Steve Seagal is . . . The Keeper

So, Ruslan is now called Driven to Kill. I preferred Ruslan but, alas, I am powerless to stop this change. But hot on the heels of the title change news comes the trailer for Seagal's next movie, The Keeper.

Steven Seagal is . . . Against the Dark

So after several months, the newest Steven Seagal movie is out. I have to admit, I went into this one pretty skeptical. I had heard the tidbit that in this movie Seagal fights vampires. I'm really not into that sort of shit. Vampires have never really done anything to fire my imagination. I especially dislike all of their most modern incarnations. You either get the ruffled shirt, androgynous, Euro-gay vampires like in Interview with the Vampire, the goth/emo vampires like in Twilight, or the leather-clad vampires that walk around to techno music like in Underworld and Blade Trinity.

So which type of vampires do you get in this movie? None. You want to know why? BECAUSE THERE AIN'T NO FUCKING VAMPIRES IN THIS MOVIE. They are really zombies in the vein of 28 Days Later and Resident Evil. Oh sure, they call them vampires in this movie but they don't really do anything like vampires. Well, this one does drink blood from a glass but that's about it.

So what about the movie and why is Seagal fighting Vampire/Zombies? The movie starts out by defining the word "infection" for us. I shit you not. In 21st century movies, some nuclear radiation or some shit from space just isn't enough to make people zombies. It always has to be some viral infection. We learn that your standard zombie apocalypse has occurred due to this virus. There are, of course, brothers of man out there struggling to survive. But there are also teams of zombie hunters that walk around in black leather with swords killing as many zombies as they can find. Seagal is a member of one of these teams. Since Seagal is having to clean up the mess, I can only assume that the CIA had something to do with the creation of this virus. It's never mentioned in the movie. It's just my guess.

We first see Seagal and his team rescue a kid from some zombies. As soon as the zombies are killed and the kid is safe, Seagal says "we're not here to decide what's right and wrong. We're here to decide who lives and who dies." As my friend Craig said, what the hell is that supposed to mean? It makes NO SENSE in the context of the scene. Now listen, I am well aware that DTV Seagal movies usually don't make any sense. But usually the nonsense is so absurd that David Lynch couldn't have even thought it up. This was just sort of odd and lame.

You better enjoy that scene and line though because you aren't going to get much more Seagal for another 30 minutes. The movie shifts focus to a group of survivors in a hospital. They fight a few zombies, argue with each other about what's best to do, and try to make their way through, what seems like, the biggest God Damn hospital on Earth! Seriously. They don't have to fight zombies at every turn. There isn't that much to slow them down. But it takes them 90 minutes to traverse this place! They are either piss poor at following exit signs or this thing is as big as the Mall of America. We get establishing shots of the hospital every now and again. It looks like a standard hospital except where you would normally see a cross or a corporate logo, there is some weird symbol that looks like it came from a goth kid Vampire RPG. I guess the company that built the hospital knew that one day it would be filled with zombie/vampires and decided to consult some goth gamers for their corporate logo. I digress.

Most of Seagal's other lines, when he's actually in the movie, are simple statements like "you clear that room!" You could have hired French Stewart to say that shit! Why waste Seagal on such tripe? He also carries this weird, fake looking sword to fight the zombie/vampires with. It doesn't even look like it's made of metal. It looks like a lousy home-made prop that some costumer would bring to Dragoncon. The description on the box refers to Seagal as a "kitana master." This dumb-ass sword looks like no kitana you've ever seen. A Hitori Hanzo this is not.

To further discuss this asinine plot would be a waste of my time. If you've ever seen a movie you've heard pretty much every word anyone says in this POS. The odd thing is, the plot is coherent and maybe that's the problem. I am used to Seagal movies like Attack Force and Submerged that started with fantasy element plots and were changed in the editing room from aliens to gangsters. I enjoyed them being gangsters but still doing weird shit that made no sense in the new context. This movie has none of that. It is just painfully dull, doesn't have enough Seagal, and when he is on screen he rarely does or says anything cool. Of this movie's 90 minute run time, I would guess Seagal is only in it for 20 minutes at the most.

