Copyright

 

 

© Copyright 2023 Luke Armitage

All Rights Reserved

 

 

 

Contents

 

Introduction

 

The Facts

 

 

Introduction

 

 

Think you know all there is to know about action movies? Well, think again. 1000 Amazing Action Movie Facts is chock full of fascinating and unusual facts about classic (and not so classic) action movies. Blockbusters, B-movies, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, superheroes, James Bond, Die Hard, Predator, Robocop, Fast and the Furious, martial arts, guns, sequels, casting, explosions, kill counts, and so on. Prepare to enter the explosive and pulse pounding world of action movies!

 

 

The Facts

 

 

(1) John McClane kills 73 people in the Die Hard franchise. 10 in Die Hard, 24 in Die Hard 2, 13 in Die Hard with a Vengeance and 13 again both in Live Free or Die Hard and A Good Day to Die Hard.

 

(2) Live ammunition was used in Old Hollywood movies. Bullets would be fired over the heads of actors when shooting action scenes.

 

(3) The first film in The Fast and the Furious franchise was originally going to be called Redline.

 

(4) The 1998 film The Replacement Killers, which stars Chow Yun-Fat, holds a record for the most bullets fired in a Hollywood film.

 

(5) The Guinness World Record for the biggest explosion in a movie is held by the Bond film Spectre. The production of Spectre used 2223 gallons of fuel for the sequence where Blofeld's desert lair is blown up.

 

(6) Rosa Kleb has a knife blade in her shoe in From Russia with Love. Believe it or not, this was a real weapon (or gadget if you prefer) used by the KGB.

 

(7) Rambo III has 132 deaths and 78 kills - making it one of the most violent movies ever made.

 

(8) It is estimated that Arnold Schwarzenegger's character John Matrix kills over eighty people in the classic action film Commando.

 

(9) Chuck Norris was completely unknown at the time of Bruce Lee's Way of the Dragon as far as acting went but he was a real life karate champion of some distinction.

 

His showdown with Lee inside the Colosseum in Rome is the highlight of the picture and one of the most memorable sequences Lee was ever involved in. The pair confront one another with the respect and formality of samurai warriors and an epic contest ensues. Bruce Lee cast Norris because he found that few martial artists or stuntmen were fast enough to believably fight him onscreen. Norris was different and it made their staged fight much more authentic and all the more inspired for the setting (although the Colosseum backdrop sometimes looks noticeably fake when the location footage in Rome cuts to studio interiors).

 

(10) James Cameron wanted to cast Bridget Fonda as an eighteen year-old Sarah Connor in the original 1984 Terminator film but when Fonda turned the part down he decided to make the character slightly older.

 

(11) Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot is a former Israeli Defense Forces soldier.

 

(12) The katana-wielding foe James Bond battles in Osato's office in You Only Live Twice is played by Peter Fanene Maivia - grandfather of Dwayne Johnson.

 

(13) Wings Hauser was originally cast as Bennett in Commando but replaced by Vernon Wells at the last minute. This might explain why Bennett's clothes don't seem to fit him very well!

 

(14) The black Interceptor driven by Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior) is a 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe. These cars are quite prized today because they were never exported to the United States at the time.

 

(15) The Fast and the Furious franchise nearly became a straight DVD series after the third film Tokyo Drift. The relatively modest box-office returns of the film made the studio wonder if the franchise still had a theatrical future.

 

(16) The legendary lobby gunfight sequence in The Matrix took ten days to shoot.

 

(17) During the climax to the 1983 Brian De Palma film Scarface, where Al Pacino's Tony Montana battles waves of gunmen in his mansion, some of the second unit direction was done by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg, a friend of De Palma, visited the set and ended up being deployed on the production.

 

(18) Patrick Swayze was supposed to play the lead character Harrigan in Predator 2 but he had to drop out after he got injured making the film Road House. Danny Glover bagged the part in the end.

 

(19) 1994's Speed was commonly known as Die Hard on a bus. The film tells the story of an LAPD cop who tries to rescue civilians on a city bus rigged with a bomb programmed to explode if the bus slows down. Even the poster seemed design to mimic Die Hard and the presence of Jan de Bont as director furthered the connections. Screenwriter Joss Whedon was brought in at the last hour to make the Keanu Reeves character less like John McClane and better suited to Reeves' personality.

