Dad's Army (1971) This film based on the BBC TV series starts right at the beginning; the formation of a group of Local Defence Volunteers after the Dunkirk evacuation. Bank manager Mr. Mainwaring takes over in Walmington on Sea, despite being a bungler. The platoon slowly gets equipment and training, the characters in it are shown off, and the platoon proves to be a total flop at a combined Home Guard exercise.
   The Warden Hodges character doesn't get much of a look-in. The vicar and the verger also play minimum parts. Mainwaring & Co. return home from the exercise to find the church taken over by the crew of a crashed Ju 88 reconnaisance plane. All of the emergency services, plus the armed services, gather around the church but it is the local chaps who triumph over the "Narzis".

Damage (2009) (21:00, Syfy) This is a vehicle for the former grappled Steve Austin, who plays a killer out on parole, courtesy of the widow of his victim. She expects him to raise $250K for her daughter, whose heart is conking out.
   Our hero takes up with the fackless Rocco, who gets him into the illegal fights business. His other job on a building site goes up in smoke when the scumbag foreman fires him, then has a heart attack. Our hero gives him CPR and saves his miserable hide.
   Our hero does a lot of scrapping. Rocco digs his debt hole bigger. The wheels come off when our hero walks away from a fight and refuses to kill his beaten opponent. Rocco is pulped by his debtors.
   A Mob boss, who was impressed by our hero saving the scumbag foreman's life, gives him a chance either to give the girl a heart transplant or clear Rocco's debts. No prizes for guessing who wins the big brawl. The kid gets her operation and Rocco isn't killed.

Dante's Peak (1997) in Washington State towers over a town having a festival and looking forward to a multi-million dollar business investment. So the film has the Jaws plot – ignore the danger and hope everything will be okay for the sake of the town's economy and the volcano won't blow its top. Pierce Brosnan plays Harry, the vulcanologist whose boss is eager not to upset people unnecessarily despite lots of dead squirrels and a couple of dead tourists.
   Harry decides to stick around instead of going on holiday and he's on hand to save the mayor and her two kids from lava- and pyroclastic flows after the earthquakes start. Lots of spectacular volcano effects, mucho peril and Harry's boss gets his for being wrong. And so does the mayor's stubborn old ex-mother-in-law, who puts the family in peril.

Daredevil (2003) (Stan Lee, Marvel Comics) Some good opening titles; the lights on buildings in New York morphing into stars' names. Matthew grew up in Hell's Kitchen and his dad was a contender who'd gone bad. Matt was blinded by a childhood accident so dad got his act together again but he didn't take a dive when ordered to do so and he was killed.
   Meanwhile, Matt's other 4 senses had become supercharged, especially his hearing, which became a sort of radar, so he became a lawyer and a costumed superhero and seeker after justice. His avenger persona was able to leap from building to building, swing about like Batman and fight like Sammo Law or Jackie Chan. And he kept confessing all to his local priest.
   Being blind proved to be a good way of chatting up Elektra, a gal who could fight. Her billionaire dad was in with the Kingpin of Crime but he wanted out, so the Kingpin decided to have Nick killed then framed as the Kingpin. A black Irishman called Bullseye, who could throw anything without missing, got the job.
   Elektra was in the car when Bullseye took out her old man, Daredevil tried to intervene and Bullseye used his DD's cane as the murder weapon. An investigative journalist warned Matt that the Kingpin would take out the rest of Nick's family; i.e. Elektra. She went after Daredevil for revenge. He wouldn't fight but Bullseye turned up and killed Elektra.
   Daredevil & Bullseye did their best to wreck the organ in DD's church, and Bullseye wrecked a police car when he landed on it from a great height. While chucking Daredevil around his office, Kingpin unmasked Daredevil and mentioned that he'd killed his dad. So Kingpin ended up busted and heading for gaol instead of dead. And who would believe a story that a blind attorney is a super hero? And the reporter deleted his story on the Daredevil to let him carry on seeing off criminals.

Dark City (1998) is a Kafkaesque tale in which a Mr. Murdoch wakes up in a bath with no memory and a body nearby. He soons finds himself pursued by weirdo aliens, which can open doors in walls and stop time. The aliens can do things with their thoughts (they call it 'tuning') and Murdoch can do it, too. He eventually learns that he's in a laboratory in space where a city in constant night is regularly remoulded and the inhabitants have their memories swapped around constantly. The aliens are trying to find out what makes humans tick. They have a group mind, they're dying out and they want to learn how to become individuals. But Murdoch eventually zaps the lot of them, takes over the machine running the environment and turns it into a sunny, happy place.

The Dark Knight (2008) Five masked bank robbers try to leave the Joker out of their split, so he puts a mask on and kills them and splits with the loot. Batman has to tackle Russian mobsters and fake Batmen. Michael Caine as Alfred! Drama in court as the DA foils assassination from the witness box. The Joker gatecrashes a meeting of the Falconi crime family. He's team-building.
   Batman kidnaps a Chinese accountant who knows where all the bad guys' cash is stashed. 549 criminals in court in one day after he becomes a witness! The Joker promises to kill people until Batman takes his mask off and turns himself in. Harvey, the DA, is up for re-election and Bruce Wayne thinks Harve should be Gotham City's new hero instead of Batman.
   The Joker infiltrates a police parade but fails to kill Commissioner Gordon. Wayne decides to admit everything but Harvey beats him to it. The Joker attacks the convoy when Harve is being taken to gaol, big shambles and the Joker is captured. Batman does some interrogating and gets to choose between saving Harvey and Rachel, Harvey's girlfriend. Both are parked next to bomb.
   Rachel is kaboomed and Harvey gets the left side of his face burnt off, becoming Harvey Two-Face. The Joker escapes and takes over the Russian mob. Next job: blow up a hospital. Gotham General goes kaboom. Harvey runs riot with half a face. The Joker does some more of his tedious pratting about (enthusiasm for this overlong film was flagging at this stage).
   An army of Batmen does battle with bad guys. The Joker's plan flops but he has Harvey as his ace in a hole. Batman plugs the hole and makes Harvey into a dead hero.

Dark Storm (2006) Mad scientists in Montana try to extract Dark Matter, but it all goes horribly wrong in 200. They're at it again 6 years later, their funding is in danger and they're prepared to take any daft risk to impress the general who holds the purse-strings. Their weapon eliminates a redundant nuclear reactor but one of the team, Daniel is contaminated with DM and the director, Dr. McKray, is selling the project to the best bidder.
   A DM cloud in space takes out a military aircraft as the first of electrical storm events. The satellite which the team used is leaking DM and attracting more, and if the cloud gets big enough, that's it for the Earth. The general gives the project the bullet and the lab is shut down but Daniel tells his colleague Andy that they have to disperse the DM cloud in space before it's too late.
   Daniel has a DM episode; he now has super-powers; and ends up in the hospital where Elly, his wife, works. Infiltrators attack the lab and steal the core full of DM. Daniel & Andy need to get it back to disperse the DM cloud. McKray has Daniel's wife kidnapped. Daniel learns that McKray exposed him to DM as a test.
   Daniel frees himself and starts electrifying everything. The cavalry arrives. McKray contaminates himself with DM to gain super-powers like Daniel's. Firing the weapon disperses the DM cloud in space and sucks all the DM out of Daniel & McKray, and the Earth is saved!