Keith David is in the movie as your typical military guy who is going to launch an attack on the hospital at dawn whether Seagal and his team are out or not. Like I said earlier, if you've ever seen a movie you can guess everything that is said in his scenes. The biggest crime is that Seagal and David never share screentime together. No Marked for Death reunion here.

I would really prefer that Seagal stick with non-fantasy concepts for his movies. I'd much rather have him screwed by the likes of the CIA, black gangsters, or childhood friends gone wrong than dumb-ass shit like zombie/vampires. But regardless of what enemy he fights, I would really like him to actually be in the whole movie! This shit amounted to a glorified cameo. I love his really bad movies. Many of you that read this will never understand how I can love movies like Out of Reach or Out for a Kill. I know that. But Against the Dark was bad in a non-entertaining way. It was total ass. I'd be hard pressed to recommend this to anyone but the most hardcore Seagalogists.

Chris Thomas King - Co-Star of Kill Switch

So I was reading up on various people in Kill Switch and found out that Chris Thomas King, who plays Seagal's cop partner in the movie is a real life blues musician! Lawd Have Mercy! I thing Seagal is more into blues culture now than Asian culture. Only time will tell. Read all about Chris Thomas King right here.

Steven Seagal is Kill Switch

Yesterday was a day of great importance. Tuesday October 7, 2008 saw the release of the latest DTV Steven Seagal movie, Kill Switch. I had purposely avoided reading Vern's review because I wanted to be surprised. What I got was another mind-boggling entry into the Seagal DTV canon. Where do I even begin? Lawd Have Mercy!

Kill Switch is the story of Memphis detective Jacob King and his relentless pursuit of not one but two serial killers. The first one we meet is Billy Joel Hill. This dude, in a very un-serial killer like fashion, has sewn a bomb into some chick's chest and the bomb squad is going through the whole "what color wire do we cut?" dilemma that anyone who's ever seen a movie is familiar with. In order to find out which color wire will disable the bomb, Jacob King beats the shit out of Hill. Now I don't mean he gives him a typical Seagal ass-whipping. This is a brutal beating. As the movie goes on, the brutality is what sets Jacob King apart from every other Seagal character we have ever seen. Well, eventually King throws Hill out of a window and the woman is saved. Only later on, we find out that Hill survived his fall and was released from prison because the police used excessive force. Really? You think?

If you've seen any of Lord Steven's more recent DTV titles, then you know he has become quite fond of using some kind of Cajun accent. Well, in Kill Switch it's thicker than ever. He says his new trademarked phrase "Lawd Have Mercy!" five times by my count. That alone is worth the price I paid for the movie. Also, Seagal manages to include another great love of his into the movie heavily, blues music. The soundtrack has blues music, there are numerous scenes in blues clubs, hell, it even takes place in Memphis. Lawd Have Mercy!

Anyway, the other serial killer he is trying to catch is named Lazereus. He's a mix of the Zodiac killer, the killer from Seven, and Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Now, would you be surprised if I told you that there is a third serial killer in the movie? Well, there is. Except, this one is from the past of Jacob King. Every once in a while, King has flashes of memories that appear as Avid Farts. In these avid fart memories, we see a young King and what appears to be his brother. King sees some ominous looking serial killer guy murder his brother. I guess that's why he tracks serial killers for a living now. All we can do is speculate since he never talks about it and it never really adds anything to the movie except minutes to the running time.

I won't bore you with any more plot details because it's a pain in the ass to recap all this shit. Let's get to the fights and the ending. There are two fights in bars in Kill Switch. The stuntman isn't as obvious as he is in other Seagal DTV movies. The problem is in the editing. All of the fights are edited via numerous small jump-cuts. And it's not just that the scenes cut frames going forward, but they will suddenly jump backwards, then forwards, then backwards again. It ends up creating an incomprehensible mess. The editor must have thought he was on to the next big thing. My advice is to not get too clever with this editing bullshit. Before computer based editing you couldn't do this shit. It makes me wish movies still had to be edited on flatbed editors. Just keep it simple and let us see the action.