 

(20) Al Pacino turned the down the part of Han Solo in Star Wars because he couldn't make head nor tail of the script.

 

(21) Rumble in the Bronx is a 1996 martial arts action film starring Jackie Chan and directed by Stanley Tong. After a few unsuccessful attempts to crack the US market in the past (Cannonball Run, The Protector) Rumble in the Bronx finally did the trick for Chan and his profile outside of Hong Kong flourished.

 

The film is set in New York (though fairly obviously shot in Vancouver) and in contrast to the later largely American based Chan films where our (older) hero is given too little to do and saddled with a comic American actor, Rumble in the Bronx concentrates on action and incredible stuntwork, feeling much closer to Chan's classic eighties Hong Kong adventures in spirit than the diluted Hollywood Jackie Chan films that followed over the years. Chan broke an ankle making the film but completed it with a cast disguised to look like a shoe!

 

(22) The Soviet dictator Stalin was said to be a big fan of cowboy films.

 

(23) The title Live Free or Die Hard is New Hampshire's state motto. Outside of the United States the film was known as Die Hard 4.0. Bruce Willis and director Len Wiseman later admitted they didn't like the title Live Free or Die Hard and would have preferred it to be released as Die Hard 4.0 in the United States too.

 

(24) Michelle Rodriguez couldn't actually drive in real life when she was cast in The Fast and Furious franchise.

 

(25) One notable veteran action star who was missing in The Expendables franchise is Steven Seagal. Seagal declined to appear in the movies because he didn't want to work with producer Avi Lerner. Seagal and Lerner had fallen out in the past and Seagal clearly still held a grudge.

 

(26) Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise turned down the part of Jason Bourne before it was offered to Matt Damon.

 

(27) The Playboy centerfold that John McClane notices on the wall in Die Hard is Pamela Stein.

 

(28) Under Siege is clearly a Die Hard film under another name. The ship makes a good constricted locale for the action. This film nixed early plans for Die Hard 3 to be set on a ship.

 

(29) Before he turned his hand to acting, action star Jason Statham was a diver. He actually competed for England at diving in the 1990 Commonwealth Games.

 

(30) The car chase in The French Connection was shot beneath the Stillwell Avenue tracks in Brooklyn. The director William Friedkin got in the rear of the 1971 Pontiac LeMans to do hand held camerawork. This was no task for the faint hearted because the stunt driver frequently reached 90 mph. The entire sequence took six weeks to complete.

 

(31) Very few of the actors playing the villains in Die Hard were German in real life. In a slight irony though, Bruce Willis was born in Germany.

 

(32) Believe it or not, the singer Neil Diamond was among those who auditioned to be Superman before the part went to Christopher Reeve.

 

(33) The tattoo on John Wick's back translates to “Fortune favors the strong.”

 

(34) The famous alley fight scene between Roddy Piper and David Keith in John Carpenter's They Live lasts for six minutes.

 

(35) Martial arts star Bruce Lee died at the age of 32 in July 1973. His death was completely unexpected and came as a great shock to the people of Hong Kong and China because he was more or less a superhero to them after appearing in local films like The Way of the Dragon and The Big Boss. Lee was not a star in America at the time because Enter the Dragon, the film that did make him a global star, was still a month from release at the time.

 

It's a great shame that Bruce Lee didn't live to see the huge success of Enter the Dragon and Hollywood would surely have beckoned if he hadn't passed away in such unexpected fashion. But what caused Bruce Lee's sudden death? How could someone who appeared to be so fit and healthy die so suddenly?

 

The most common explanation for his death is that he died after an allergic reaction to aspirin. His death occurred after he visited the actress Betty Ting Pe in her apartment. Lee was having an affair with Betty Ting Pe - although this fact was covered up at the time lest it should damage Lee's reputation (he was married afterall). After he complained of a headache, Betty Ting Pe gave Lee an Equagesic - a common painkiller containing aspirin and a tranquilizer known as meprobamate. Equagesic was felt to be harmless although it was discontinued in the United States after Lee's death. After taking the medicine, Lee had a lie down and never woke up. Though an ambulance was called and there were attempts to revive him he was pronounced dead in hospital.