Dark Waters (2003) kicks off with a pack of sharks chomping 2 divers and attacking an oil transfer station 3,800 feet down in the Gulf of Mexico. Our hero, Dr. Dave Quatrell, a con-man who's looking for Atlantis, is then shanghaied with his stroppy female partner by Mr. Somerville, a former associate of Dave's father. They head for the transfer station in Dave's submarine but the sharks return, the submarine bursts into flame inside when the sharks attack and Dave, his lady friend and one of the crew are left stranded in the transfer station.
   Dave learns that Somerville used to be with the CIA and he was working on a black program called 'Dark Waters'. The 3 survivors are rescued by a mystery submarine, which is the base for the sharks. A secret US project is trying to control them but not having much luck even after 20 years. And the sharks have killed over 280 people.
   The captain decides to have Dave & Co. killed but they have already escaped from the cell. Pursued by Marines, they take a swim in a shark tank and emerge at the lab where Dan, Dave's father, works. But Dave doesn't recognize his dad because he last saw him when he was 9. There's a shoot-out with the Marines and dad tells Dave who he is before he croaks.
   Dave uses his dad's keycard to start a self-destruct mechanism, which destroys the sub after Dave and his pals have escaped in a mini-sub, pursued by 2 sharks. Their answer is to open the hatch and wave a bloodstained top in the water. And when the shark pokes its head into the mini-sub, it gets a shotgun blast. Then a torpedo finishes the other one off.
   The survivors save themselves by inflating a life raft under the mini-sub. And when Dave opens his father's deposit box, he finds a map showing the position of Atlantis! So he reopens the Quatrell Marine Research Institute, which his father used to run.

The Da Vinci Code (2006) American professor Robert Langdon is called in by a French cop to look at the symbols with a body. Then a police woman (Officer Sophie, the dead man's grand daughter) tells Bob he's bugged and the male cop is going to frame him and lock him up. [And there are Catholic weirdos up to no good in the background.] The dead man left a message about Leonardo da Vinci in code.
   Bob & Sophie go for a look at the Mona Lisa, and the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail are tossed into the mix. Bob & Sophie end up at the chateau of Lee, Bob's elderly English pal. He says the Grail is Mary Magdalene, the wife of Jesus, and they had a daughter.
   Jesus wanted Mary to spread his message, not Peter, and the Catholic church has been trying to suppress this for 2,000 years and maintain its power base by killing the descendants of Mary & Jesus. The Catholics want to find Mary's sarcophagus and destroy her remains so that her descendants can't prove who they are by DNA testing.
   Nutter after nutter oozes out of the woodwork and the killing goes on and on. Lee turned out to be another nutter. Bob & Sophie find the place in England where the sarcophagus was parked, but it's gone. Gulp! Sophie is one of the descendants, and she has a whole gang of hovering protectors, including her grandma.
   Robert cuts himself shaving and that's the clue that tells him the Grail isn't in England. It's under the Louvre pyramid in Paris.

The Da Vinci Treasure (2006) Burglars nicked a LdV manuscript and one ended up dead. Michael, the other burglar, was done over by his archaeologist employer, who was after the DV treasure, which had been lost for 500 years but there were clues in LdV's work.
   Michael and his girlfriend Julia nicked the Turin Shroud inches ahead of the boss man's killers, but they had to give it up. Michael had a run-in with the bad guys and a car chase. Then he stole a bus to keep running. LdV's specs unpicked the final clue. Michael and Julia burgled a convent next.
   Michael thought that LdV had invented photography to create the Shroud, putting his own face on it. So it was off to Afghanistan to be shot at and find the hidden vault full of traps, bad guys and treasure. Michael blew the place up but he and Julia escaped with the Shroud. Daft film but it fills up a couple of hours of telly time.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is a disaster film which begins with the Antarctic ice shelf breaking up and ice cores from it showing that global warming 10,000 years ago triggered an ice age, which lasted 2 centuries. Melting of the ice caps causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. It starts snowing in New Delhi, where there's a conference on climate shift, and monster hail the size of grapfruit batters Tokyo.
   Our hero is the abrasive Jack, who has made an enemy of the US vice president. Extreme weather builds in the North Atlantic; weather buoys show huge temperature drops and the birds bug out of New York where Sam, Jack's son, has gone for a school quiz competition. Jack is told that the Gulf Stream is shutting down but he thinks everything is happening too fast.
   The giant hail, gales and then a whole bunch of tornadoes devastate LA. All air traffic in the US is grounded. Jack's model based on the ice cores suggests an ice age is 6-8 weeks away. Massive storms develop over the northern hemisphere and the ISS astronauts are stuck there, observing, as the space programme is also grounded.
   Helicopters fall out of the air over Scotland and people freeze solid in moments. New York starts flooding then a huge storm surge washes over the city. Sam and his pals are trapped in the library. Forget 6-8 weeks, the next theory is that the world-wide storms will bring the ice age in 7-10 days! America migrates to Mexico.
   Sam & Co. start burning books to keep warm and Jack heads north to rescue him. A couple of his mates are killed along the way. New York freezes solid and Sam and his pals have fun & games with wolves which have escaped from the zoo. Eventually, the storms end (after Jack had reached Sam) and helicopters arrive at New York to rescue the survivors.

The Day Mars Invaded Earth (1963) A capsule sent to Mars launched a rover. Contact with it lasted 6 minutes. Dr. Fielding was less than thrilled. As was Mrs. Fielding about his job. She disappeared into thin air in the vast grounds of their mansion? No, she was in the house all the time. It was those Martians making people's heads go all fuzzy!
   The Martians made the daughter's boyfriend crash his car to stop him taking the family to safety. Fielding called in Webb, his assistant, but that did no good. Fielding met a "manifestation of intelligence", which told him the Martians would take out anyone who sent probes to their planet.
   Webb came up with an idea to deal with the monsters but they zapped him and replaced him. Same with the Fieldings.

Days of Thunder (1990) Tom Cruise O'Missile plays Cole, a punk kid, who crashes into Nascar racing. Cole impressed Harry, the old hand car builder (Robert Duval). The kid knows how to drive but he doesn't know about cars. Harry tells him a porky about the car to help Cole to his first win. Cole enjoys a winning streak while indulging in shunting matches with the current champ. Of course, both of them end up in the hospital.
   Cole romances his doctor (Nicole Kidmann) and another punk starts hassling him when he returns to racing. The same sponsor is providing cars for both running punks so Cole gets himself fired for a revenge crash after the other punk puts him out of a race.
   Cole convinces the champ to have surgery for a leaky blood vessel in his head. So Cole is handed the task of winning at Daytona in the champ's car so that the champ's sponsor will pay up for his season. No prizes for guessing who takes the chequered flag.

The Day The Earth Stood Still remake (2008) In a frozen waste, an explorer found a large, glowing eye of ice, broke it ... was it all a dream? In the present day, Dr. Helen Benson was grabbed by the government along with a whole gang of scientists. NASA had spotted an object hurtling through the solar system; but under power rather than gravitational influences. Next stop, Manhattan in 78 minutes.
   A huge sphere landed in Central Park, the army shot the visitor, a surgeon removed the bullet and found a human growing in an alien shell. And there was a huge freakin' robot. Klatu hatched and grew. He wanted to talk to the UN. The US Sec. of State wouldn't let him. She wanted to interrogate Klatu, the other scientists refused to join in but Dr. Benson did.
   Klatu escaped. The Air Force failed to take out the robot. Klatu told Dr. Benson he was there to save the Earth. An agent in place for 70 years told Klatu he wasn't leaving. The alien invaders had decided that humanity was killing the planet so their plan was to save as many other species as possible and wipe out the humans.
   The robot became a metal-eating cloud of bugs, which began to wreck every structure and vehicle and gadget on the planet. Dr. Benson and her horrible kid were affected by the bugs but Klatu saved them and called off the death cloud. The lights went out everywhere, everything mechanical stopped working and the aliens buggered off, leaving a blighted planet and billions of people facing death from starvation, disease and lack of medical care.