I would be remiss to not talk about Jacob King's brutality. In order to find out information about a dead prostitute, King asks her pimp some questions. When he refuses to answer, King puts the guy's mouth on the bar and starts beating on the back of his head until the dude's teeth are knocked out. Sounds like a pretty standard police interrogation technique to me. It's pretty brutal to watch. But, the comforting thing is the pimp shows up moments later, shooting at King in an alleyway, and he miraculously has all his teeth! Also, once King tracks down Lazereus, they have a really long fight in a bar. Once King has the upper hand, he beats the shit out of the guy with a club. He literally attempts to break as many of the guy's bones as he can. Jacob King isn't fuckin' around. Lawd have Mercy!

OK, so King also lives with this cute Asian chick who is also a cop. She walks around the house in short silk robes all the time but King never shows any interest in her sexually. He is too immersed in his serial killer tracking to even look at her, much less fuck her. Well, eventually she gets killed by the aforementioned Billy Joel Hill. King finds the dead girl and Hill in his house. He proceeds to beat the shit out of Hill and then kill him. The thing is, it's not out of rage over the girl's death. It's more like a personal pride issue. This all seems strange right? Just hang on.

When King's Memphis PD partner and some hot federal agent show up to King's house and find Hill dead, King is nowhere to be found. He has left a note explaining that his work is done. Notes with voice-over are a common plot element in the DTV era. Now we see that Jacob King has returned to his beautiful Russian wife and his two children! The movie ends with her taking her top off and King closing the door implying they are about to fuck. Nowhere in the movie was there even the slightest hint of him wanting to return to some family we had never met. But, I guess this explains why he wasn't interested in the Asian girl who lived with him.

Let me try and piece this together in my mind from the clues I was given in the movie. Jacob King saw his brother murdered by a serial killer when he was a kid. From that moment on he dedicated his life to catching serial killers. At some point in the past, he left his wife and kids to join the Memphis Police Department (Because I guess Memphis is a hotbed of serial killing). He lets a sexy female police officer live with him but they keep it strictly friends. He then kills one serial killer, arrests another and finally feels vindicated. He then returns home to his family, mission accomplished. There doesn't appear to be any meaning to the title, Kill Switch. That's OK. In the DTV era, titles are pretty meaningless.

So did I like the movie? Hell yes! It was crazy Seagal DTV fun. It is a step backwards from Urban Justice and Pistol Whipped. But, if you enjoy the insane, unpredictable nature of movies like Today You Die, you will definitely enjoy this one. Lawd Have Mercy!

Steven Seagal Night - July 12th at 8:00PM

Greeting programs! I wanted to add this information to my little corner of Cyberspace. Today my friend Jim Blanton announced the details of the July Fantasmo Steven Seagal Night. Boy are you in for a treat! The two movies being shown are Out for Justice and Belly of the Beast! Also, outlaw film critic Vern will be calling in and doing a Q&A session just for us! If you have not read his newly published book Seagalogy: A Study of the Ass-Kicking Films of Steven Seagal, order it now! I promise you that won't regret it. Also, the night will kick off with a live Aikido demonstration from Aikido of Virginia Beach! How cool is that?

Here is Jim's list of what you can expect to enjoy that night . . .

*A discussion of the principles of Seagal’s trademark aikido style and a live aikido demonstration by representatives from Aikido of Virginia Beach!

*Samples of both flavors (Asian Experience & Cherry Charge) of Seagal’s Lightning Bolt energy drink to lucky door prize winners!

*Live discussion of Seagal’s oeuvre with reclusive Seagalogy author/Ain’t It Cool News contributor Vern!

*Trailers from Seagal’s classic films!

*Team Fantasmo commentary!

*A superior attitude and superior state of mind!. . . and much, much more!

Here are your full Episode 38 details:

When: Saturday, July 12, 8:00 P.M.

Where: Chesapeake Central Library, 298 Cedar Road, Chesapeake, VA 23322

Films & Activities:

8:00 P.M. – Aikido Lecture/Demonstration & Out for Justice (Rated R)

10:00 P.M. – Author Discussion & Belly of the Beast (Rated R)


If you need any additional information leave a comment and I'll get you what you need. This will be the best Fantasmo ever so let's pack the place out for the master of wrist-breaking, Steven Seagal!