 

The coroner officially ruled Bruce Lee’s death the result of a second cerebral edema (this was not the first time Lee had suffered this condition) brought on by taking Equagesic. Naturally, as no famous person can seem to die young without conspiracy theories abounding, there were plenty of these when Bruce Lee passed away. There were stories that he was killed by an organised crime group or had been the victim of a family curse (this theory is probably retrospective due to his son Brandon also tragically dying at a young age). A later theory (which doesn't seem implausible) is that Lee died of heatstroke after having sweat glands in his arm pits removed (Lee apparently hated the appearance of sweat on clothes). The day Lee died was ferociously hot in Hong Kong.

 

When it became public knowledge in Hong Kong that Lee had been with Betty Ting Pe when he died there were even theories that Betty Ting Pe had murdered him with poison. These theories were nonsense but Betty Ting Pe said she received death threats as a result of the gossip. Chuck Norris, who knew Bruce Lee and worked with him, suggested that muscle relaxants Lee took might have killed him. There are a lot of stories too that Bruce Lee, despite his monastic image, took a lot of recreational drugs and that these might have contributed to his demise. The death of Bruce Lee still remains something of a mystery after all these years but it appears that it was probably a natural medical demise rather than a conspiracy, murder, or outlandish supernatural curse.

 

(36) About three weeks before The Expendables 3 was due for release, a DVD quality print of the film was leaked on the net and downloaded over 2 million times. As you might imagine, this didn't help the movie's box-office. After an investigation conducted on both sides of the Atlantic a man was arrested in England for illegally distributing the film.

 

(37) Predator 2 was going to be set in New York but this was changed to Los Angeles to save money.

 

(38) Bruce Willis was considered for the part of Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon before it was offered to Mel Gibson.

 

(39) There are an estimated 307 deaths in the John Woo film Hard Boiled.

 

(40) MacGyver (and later Stargate) television star Richard Dean Anderson was considered for the part of John McClane in Die Hard.

 

(41) The Steve McQueen film Bullitt has one of the most famous car chases in cinema. Frank Bullitt’s car is a 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback. The baddies have a 1968 Dodge Charger 440 Magnum. McQueen insisted on doing as much driving as possible himself in the film - which infuriated his wife. She begged the producers to use a stunt driver.

 

(42) Clint Eastwood hated his 'Man with No Name' character smoking cigars in the Spaghetti Westerns because he was a non-smoker in real life and they made him feel sick.

 

(43) In the classic period war film Zulu, a young Michael Caine plays Lieutenant Bromhead - an officer who has never actually experienced war. In real life though Michael Caine had actually fought in the Korean War when he was in the British Army.

 

(44) In reality you would actually need 480 dump trucks to steal all the gold from the Federal Reserve - as happens in Die Hard with a Vengeance.

 

(45) Among the working titles for Die Hard 4 were Die Hard: Reset and Die Hard: Die Hardest.

 

(46) The Fast and Furious franchise was inspired by an article in Vibe magazine about illegal street racing in New York.

 

(47) On the Bond film No Time to Die, 8,400 gallons of Coca-Cola were used to make a street in Maratea less slippery for a motorbike and car stunt (the coke left a sticky residue and so gave the bike and car more grip). The producer Barbara Broccoli thought the stunt crew had gone mad when she saw that they'd covered the road in Coca-Cola so they had to explain to her why they'd done this and why they were spending a sizeable little chunk of the budget on preposterous amounts of this popular soft-drink. £55,000 was spent on Coca-Cola for this sequence. Coca-Cola, according to the stunt director, actually washed off very easily and made the streets look cleaner than they were before.

 

(48) Milo Ventimiglia, Freddy Rodríguez and Josh Brolin were considered for the role of Royce in Predators before it went to Adrien Brody.

 

(49) Ang Lee's 2000 martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a critical and financial hit and raised the bar for the genre. A sequel finally arrived in 2016, directed by Yuen Woo-ping. In the film, Michelle Yeoh's Shu Lien must travel to Peking where the Green Destiny — the legendary sword of her deceased love Li Mu Bai — is located.

 

This rather obscure sequel did not repeat the success of Lee's film and enjoyed not only a dismal box-office but terrible reviews. The charismatic Hong Kong star Donnie Yen is a welcome addition to the cast but the actual film is not a patch on its illustrious predecessor. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny was shot in New Zealand and makes much use of green screen CGI in a way that the original film did not. The first film was shot in China and this sequel just doesn't have the same authentic backdrops or atmosphere. The martial arts scenes in Sword of Destiny lack the majesty of the original and the film becomes something of a slog to get through in the end.