The Day The Earth Stopped (2008) Freakin' huge robots arrived on Earth and a couple of naked, humanoid aliens landed in a small pod. The US military captured them. Joshua, who was guarding the femalien, found that they were telepathic. The femalien said her kind had been watching Earth and decided that the human race was a threat. The robots were going to destroy the planet, but if the human race could prove it had worth, the destruction process would stop.
   The malien said the femalien was The Destroyer. The human race had until sundown to save itself. Shooting missles at the robots was futile. Joshua's boss relieved him of duty but the femalien bamboozled him into getting them out of the military base. The Earth was zapped with large EM pulses and the robots were making Earth's axis tilt.
   Joshua killed some of his own men when they tried to recapture the femalien. A robot on a remote Pacific island survived being nuked. Joshua collected a woman, who was about to give birth, and her husband, and that convinced "Sky" that the human race has compassion. But the femalien had to get back to its transport.
   Joshua & the femalien were captured and held as terrorist. Most of the Earth's landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower, were destroyed. Joshua escaped again but he and the femalien were taken out. But the malien arrived to revive them. The aliens and the robots left Earth and the human race was left with lots of wreckage.

Deadly Water (2006) A kid's parents are dragged off a boat and eaten. In the present day, 2 women are searching for Greek artefacts under the sea. Something grabs their underwater camera and Old Jim is decapitated by a cable. There's a giant squid in the area and global warming gets the blame. Ray Ryder, the kid from above, inflicts himself on the expedition.
   Nicola finds a ceremonial mask from the Trojan war. Maxwell, a Greek gangster, turns up. He's looking for a huge opal, which his family has told him to deliver or else. The kid in Nicola's crew sells her out to Maxwell. Nikki's boat goes up in flames; the mask wasn't aboard. Ray provides a replacement boat.
   The squid starts eating bad guy divers. Ray goes off to kill the squid and finds the giant opal. Nikki is grabbed by bad guys and their boss gets the opal. The squid attacks the bad guys' boat, they're all eaten, including Maxwell, the opal goes overboard Raymond shoots the squid full of holes and Nikki ends up with the mask.

The Dead Pool (1988) is number 5 in the Dirty Harry series and the last one. An English film director and his associates have made lists of celebrities who are likely to croak – the dead pool – and the one with the most dead names on the list will be the winner. Harry Callaghan is number 8 on the list. But someone is giving destiny a helping hand.
   Callaghan is praised by the DA for putting a mobster away so Harry is ambushed by goons; all 3 of whom end up dead. He's grounded, almost moved to PR, then let out on the streets again with a Chinese-American partner; Al Quan. The first dead pool corpse is a druggie rock star, who's making a movie with the director. Then Harry joins in a restaurant robbery, where one of the dead is carrying a dead pool list.
   A midget TV reporter files a $2M law suit because Harry wrecks a camera when she was behaving like an asshole. He has to buy her off with a dinner. More goons shoot up Harry & the reporter in a glass lift. So Harry visits the gangster Genero in gaol and intimidates him. A film critic is offed next, and an attention-seeker pretends to be the dead-pool killer to get himself on TV.
   The next victim is offed by a bomb in a radio-controlled toy car. Genero gives Harry a couple of bodyguards. Harry gets a dead pool letter with RIP beside his name. The killer has a go at Harry & Quan with another toy car and Quan ends up in hospital.
   The killer grabs the midget reporter. Harry turns up, gives him his Magnum revolver, lets the guy shoot off all the bullets then nails him with a harpoon on the film set.

Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14 (1995) features a couple of escapers from a prison camp on the site of an old fun-fair, who have to stick together -- not because they are handcuffed but because the prisoners are wearing collars, which explode when they get more than half a mile from the detector. The bloke resets the collars so that they are okay if they stayed within 500 yards or so of each other, which gives them real problems when the woman jumps onto a train before the bloke is ready and they get themselves shut into separate furniture vans! Lots of high-tech skulduggery, a couple of exploding heads and bad guys who really deserved everything they get.

Death Becomes Her (1992) is about two women who become obsessed with the same man and looking young. Madeline (Meryl Streep) steals surgeon Ernest (wimpy Bruce Willis) from Helen (Goldie Hawn), who balloons to a fat lump in therapy. She can talk only about Madeline and Ernest, which freaks out the rest of the group. She is told that she has to completely eliminate . . . Helen doesn't listen to any more. Completely eliminate Madeline becomes her mission in life.
   Ernest becomes a sad, drunken loser. Madeline's toy boy tells her to get someone of her own age. Faded film star Madeline takes a potion which will stop the ageing process and becomes young again. Like Helen, who conspires to kill Madeline with Ernest.
   Ernie tells Maddy she looks cheap in an argument and pushes her down a long flight of stairs. Despite a dislocate neck and her head turned backwards so that she can see her own ass, she survives! She's undead and she needs Ernie's skills as a reconstructive mortician to keep looking young.
   Maddy shoots Helen with a shotgun but she had already taken the potion and she survives with a big hole where her belly used to be. Ernie tries to walk out on both of them. They decide he has to take the potion. He refuses and chooses to fall to his death rather than drink it. He lands in a swimming pool and escapes.
   37 years later, the ladies are falling apart when they attend Ernie's funeral. He has led a full and satisfying life, apparently. In their extremely fragile condition, the ladies manage to fall down a flight of stone steps and end up as disconnected bits. Daft but fun.

The Death of the Incredible Hulk (1990) Dr. David Banner was posing as a v. simple cleaner at a US govt. biological research station and still Hulking up when mugged. Eastern European terrorists were after the work of Dr. Pratt, the Head of Station. Pratt discovered that David had been helping out with his genetic research, and he wanted to study the monster.
   Terrorist Yasmine struck as Dr. Pratt was trying to rid David of the monster. Pratt ended up in a coma so she went after David and her gang turned on her. David brought Pratt out of his coma. The gang ambushed David's stolen SUV so he Hulked up to frustrate them.
   David & Yasmine planned to go away together but the terrorists grabbed Dr. Pratt. The cops, tipped off, went after the terrorists and shot most of them to bits. David & Yasmine rescued Dr. & Mrs. Pratt. The monster took out the plane carrying Yasmine's bad guy sister, and the fall to the runway wrecked the Hulk, and that was it for Dr. David Banner, too.

Death Race (2008) In 2012, the US economy went bust, society went to hell and private prisons started showing cage fights to the death on the Internet. But the customers wanted more, so the Terminal Island jail introduced the Death Race. Aimes, our hero, was an ordinary guy who used to drive racing cars until he was banned.
   His steel plant was closed, the cops beat up the workers, Aimes' wife was murdered by a masked intruder and he ended up convicted of the murder at Terminal Island, where the lady governor wanted him to replace the masked Frankenstein, an ace driver who had croaked, because she needed the income from Frankie's races. The deal was win 5 races and you go free, and Frankie had won 4.
   Aimes was teamed with The Coach and his team of misfit mechanics. Stage 1 of the next 3-day Death Race: mucho mayhem for Frankie and his lady navigator, especially from Machine-Gun Joe, and their weapons were sabotaged. Aimes found that the governor had used one of the inmates to kill his wife to get him sent to her prison, and she'd kidnapped his daughter. The governor stopped Aimes from killing the killer.
   Stage 2 of the race; his navigator told Aimes that "Frankie" wasn't supposed to win, he was just there to make the racing exciting. So Aimes ambushed his wife's killer and killed him. The governor put a big-ass killer truck on the track. Frankie & Joe took it out after the other competitors had been killed, so it was just them for Stage 3.
   The race was rigged against Frankie but Joe used his missiles to blow a hole in a wall and they staged a gaol-break. The cars were crashed but his navigator posed as the masked Frankie while Aimes & Joe hopped a freight train. They ended up in Mexico, where the navigator joined them with Aimes' daughter 6 months later.

Death Race 3: Inferno (2012) The Death Race is going global and getting bigger and better and more frequent. But Frankenstein has won 4 races and he's only one win away from release. He's sent to South Africa and told the new deal is "win and you die" in the Kalahari desert. It's a 3-day event and it goes through town full of gangstas with guns.
   Frankie is 2nd after day one, and everyone is dumped in flooded cells full of bugs. Frankie tells his crew about the "you die" rule at the start of day 2. More revolting, crazy natives get involved, 4 cars left. Frankie gets his crew blown up on the last day? The boss-man fails to take him out with a missile. The broadcast network lady gets the hump at being screwed over by the boss-man.
   Frankie lets 14K win the race. The network lady chains the boss-man to a table when Frankie drives into his bunker to blow it up. Frankie survives, burnt to a crisp, but he denies being Frankenstein. Which is true. He's the boss-man and the new Frankenstein. The previous driver known as Frankenstein and his crew have gained their freedom.

Death Race 2000 (1975) (David Carradine & Sylvester Stallone, a Roger Corman production written by Chuck Griffith) This film was banned from TV for about 30 years but along came violent video games and the censors lost the will to live. The 20th annual Trans-Continental Road Race is about to begin, offering 3 days of blood and death to the TV audience in a very strange United States, which is run by a Mr. President who's living in Japan.
   The star of the show is Mr. Frankenstein, who's supposed to have been rebuilt many times after crashes, and his main rival is Machine Gun Joe. The 5 cars can score extra points for killing people in their path, e.g. 70 points for toddlers and 100 points for anyone over 75. So a geriatric hospital parks some customers in Frankenstein's path but he goes for the staff instead!
   Meanwhile, there's an anti-race operation going on and Nero the Hero is blown up by the Resistance, which patches into the national TV to declare war on Mr. President & the race. Franky's navigator learns that he's really one of a succession of replacement guys, and he eventually learns that she's the grand daughter of the resistance leader. They want to kidnap him and swap Franky's life for permanent abolition of the race.
   The President blames the French for sabotaging things as the Resistance reduces the race to just Franky & Joe. The Resistance tries real hard to take out Franky but fails. Which is just as well as he plans to take out the President with his exploding hand. But he uses it to blow up Joe instead. So Franky has to improvise. And he becomes the President at the end.
   This film has a lot in common with Rollerball.

Deep Blue Sea (1999, Samuel L. Jackson) A shark attacks a pleasure boat but a mysterious stranger (Carter) harpoons it just in time. A female mad scientist is looking for a cure for Alzheimer's disease at Aquatica, a floating lab, using sharks. Mr. Franklin of the pharmaceutical company visits the site. Carter, the shark wrangler, tells the mad doctor that the sharks are killers. She doesn't want to know.
   The sharks take out TV scanners and lights. Carter foils an escape attempt. The mad doctor shows that her shark extract can revive Alzheimer's neurons; she's been putting human genes in shark brains. Then her test shark bites a guy's arm off. The mad doctor releases it before Carter can shoot it. The sharks make a rescue helicopter crash onto the complex, which starts flooding.
   The humans try to get to the surface and the 3 smart sharks start picking them off after wrecking the mini-sub. The cook blows one up, the mad doctor electrocutes another. So that just leaves the big, bad, 2nd generation female. Carter, the mad doctor and the cook reach the surface, where the shark starts trying to bash a hole in the fence.
   Carter comes up with a plan to kill the shark; which was thoroughly debunked by the Mythbusters. Even so, the shark is blown up, the mad doctor is killed and Carter and the cook are still alive when a rescue boat approaches.

Deep Evil (2004) is a daft sciffy monster movie. A man is arrested for setting off a nuke in Alaska and he ends up being interrogated by tazer. He says he is Dr. Langdon and he was on a black operation at a secret lab, which went into lockdown. A team of military & scientists was sent to investigate. All they found at first was a strange liquid and what looked like the remains of someone who had been dissolved!
   The US government had been trying to clone an alien lifeform brought to Siberia on an asteroid. The Russians had tried to do something with it and ended up nuking their lab. Anyone contaminated by the alien lifeform turns to water, after suitable horrible skin-erupting special effects. The US government was trying to clone the highly intelligent alien lifeform to find out how to kill it to stop it taking over the planet.
   Team members, including Dr. Langdon are killed and the survivors decide to set off a nuclear device. But the bozo on the team blows up the lift while they are under attack by alien 'spiders'. So General Harrison, the man in charge, gives them permission to halt the count-down. The surviving two military men fight caveman-size alien monsters with carbon dioxide fire extinguisters and the last of them triggers the bomb manually.
   Civilian Dr. Cole escapes to the surface, only to be shot by Harrison. So the interrogator asks 'Dr. Langdon' how he knows all this if there were no survivors from the mission. So he reveals himself to be an alien lifeform, which gives the interrogator a hell of a shock!

Deep Freeze (2003) is a daft tale about monsters at an Antarctic drilling base which is experiencing earthquakes. Trilobites (extinct everywhere else for 225 million years) the size of a dog are running around attacking everyone. And then one the size of the Loch Ness monster appeared. It is blown up but the final shot is of a waving tentacle belonging to a trilobite the size of the Kraken!

Deep Impact Interesting example of synchronicity here. During the slow bits of the film, your reviewer carried on reading Moonfall by Jack McDevitt. The film Deep Impact is about a comet which is on course to collide with the Earth. A schoolkid spots it, a professional astronomer confirms it then he's wiped out by a dozy truck driver while speeding down from his observatory.
   A year later, a TV reporter thinks she's getting dirt on the US Secretary of the Treasury, who has just resigned. Jenny Lerner thinks he's having an affair with someone called Ellie. But when she's kidnapped by the FBI and taken to see the president, he talks about E.L.E. – an Extinction Level Event. The comet impact is a year away, the Americans and the Russians have been building a spaceship called Messiah to blow it up and the resigned Secretary didn't think the plan would work
   A team of astronauts (& cosmonauts), led by an America Moon-landing veteran (Robert Duval) goes up to nuke the to comet. Their drilling operation takes too long, they lose a man in space and they succeed only into breaking the comet into a little chunk and a big chunk. So the US government sends a million selected people to hide in purpose-built caverns for a couple of years while the dust and debris of the impact settles.
   The Americans fire a shower of missiles at the comet, but they fail to deflect it. Panic on Earth and lots of human interest stuff and noble sacrifice. Heading home ahead of the comet, the astronauts realize they have 4 nukes left and while they can do nothing about the small comet fragment, they can take out the big one – which is big enough to cause the extinction of pretty well all life on Earth.
   The smaller fragment hits the Atlantic and sends an enormous tsunami hurtling across America. The larger fragment provides a spectacular display of meteors for the survivors, and America (and everywhere else) starts to rebuild.
   In the book Moonfall, the comet hits the Moon, which breaks up and drops big chunks of itself onto the Earth, wiping out large areas and drowning coastal cities with tidal waves.