 

(50) Jason Statham was supposed to play the lead character Cooper in Dog Soldiers but dropped out to make Ghosts of Mars.

 

(51) Legend has it that Bruce Lee had to be restrained from throttling the inept director Lo Wei on the set of Fists of Fury because Wei was more interested in the racetrack than the film and would have commentary from whatever horse race he had bet on that afternoon blaring away on a loudspeaker while they were trying to shoot the picture.

 

(52) 1987's Robocop had to be ruthlessly cut to avoid a certificate X when originally released. Many big action films in the eighties - Predator, Die Hard - were very violent and Robocop is no exception.

 

(53) David Soul was cast in Starsky and Hutch on the back of appearing in the Dirty Harry film Magnum Force. A television producer saw him in the film.

 

(54) Beverly Hills Cop was a huge breakout film for Eddie Murphy in 1984 but it was Sylvester Stallone who was originally cast as the fish out of water Detroit policeman who gets into all manner of trouble in Beverly Hills. Stallone, to the irritation of screenwriter Dan Petrie Jr, had rewritten the script to tone down the comedy and inject more violence and action. Paramount executives had to decide whether or not to go with Stallone's script or Petrie's original concept. In the end they went with Petrie's script and Stallone left the film - just two weeks before shooting was due to commence.

 

(55) The absence of guns in Hong Kong martial arts films was not merely a convenient plot contrivance. Hong Kong had experienced the British tradition of strict gun control.

 

(56) The explosive and bombastic sequence in Predator where Schwarzenegger and his commando team destroy a rebel camp in the jungle was shot by second unit director Craig Baxley. John McTiernan, the director of the film, disliked this sequence and tried to have it removed. McTiernan felt that it didn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of the movie. Baxley had shot the sequence because he felt they needed some spectacular footage to placate worried studio executives. It eventually stayed in the film.

 

(57) The reason why Die Hard takes place mostly at night is because Bruce Willis was still shooting the television show Moonlighting during the day.

 

(58) Daniel Craig was the first James Bond actor who wasn't born before the movie franchise began.

 

(59) Paul Walker was born in Glendale, California, in 1973. Walker was a child actor in the 1980s and appeared in popular TV shows like Who's the Boss?, Charles in Charge, and Highway to Heaven. As he got older he began to pick up parts in movies - which included Pleasantville, She's All That, The Skulls, and Joy Ride. Blond and handsome, Walker tended to gravitate (whether through choice or not) into action roles when he outgrew teen parts. He famously turned down a chance to be considered for the part of Superman though in 2003 when the comic book property was emerging from development hell. Walker seemed to operate a step down from the A-list but this threatened to change thanks to the remarkable success of the car racing action Fast & the Furious franchise. Walker died during the production of Furious 7 in November 2013. It was a great shock to the Hollywood community and the world at large because, at the age of 40, Paul Walker was becoming a bigger star than ever at the time of the accident.

 

Walker died in Los Angeles after the Porsche Carrera GT he was in crashed at a speed of more than 100mph and burst into flames. Also in the car was Walker's financial advisor Roger Rodas. The car is believed to have left the sidewalk and then hit a tree and a lightpost. After the initial impact the car began to spin - whereupon it smashed into a tree and burst into flames. Drugs and alcohol played no part in the accident. It was simply a case of driving too fast and losing control of a vehicle. Walker suffered horrendous injuries in the crash and there was no chance of him surviving. Paul Walker was buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills.

 

There were two services, one for fans and one for family and friends. After the accident, there were legal cases against Porsche by Walker's relatives due to the fact they believed that a defect in the car Walker was driving had caused the crash. Porsche were successful though in defending themselves against this lawsuit. There was speculation that Walker was 'drag racing' when he was killed but this seems to be a myth and there was certainly no evidence of that. An investigation into the crash cited the fact that Walker's tyres were pretty old and in need of changing. These tyres were probably a factor in this tragedy. It is of course darkly ironic that a man most famous for high octane car chase movies should die in these circumstances.