Delta Force II : The Colombian Connection (1990) is a 2-star action film with Chuck Norris showing off his karate skills. An operation to extract a Colombian drug baron comes to nothing in the American courts when an idiot of a judge gives him bail of $10,000,000, which is just loose change to a coke baron. Then things get personal and the body count rises and rises, especially when Mr. Norris heads for South America to sort out the bad guy once and for all.

Depth Charge (2008) The nuclear sub USS Montana successfully tested some stealth gear off Iceland then the XO chucked the captain and most of the crew off the boat and threatened to nuke Washington and other major cities unless he got $1 billion for each of them. Cmdr. Krieg was sore because the US Navy had never given him his own command.
   Krieg fired a warning shot and Seaman James (young, black and looking nothing like Steven Seagal) and the doctor began to take out the bad guys. The President was told that Krieg's medication for a brain tumour had turned him psychotic and he had less than a year to live. Both of our heroes were shot but they continued to wreak havoc and kill bad guys.
   USS Florida, another sub, tried to intercept Montana but the bad guys got the stealth gear on line just in time. The doctor was captured but James freed him and they put the reactor out of action, in need of a reboot. Montana closed in as Cmdr. Krieg prepared to launch his missles. The President told the captain of Florida to shoot anyway.
   All of the bad guys were killed but Krieg shot off half a dozen missles as he croaked. The doc cancelled most of the launches and managed to make the last one self-destruct. And James steered the sub away from Florida's torpedoes.

Derailed (2002) features the 'Muscles from Brusselles' Jean-Claude Van Damme. His job was to extract an agent from Slovakia and he was being hassled by his wife because he kept disappearing. After a punch-up with Redcaps in Bratislava, a car chase and blowing up half the city, our hero and the agent made it to a train, which was promptly hijacked by the criminal gang, which the female agent had double-crossed.
   Worse, Mrs. Damme turned up with the family and got the hump when she found her husband sharing a compartment with a woman. Even worse, the woman was carrying SP43, a mutated strain of smallpox, one of the vials was shattered and the train was infected. So everyone who had not had a smallpox vaccination started coughing and getting v. spotty!
   The head bad guy was hoping to make a fortune out of an antidote to the virus. The Muscles larked about under the train as well as on top of it. The train went into a tunnel with the hijackers' helicopter attached to it! The Muscles went riding around on a motorbike, on and off the train. A drunken train driver nearly wrecked the hijacked train.
   The Luftwaffe took out most of the train and a bridge with it. Luckily, the Muscles had uncoupled the bit containing the hijackers and their prisoners, doing in the head bad guy in the process, but it ended up hanging off the wreck of the bridge! But in the end, everyone was cured of the pox and Mr. Muscles squared things with the missus.

Desperado (1995) A guy in a bar tells a story about a BIG Mexican who did in a bar full of world-class terrorists, and who's heading for that bar. A guy walks into the same bar and tells a story. A guy with a guitar case arrives for a HUGE shoot-out. He leaves a message for the local crime boss among the bodies. He's a man on a mission to kill drug dealers.
   A crazy guy flings lots of knives around but he gets himself killed. The boss tries to wipe out the vigilante, and the lady from the book store, who patched up the vigilante and who gets 50 grands per year for looking after packages (of drugs).
   The vigilante doesn't take a clear shot at the gang boss. Two more guys with weapons in guitar cases show up and get killed in a HUGE battle. The vigilante is the local crime boss's brother, and the boss ends up dead.

Destruction: Las Vegas (2013) A gang of students in Vegas messes with a sword in an exhibit at a casino and unleashes a huge brown-cloud storm on the city. An ageing entertainer leads them into the tunnels below the city to help Nelson find Olivia, who finds herself being chased by a tiger. The kids realize that their messing about caused the catastrophe.
   An idiot gets half of the group killed. The rest reach the Cactus Cave but no Olivia; she's under half the ceiling! She says Thutmoses III is behind all the trouble and the have to find 3 peace offerings for a guy who died thousands of years ago.
   When they have the stuff, Nelson is able to pull the sword out of the ground. But the storm doesn't stop. There's a final piece of the puzzle missing. Nelson & Olivia, the only survivors of the group, run into a scumbag with a gun, who strolls off with Olivia and the sword. But Nelson slays him and he and Olivia head to the top of the mock Eiffel Tower to defuse the storm.

The Detonator (2006) A wife walked out on her dead husband with all the cash in the safe. Wesley Snipes played Sonni Griffith of Homeland Security, a black man trying to be inconspicuous in Bucharest. A weapons buy with bad guy Dmitri, went bad and Griff had to kill just about everyone in sight. The CIA got him out of police custody and gave him the job of taking the widow to New York as a witness. Bad guys attacked their safe house, but Griff bugged out with Nadia when everyone else was dead.
   Her old man stashed $30 million in a Swiss account and Joe Barzanescu, the head bad guy, who owns a football team, wanted it back. Nadia wanted to buy her life back from Joe. Mitchell, the local CIA data expert, said there were no leaks, so the safe house was sold out. Nadia ID'ed Joe as The Hawk, an arms dealer. Dmitri followed Griff from a meet with Sheppard, his CIA contact, to Griff's motel, which blew up when the bad guys attacked.
   Mitchell told Sheppard that Joe was paying off Flint, their boss. A big shoot-out under the football stadium during a match and a stampede of spectators when it got to ground level. Griff got to take out Joe then he found out the hard way that Sheppard was the traitor. But he got to go to his own funeral to make him free to stroll off with Nadia and the $30 million.

The Devil's Advocate (1997, Keanu Reeves) A groping teacher is on trial, defended by Kevin, a hotshot lawyer who hates the client; but not enough to blow his winning streak. So he torpedoes the girl who made the complaint on the witness stand. Then he's recruited by a New York firm to help rig a jury. John Milton, the boss, has some monumental, almost mediaeval, space in his office building.
   Gulp! The boss is the Devil and Kevin's mom is a Bible-bunny. The boss puts Kevin on the job of getting a client off a triple murder charge. Kevin's wife starts freaking out all over the place and complaining that she never sees him. Mom comes to New York and gets creeped out. The boss tries to chuck Kevin off the case but he doesn't want to go. Some more stuff happened but we lost the will to watch any more. Not the most enthralling film ever made.

Die Another Day (2002, Pierce Brosnan) James Bond and 2 others surf into North Korea. Bond hopes to buy armed hovercraft with conflict diamonds but he's rumbled and mayhem ensues before the opening titles with a really cheesy title song. After 14 months in The Hole, Bond is spy-swapped and Mrs. M has a serious case of the hump. So he does a runner from the base in Hong Kong instead of going to a training centre in the Falklands, and wrecks a gene-therapy clinic in Cuba, and kills the "artist" in charge, after Halle Berry gets her kit off for him.
   Bond has a rumble with Zao, the guy who gave him up to the Koreans. Zao gets away from Bond 'n' Berry of the NSA, and the Yanks give Mrs. M a roasting. Back to London to do some fencing with mega-rich Gustav Graves, a Korean enemy with a new face via gene therapy. Bond winds up Q Cleese and takes his invisible car to Iceland, where Graves is passing off African conflict diamonds as local products.
   Bond is stitched up by Miranda of MI6 and Graves deploys his monster laser satellite. Bond and a NSA lady have fun in a lab with lots of lasers. Bond does some cliff-hanging, para-surfing and ice-driving before charging round a melting ice palace to free the trapped NSA lady. Zao is done in, then it is back to North Korea for fun and games on a Jumbo cargo transporter whilst Graves' space laser is taking out the minefields in the Demilitarized Zone. The plane is BBQ'd by the laser and the world is saved. Again.

Die Hard (1988) It's Xmas Eve and NY detective John McClane won't be visiting his wife & daughter. But he gets a ride in a limo and ends up at a party in the deserted NakaJapi Building by mistake. Just before BGs invade it and start shooting. They're a bunch of tiresome gits after $30 million in the vault.
   McClane tries to set off a fire alarm but the BGs thwart him. He takes out one of them and lets the BGs have the body. His wife, who's one of the prisoners, realizes who dunnit. McClane tries to get help with a stolen CB radio but some stoopid woman won't listen. Until she hears BGs shooting at McClane.
   A fat black cop is sent to look at the building. He's almost deflected but the BGs can't resist shooting him up. The HBG thinks the arrival of more cops is just a minor inconvenience. The police chief is a total twat. Surprise! The armoured car is blasted by the BGs. The BGs blow up the building? No, it's just McClane messing about and he has the BGs' stock of detonators.
   A corporate twat in the prisoners tries to make a deal with the BGs and blows McClane's identity. The twat gets himself shot. The Feds boot LAPD in to touch. McClane is bamboozled by the HBG and admits that he's a NY cop. McClane finds a BG bomb just before he's nailed and beaten up.
   The top of the building is shot up from a chopper. The BGs blow up some bombs there. The repairs will cost more than the $30M in the vault! At the end, the HBG confronts McClane and his ex-wife, and ends up doing some skydiving without a parachute. And the fat black cop relearns how to shoot someone.

Die Hard II: Die Harder (1990) John McClane gets his car towed at Dulles airport whilst he's waiting for his wife and it's Xmas. A South American dictator, formerly in cahoots with the CIA, is being extradited to D.C. for being in the cocaine industry Terrorists take over a church near the airport. McClane spots 2 suspicious characters and kills one in the baggage area. The captain of the airport cops is totally useless so McClane by-passes him to get the dead bad guy ID'd. He's supposed to have died 2 years earlier in Honduras.
   McClane tries to get the airport locked down when the BGs shut off the runway lights, then the ATC system – they have their own system in the church. McClane fails to stop them crashing a plane to prove how in charge they are.
   The Heavy Mob copters in. The airport staff find a way to talk to the planes orbiting over the airport. McClane finds a BG radio and gets in on the action. The dictator's plane lands and McClane gets shot up on it. He has to use an ejector seat to get away from a shower of grenades. A guy at the airport shows McClane where the BGs must be.
   The BGs bug out and McClane follows them for a while. A scumbag reporter on Mrs. McClane's flight does some eavesdropping, phones his TV station and causes a panic at the airport. So Mrs. McClane assaults him with a taser.
   McClane realizes that the Heavy Mob is in with the BGs. He takes a ride on the wing of the 747 given to the BGs and sets it on fire and blows it up. His wife's plane, out of fuel, uses the trail of flames on the ground to make a landing. McClane is a hero again.

Die Hard With A Vengeance (1995) The script is supposed to have been turned down as Lethal Weapon IV. Terrorists blow up a department store in New York and 'Simon', the mad bomber makes life tough for Lt. John McClane by sending him to Harlem in his shorts wearing a sign board saying "I Hate Niggers". Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), a shopkeeper, saves him from a small mob, hijacks a car and ends up as McClane's non-buddy for the duration.
   The non-buddie have to drag their asses around New York from phone to phone. McClane blows up the subway without getting anyone killed. The FBI & NSA join in and the bad guy is Hans Gruber's brother. McClane tossed Gruber off a building in Die Hard. Simon says he's put a bomb in one of New York's schools. So everyone goes looking for it while Simon & Co. are stealing the gold in the Federal Reserve Bank.
   A thieving kid puts McClane on the right track, he avoids being killed in the bank, and goes chasing after the convoy of dumper trucks containing $140 billion. There a device in the school, but it's not explosive, just a decoy. The German terrorist group behind 'Simon' plans to put the gold on a ship and sink it in Long Island Sound. But Simon double-crosses the idealists.
   McClane & Zeus bust a gut to get aboard the ship, and jump off just before it explodes. McClane works out that the bad guys are heading for Canada and intercepts them at the border for a shoot-out, in which Simon's helicopter crashes & burns.

Die Hard 4.0 (2007) Cyber terrorists hacked the FBI at the 4th of July weekend as skinhead New York cop John McClane was spying on Lucy, his daughter. He was hauled into the Feds' round up of all US hackers, and terrorists shot up his collar's apartment. 3 French Canadian bandits were killed but the terrorists continued to pursue the kid, Farrell. So McClane had to do his thing again.
   7 other hackers were dead. The bad guys gridlocked DC when McClane arrived and crashed the stock market. The kid said it's a "Fire Sale" – everything controlled by computers must go (down). Farrell and the dead hackers had been used to tested the bad guys' software. The BGs sent a chopper after McClane, so he did some dodgy driving and shot it down with a police car!
   McClane & Farrell headed for West Virginia next to stop the BGs taking out the power system manually. McClane had his ass kicked by the head BG's girlfriend so he chucked her down a lift shaft. Gabriel, the HBG, had been screwed by the Federal government, which had trashed his reputation, so he was out for revenge.
   The lights started to go out everywhere. McClane & Farrell visited the kid's hacker pal, Warlock, and McClane ended up chatting with Gabriel, who told him he knew where to find Lucy, who was trapped in a lift. Gabriel was after a dump of the USA's financial records (the state was using a back up program which he wrote) with a view to stealing cash and causing chaos by erasing the data.
   The kid screwed up the financial grab. The Feds closed in as Gabriel fled in a Hazmat van, pursued by McClane in a big rig. Gabriel set a fighter hotshot on McClane, who wrecked the plane after the bozo pilot had wrecked a freeway. Cue a final shoot-out and the Feds arriving too late, as always.

Dinocroc Versus Supergator (2010) A huge crocodile started eating the staff at Drake Industries in Hawaii. The boss didn't want the authorities to know that Primaeval One had escaped. Then another monster broke out; one looking like a dinosaur-croc hybrid. Tourists became lunch. Drake's clean up team, sent to kill the monsters and any survivors from the research station, were also eaten.
   Drake called in The Cajun. Paul, a Dept. of Agriculture investigator, met a stranded conservation lady (the sheriff's daughter) on his way to the Drake base, and her dad got to view a half-eaten cow. Drake Industries was supposed to be creating fast-growing crops but the DoA suspected that Drake was doing something military on the side.
   The pushy Victory, Drake's hit-person, crashed the Cajun's party. Paul found a survivor from the lab, who spilled the beans before Victoria killed her. But Paul recorded her admitting Drake had bribed her and her brother to apply the plant-growth research to alligators as part of a plan to create super-soldiers.
   Victoria failed to kill Paul. The Cajun decided to make the lizards fight each other and take out the winner while it was in a weakened condition. The Feds took out Victoria and Drake had a heart attack. The sheriff was eaten before the battle of the monsters. Paul blew up the winner. But, of course, there were little monsters still around.