 

(60) Despite having a running time of 127 minutes, Jurassic Park only actually contains 15 minutes of actual dinosaur action.

 

(61) Vin Diesel did not appear in 2 Fast 2 Furious because he chose to make The Chronicles of Riddick instead. Diesel was offered $25 million to appear in 2 Fast 2 Furious but could not be persuaded to change his mind.

 

(62) In the film version of Blade with Wesley Snipes, the character is from Detroit. In the original comics though the character is from London.

 

(63) The 2012 film Dredd is considered to be one the best modern action films and yet - sadly - it didn't make enough money to get a sequel. Michael Biehn auditioned to play Dredd before the part was given to Karl Urban. Urban took the film so seriously that he refused to do a scene where he takes his helmet off. As he pointed out, Dredd never takes his helmet off in the comics.

 

(64) Tom Hardy said that before he took on the role of Max in Mad Max: Fury Road he met with Mel Gibson to get Gibson's approval. Gibson was apparently fine with Hardy taking over his most famous role.

 

(65) 2022's Prey is the highest rated Predator movie on Rotten Tomatoes - though the original 1987 Predator does still have the highest audience score on the site.

(66) Tim Burton wanted to cast Brad Dourif as the Joker at one point on his first Batman film but the studio blocked this because they wanted Jack Nicholson.

 

(67) Matt Reeves wrote the 2022 film The Batman specifically for Robert Pattinson - who he was determined to cast as Bruce Wayne/Batman. However, given that Pattinson had diverted into arthouse pictures and was also signed up for Christopher Nolan's Tenet they had no idea if Pattinson would be interested or available. It turned out that Pattinson was available and interested but if he hadn't been the back-up choice as Batman was going to be Nicholas Hoult.

 

(68) Dougray Scott was cast as Wolverine in the first X-Men film but had to withdraw due to Mission Impossible 2 (where Scott was playing the villain) taking much longer than expected to complete.

 

(69) Will Smith turned down the part of Neo in The Matrix to make Wild Wild West. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but that was clearly a bad decision!

 

(70) Spider-Man made his debut in the MCU in Captain America: Civil War. Marvel looked at many young actors for the part of Peter Parker and it came down to a choice between Tom Holland and Asa Butterfield. Asa Butterfield was the frontrunner at one point but in the end they obviously went for Tom Holland.

 

(71) Charles Bronson was 71 years-old when he played the vigilante Paul Kersey for the last time in Death Wish 5: The Face of Death.

 

(72) Believe it or not, Roger Moore had a firearms phobia. Despite this he made seven James Bond pictures.

 

(73) The iconic M41A1 Pulse Rifles used in Aliens were named and designed by James Cameron and brought to life by the British prop and armoury company Bapty & Co.

 

(74) John McClane's frequent protest "I'm on vacation!" throughout A Good Day to Die Hard doesn't make any sense because he isn't actually on vacation!

 

(75) In the Lethal Weapon movies, Danny Glover played a character ten years older than his real life age. This is pretty unusual in Hollywood as actors usually play characters who are younger than them. Look at all the horror and teen films where you have twentysomething actors playing high school kids!

 

(76) Harrison Ford was pushing 80 when he made Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

 

(77) Kingsman: The Secret Service, based on the Mark Millar comic, is a cheeky and very entertaining Matthew Vaughn fusion of John Steed, James Bond, and chav culture. Fast, funny, crude, unashamedly British and deliberately wonky, Kingsman was a lot of fun. Sadly though the Kingsman sequels have thus far been rather disappointing.

 

(78) Geoffrey Holder, who plays Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die, had a fear of snakes. Making this snake festooned movie was no picnic for him.

 

(79) In the 1980s and 1990s, the nunchaku (chain stick weapon) scenes in Enter the Dragon were ludicrously edited from the video version of the film in Britain. The film censors were worried that children might see the film and attack each other with nunchakus!

 

(80) Liam Neeson's character Bryan mills kills around 35 people in the first Taken movie.

 

(81) As part of his fee for appearing in Rambo III, Sylvester Stallone was given a Gulfstream private jet.

 

(82) Matthew Modine turned down the part of Maverick in Top Gun. Modine felt it was a bit too militaristic and gung ho for his tastes.