The Dinosaur Project (2012) Back story: a gang of cryptozoologists disappears hunting Mokele Mbeme, the Nessie of the Congolese jungle. Prof. Marchant ends up lumbered with Luke, his appalling teenage son, who stows away on the expedition's helicopter, which crashes. The gang makes camp in a wrecked and abandoned hut. Come nightfall, something with big teef attacks the hut. So the gang drifts about a bit on the river in some handy boats.
   Something in the water attacks them and they end up on an island with small dinosaurs. Luke puts a camera on one. There's at least one much bigger dino. More pratting about in boats. Something huge gets Dave, the cameraman. The gang finds a lost world.
   Charlie tries to kill Luke. Amazing no one thought of it before. Pete, the sound man, slays some small monsters then runs into a mob of them. Will anyone get out alive? Does anyone care? Not the Prof., thanks to Charlie. Chomp! Not Charlie. Luke puts a pack of camera hard disks in a pack and floats it off down the river before heading into the lost world. At the end, it's found.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) Michael Caine, in league with crooked police lieutenant Anton Rodgers, works the Cote d'Azur, preying on rich women. Enter Steve Martin as a poacher, who tried to horn in on MC's next target. So the crooked cop puts the lady wise and SM is locked up. The poacher leaves town, but returns when one of MC's marks spills some beans.
   MC agrees to take him on as a pupil, teaches him some manners and dismays him by letting SM know that the profits of their scams have to be spent on culture. So SM quits but doesn't leave town. MC decides there isn't room in town for the two of them. So they have a scamming contest; first to extract $50K from the Soap Queen.
   SM does a 'wheelchair war vet and grandma needing an operation' routine. The mark isn't rich, so they change the bet. But the 'mark' scams both of them. And next thing you know, the lady is back with a gang of mugs and she recruits MC & SM to her outfit.

Disaster Movie (2008) A kid has a bad dream, then it's the day on which he thinks the world will end, and his Sweet 16 party even though he's 25. Then there's an earthquake. Next, asteroids falling out of the sky. A cold storm arrives to freeze the city. All sorts of weird characters do some singing and dancing, then a twister arrives. And the Incredible Bulk (sans pants).
   Everyone has to be evacuated from the city to avoid being buried in rubble. The crystal skull has to be returned to the altar in the Natural History Museum to prevent the end of the world. But everything in the museum comes to life and gets in the way. A midget Inbanana Jones joins in and screws up. Will blags the hat, though, and plants the skull on the altar to save the world. Then he marries Amy.

Disaster Zone: Volcano In New York (2006) New York is having an energy crisis and there's cold weather on the way. Under the city, there's a gang led by Matt engaged in building tunnels to give the city all the water it will need and a crew drilling a geothermal energy shaft. Cooling water pipes start exploding in the water tunnel and members of the gang are burnt with scalding, acidic water. Lava breaks into the tunnel, which collapses just before the gang bugs out!
   The US Geological Survey is called in to investigate the earth tremors. The bosses on the ground aren't too bothered about 3 deaths. The geothermal project is under financial and time pressures. No one wants to believe Matt saw lava and his ex-wife, Susan, is on the USGS team.
   Volcanic gases wipe out 100 bums in Central Park. The FBI thinks it's a terrorist attack on the city's water supply. Lava under the Hudson River cooks fish and blows up a cabin cruiser. Matt & Sue sneak into Tunnel 3, Sue gets her foot burnt with acid water and starts believing Matt.
   Sue's boss fires her when she tells the mayor it's not terrorism. Earthquakes, exploding manholes and house fires in the suburbs. No surprise that the drilling project at the centre of all the trouble. The guy funding it gets cold feet but the mad scientist won't stop. Matt & Sue track down his warehouse, they're captured and they have to escape when lava erupts from the bore-hole.
   The city has to be evacuated. Matt decides to vent the lava into the sea via the tunnels under New York. Of course, the mad scientist confronts them underground, but the lava gets him and the city is saved!

District 13: Ultimatum (2009, French + subtitles) Paris 2013 – then 3 years later, a new government but nothing else has changed. The criminal underclass in a huge ghetto is still doing drugs and guns on a massive scale, and they've got more guns than the cops. Undercover tranny Damien Tommaso nails the druggist Mr. Woo and a whole gang of others, and fights his way out of their lair with a €20M van Gogh.
   That night, some kids film special forces murdering 2 cops and setting them up in front of the ghetto to be blasted to pieces by the inmates. Tommaso is busted and fitted up on a drug charge so that the President gives the ghetto problem to a corrupt top cop with a plan. The bad guy finds out about the film, but it's passed on to an inmate, who blows holes in the walls of the ghetto.
   The blaster teams up with Tommaso. Meanwhile, we learn that there's a plan afoot to raze the ghetto and turn it into somewhere for decent people to live. The cop and the blaster keep getting into fights with the police and special forces. The corrupt top cop offers the President another term if he lets the ghetto project go ahead. But Tommaso, the Blaster and their gang finally get to the President and he has to do the right thing.

Divergent (2014) In a post-apocalyptic society, there are various factions. Our heroine, Beatrice, is a girl who is about to be tested and assigned. There are 5 castes: smart, farm labourers, lawyers, soldiers/cops and carers, and factionless nobodies. Beatrice turns out to be something special. The sensors can't pick a faction for her because she's a Divergent, but youngsters can choose their own faction, and she chooses the Dauntless military.
   Jumping on and off trains features heavily in the film; it gets Beatrice and fellow recruits to a place where they can prove they're Dauntless. The leaders are charmless bullies; it's a warrior faction, which defends the city (from whom?). The weakest get killed off. The defenders do rather a lot of pointless pratting about. The government has it in for talented people with a personality. Tris, as Beatrice has become, has to fake being just one of the herd, but she refuses to get involved in mindless murder.
   Beatrice finds there are others who haven't bought the party line; including her mom, which gets mom killed. Her father is another unbeliever, so he doesn't last long. Tris gets some resistance types into the Fortress. She finds her pal, Mick, is now just a zombie controlled by the city's computer, but she brings him out of it.
   Tris turns the evil blonde city boss, who wants to eliminate human nature, into a zombie by injecting a control chip into her and makes her take down the system. Then it's off on a train into the distance for Tris and a group of like-minded dissenters.

DNA This film got 1 star and a diamond in the Daily Mail's Weekend magazine, which means that it's a cult film (which is 10 times better than a 2-star film and 100 times better than a 3-star film). The main bad guy is Jürgen Prochnow, the captain in Das Boot, who is a mad scientist. After some guff about curing every disease imaginable, we get "2 years later" and the mad scientist has revived an extinct monster while on the CIA's payroll. But he's really double-crossing The Company and offering his ultimate killing machine/weapon of war to foreign governments.
   So a CIA lady with a suitcaseful of munitions is sent into the jungles of North Borneo to take him out, helped by a local doctor, whom the mad scientist shot last time we saw him, and some colourful natives. Next thing you know, the monster turns out to be an alien and the plot starts to look like a rip-off of Predator, the film starring Big Arnie and Jesse "The Body" Ventura, the ex-wrestler and sometime governor of Minnesota. And thereafter it's lot of bangs, lots of people getting chomped by the monster, explosions, bodies everywhere and the CIA gets the job done.