 

(83) The Bond movie Die Another Day achieved the impossible by uniting Korea. North Korea complained about the North Korean villains while in South Korea there were protests against the movie for its depiction of South Korea as something akin to a colony of the United States.

 

(84) The 1903 film The Great Train Robbery is felt by many to have been the first example of an action movie.

 

(85) Tom Cruise turned down Top Gun when it was first offered to him.

 

(86) It is of course unrealistic in action movies that guns rarely seem to run out of ammo. In real life you could only use a machine gun for a matter of seconds before it had to be reloaded.

 

(87) Timothy Olyphant turned down the part played by Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious.

 

(88) Charles Bronson's $6 million salary on Death Wish V: The Face of Death was actually larger than the movie's budget!

 

(89) The plot of Live Free or Die Hard was inspired by an article by John Carlin in Wired magazine entitled A Farewell to Arms. The article was about America's electronic infrastructure being vulnerable to computer hackers.

 

(90) The first attempt to translate The Punisher to live action came in a 1989 Mark Goldblatt directed film starring Dolph Lundgren as Frank Castle. Sadly, the film didn't get a theatrical release in the United States despite reaching some international cinemas and so has been largely forgotten. The premise of the film is largely the same as the comic. Castle is a cop who had his family slayed by mobsters. He now lives underground waging war on criminals as a vigilante. In the film he ends up having to battle the Yakuza after they stage a turf grab on the Mafia. There's a decent supporting cast in the film with Jeroen Krabbé as a Mafia boss and Kim Miyori as latex baddie Lady Tanaka. Louis Gossett doesn't get an awful lot to do though as a policeman following the blood trail left by The Punisher.

 

The main flaws of the film are the patently small budget, lack of Microchip character and, unforgivably, the fact that The Punisher never wears his iconic skull logo costume!

 

(91) The 2022 film Prey rejuvenated the Predator franchise but many think it ripped off a 2019 short film called Warrior: Predator by Chris .R. Notarile.

 

(92) First Blood, the film that introduced Stallone's Rambo character, is based on a 1972 novel by David Morrell. In the first attempts to turn the book into a film in the 1970s, Steve McQueen was considered for the part of Rambo. When plans went ahead to make First Blood in the early eighties, Michael Douglas and James Garner both turned down the part of Rambo before it was offered to Stallone.

 

(93) Mad Max: Fury Road was shot in Namibia rather than Australia. The reason they did this was that the Australian outback was going through a rainy season.

 

(94) Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis both used the same prop Beretta 92F in Lethal Weapon and Die Hard respectively.

 

(95) Stanley Kubrick shot the Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket in England near his home. He used the British Army base Bassingbourn Barracks to double for Parris Island and the derelict Beckton Gas Works on the Isle of Dogs became the wrecked city of Hue. Kubrick imported hundreds of palm trees and tropical plants and made Cliffe marshes on the Thames his Vietnam.

 

(96) John Carpenter's classic action film Assault on Precinct 13 was based on the Howard Hawks western Rio Bravo.

 

(97) No Time to Die begins with a gunbarrel intro (a rarity in the Craig films!) which dispenses with the traditional blood flowing down the screen. It has been theorised that the bloodless gunbarrel signifies in No Time to Die that Bond has finally missed his target and thus has a subtext which anticipates Bond's death. If you believe this theory then the bloodless gunbarrel is visual shadowing that Bond could die in this film. The theme of No Time to Die is that James Bond (specifically Craig's version of Bond - obviously) was always doomed. 00 agents, as we were reminded in 2006's Casino Royale, do not have a long life expectancy.

 

(98) This 1997 sequel to the successful action film Speed was a notorious megabomb roasted by the critics. What went wrong? Strike number one was the first film's leading man Keanu Reeves declining to return. The plot of Speed 2: Cruise Control has Annie (Sandra Bullock's character from the first film) on a West Indian cruise with her boyfriend Alex (Jason Patric). When the nutty villain Geiger (William Dafoe) hijacks the ship, Annie and Alex must foil his plans.

 

Speed 2 was a box-office bomb and a critical disaster. It is justifiably referenced whenever anyone attempts to put together a list of bad sequels. The most galling thing for the studio was that they actually spent much more money on this one than they did the first film! The caution of Keanu Reeves proved to be adept. Switching the action from a speeding out of control bus to a slow moving cruise liner was a stupid idea in the first place.

 

(99) Sly Stallone says Rambo: First Blood Part II is the Rambo film he dislikes the most. He felt it was too cartoonish.

 

(100) Dirty Harry was written with John Wayne in mind but he decided that Harry Callahan was the type of character he'd played far too often - a decision he later regretted when he saw how successful the film was.

 

(101) The romantic adventure film Romancing the Stone was a smashing success in 1984 and put director Robert Zemeckis firmly on the map. The film had the considerable charisma and sex appeal of Kathleen Turner in her eighties prime plus the star power of Michael Douglas as her male lead. The studio wanted a sequel as soon as possible but this would be something of a reluctant affair for the stars. Turner and Douglas did not want to return but had no choice because of a clause in their contracts. At one point the studio Fox filed a $25 million lawsuit against Turner to force her to take part in the film. Jewel of the Nile is a very forgettable sequel that pales in comparison to the first film.

 

(102) The Terminator is a virtuoso film if not a terribly original one. It was the subject of a lawsuit by the writer Harlan Ellison (who alleged similarities between Cameron's script and a sixties episode of The Outer Limits called 'Soldier' he wrote) and one must also mention Westworld. The T-100 cyborg here owes an awful lot to Yul Brynner in Westworld. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said that he and James Cameron often discussed Yul Brynner's performance in Westworld when it came to crafting his approach to playing a relentless robot assassin.

 

(103) Brandon Lee was the handsome son of the legendary Bruce Lee and began a promising career in Hollywood with action roles. Brandon's movies (Legacy of Rage, Laser Mission, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Rapid Fire) hadn't got great reviews but the critics were quite kind to him and said he was charismatic and likeable onscreen and had a good future in Hollywood. 1992's Rapid Fire was sort of like the first undiluted Brandon Lee film and suggested he could follow in the footsteps of people like Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris. Lee had an advantage over them too in that he looked a bit like Johnny Depp and was much younger. Brandon signed on next to appear in a film called The Crow - which was something of a departure. The Crow was a superhero film with horror elements and was considerably more ambitious than any film Brandon had been in before. Sadly, this would turn out to be Brandon's last film. He was killed shooting The Crow when a live primer in a dummy round hit him at point blank range during a gun sequence. He was only 28 years-old.

 

The tragic accident happened on March 31, 1993. There were only eight days left on filming on the movie and Brandon was due to get married in the following few weeks when production on The Crow had concluded. The actor Michael Masse, who played a villain in The Crow, was part of a scene in which his character shot Brandon's character. When the stunt was concluded the crew became aware that Brandon was not moving. There was now a hole in his abdomen and he was rushed to hospital. Despite six hours of surgery he died of his injuries. The accident had occurred because the bullets used in the gun had been converted to blanks from live bullets. Blanks are supposed to have cardboard tips so that in the event of any accidental contact the damage is minimal. In this case though one of the lead tips from the modified live bullets was still in the gun and came loose during the scene - fatally hitting Brandon in the stomach. It was basically incompetence on the part of the people making the film. The death was ruled an accident but Brandon's mother Linda Lee Cadwell launched a civil suit against the film studio - which was eventually settled out of court. The Crow turned out to be a pretty good film but this was obviously scant consolation to the late Brandon Lee and his distraught family. The Crow might well have made Brandon Lee a big star had he lived but - alas - we'll never know how his career would panned out now. The Crow was completed with the use of a double after Brandon's death. This was a rather spooky echo of how Bruce Lee's last film (Game of Death) was completed with a double after Bruce Lee died.

 

It is sometimes said that Brandon fell victim to a family curse but this is patently fiction. The Crow was apparently quite an incompetent production and - sadly - it was safety issues on the set which cost Brandon Lee his life.

 

(104) George Lazenby breaks the fourth wall at the end of the PTS of On Her Majesty's Secret Service by saying - "This never happened to the other fella!" This was a line Lazenby said on the set all the time so the director Peter Hunt decided to have him say it in the film.

 

(105) Doom is a 2005 science fiction action horror film directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak. It is based on the legendary FPS video game series. The game, as everyone will know, has you as a space marine fighting your way through demonic monsters who seem to have been literally raised from Hell. If you are a fan of Doom you'll struggle to see much in the film that reminds you of the game - aside

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 27.02.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-3367-5

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