Doctor Who: The Movie (1996) While taking Master's remains to Gallifrey, the Doctor had to make an emergency landing on Earth on December 31st, 1999. He was shot by gang bangers and the Master escaped from the TARDIS as a sort of snake-thing. The Doctor ended up in hospital but the surgeon, Amazing Grace, got lost inside his 2 hearts and he croaked; only to regenerate in the morgue.
   Meanwhile, the Master had taken over a body as a temporary host until he could take over the Doctor's body. The Doctor, with amnesia, inflicted himself on Grace. The Master opened the Eye of Harmony in the TARDIS using a junior gang banger and the Doctor regained his memory. He told Grace he had to close the Eye or the Earth would be sucked through it!
   The Doctor & the Master had a race to an atomic clock for a spare part, the Doctor closed the Eye but the Master had taken Grace over by then. He started to take over the Doctor's body but Grace hot-wired the TARDIS and put it into a temporal orbit. After a big battle, the Master ended up in the Eye and the Doctor undid his damage.

Dog Soldiers (2002) Private Cooper evades capture by a Special Forces unit for 22 hours and 47 minutes, but Captain Ryan rejects him because he won't kill a dog for no reason. Four weeks later, Cooper is in Scotland as part of a military exercise in an area where people are disappearing. A cow goes over a cliff and lands on the unit's camp in the night. Then they come across some massacred Special Forces and get some live ammunition.
   The sole survivor is Captain Ryan, who is badly injured. Their radio doesn't work. Ryan was hunting something. "There was only supposed to be one of them," he complains. Bruce's gun doesn't work and he is killed. After a chase through the evening, a woman in a Land Rover, Megan, rescues the unit from wolf-like creatures.
   They take refuge at a deserted house. The Land Rover goes up in flames and the creatures attack the house. Megan says they are under attack by werewolves and she thought the troops were there to deal with them. Cooper sticks the sergeant back together with superglue. Megan says she's a zoologist, she heard the stories, she came looking and she found evidence of werewolves.
   Ryan's wounds heal miraculously and he is tied up. The creatures attack the house. A plan to escape in another Land Rover flops and Joe is written off. Ryan says he was sent by Special Weapons Division to capture a werewolf for study. Then he turns into a werewolf and escapes.
   The troops realize they're in the werewolves' home. The sergeant's wounds heal miraculously and he realizes he's turning into a werewolf, too. Megan gets the unit to blow up the barn with a propane cylinder. But she turns out to be a werewolf. Mucho mayhem. The sergeant turns the kitchen into a gas bomb and blows up the werewolves.
   Cooper runs into Ryan and slays him with the solid silver dirk, which his girlfriend gave him. The film closes with a tabloid front page. The headline is 'England 5, Germany 1' (one of the soldiers was going on about missing the match) and there's a side headline saying: 'Werewolves ate my platoon'.

The Domino Principle (1977) stars Gene Hackman as Tucker, a gaolbird Vietnam vet in the decade after the Kennedy assassination. Richard Widmark gets him out of gaol and reunites him with his wife but the price is a job. Tucker is manipulated into getting his cellmate, Oscar, released too and he ends up in Costa Rica. When he says he won't pull the trigger, the plotters kidnap his wife and make sure the job goes down. And then the person who ordered the hit gets antsy and everyone, but every one of the little people, goes down like a row of dominoes.

Doom (2005) In 2026, the Ark was discovered; a portal to a city on Mars. 20 years later, we're still struggling to understand the civilization and why the portal was built. This is a video game turned into a film starring The Rock. There's a Level 5 threat on Mars and Sergeant Rock and his gang of misfits are sent to seek and destroy. Unlike the stargate, the Ark makes users puke.
   The gang, and Dr. Samantha Grim, the sister of one of the misfits, go in to retrieve some data. There are creatures with 24 instead of 23 chromosomes; rapidly self-repairing creatures bioengineered by the dead Martians. The misfits are the last people you'd send to fight monsters. The monsters can turn dead misfits, and others, into more monsters.
   All the dead scientists have to be killed again. Having lost 4 misfits, Sgt. Rock refuses to believe he's in just an archaeological research unit, which is Dr. Grim's story. Sgt. Rock goes kill-crazy. Dr. Grim gives her dying brother some of the experimental serum to save his life. Sgt. Rock becomes the problem, so he gets terminated explosively.

Doomday Prophecy (2010) is one of the daftest sciffy disaster films imaginable. The Black Sea disappears into a big hole after huge earthquakes and a New York publisher gets a call from Rupert Crane, a well-known nutter. The modern Nostradamus has a new book of prophecies. And a dotty old Red Injun in British Columbia is having visions.
   New York is flattened by a huge EQ and the Solar System is aligning with the galactic plane, which causes major destruction every 26,000 years. (Yeah, right!) Eric from the publishing firm finds Crane dead, but he left video messages.
   Eric is programmed with Crane's daft visions with an iron rod. Archaeology prof. Brooke joins the party. She & Eric find themselves pursued by a killer sent by a nutty general; Crane used to work for him. The Easter Island statues are dropped into the equation.
   Earthquakes take out Italy & Greece, and the Earth is whizzing past a huge black hole. The old Injun and his grand daughter join the party and help to see off the killer. Eric & Co. have to activate some miniature Easter Island statues buried in Canada; allegedly, a defence system built by aliens.
   The general tries to stop Eric from saving the world because he wants to rule it. But the iron rod cooks him and Eric gets it installed in the gadget just in time to cook the death star. Totally daft!

Doomsday (2008) A virus breaks out in Glasgow in April 2008 and by June, there's a fence at the border with England, the gates are welded shut and Scotland gets its independence under a no-fly zone. In 2035, the plague breaks out in London. A team is sent to Scotland, where satellites have been seeing people moving around in cities for the last 3 years. Dr. Kane was working on the virus back in 2008 and he might have a cure.
   Major Sinclair and his team run into a Mad Max mob in Glasgow, their vehicles are wrecked, a couple of guys escape and Sinclair is the sole survivor of the prisoners. Sinclair escapes with Kane's daughter and rejoins her 2 soldiers. Dr. Kane is now playing king of the castle out in the wilds with a mob of knights in armour.
   The plague spreads all over London, the prime minister gets it and he kills himself. Sinclair has to kill some bozo in the arena before she escapes from the castle with Kane's daughter and her soldiers. Back to Mad Max with Sinclair & Co. in a James Bond car and the Glasgow mob in Mad Max cars. The lunatics are written off on the way to an RV with a chopper.
   The new PM plans to let the plague kill off surplus population before he produces a cure made from Kane's daughter, who's immune to the plague. So Sinclair does the dirty on him with a recording of him telling her his plans. Then she heads back to Glasgow to be the new leader of the crazies there.

Double Team (1997) Another outing for The Muscles From Brussels. Agent Jack Quinn does a final job crashing stolen plutonium out of Croatia to frustrate arch-villain Stavros then he retires. 3 years later, his wife is pregnant, Stavros returns and the US government wants him caught. Quinn gets some weapons from a freaky black guy but makes a total bog of catching Stavros 20 minutes in to the film, so lots of mayhem and Stavros Jr. is killed.
   More mayhem in a maternity ward and Quinn wakes up at The Colony, where failures are stashed. His wife has been told he's dead and he has to be part of a think-tank if he wants to stay alive. Stavros takes charge of the career of sculptor Mrs. Quinn and lets her old man know it. Quinn escapes from the escape-proof island and his 'guardian' is sent after him to kill him.
   Quinn is ambushed by Stavros' guys at his home. Mayhem in Rome after Quinn's arms dealer joins the party. Mrs. Quinn gives birth. Quinn has to take on a tiger then Stavros in a minefield to save his kid. Stavros, the tiger and the Colosseum get blown up and the arms dealer bamboozles the guardian to let Quinn get away.

Downfall (2004) is the story of the last days of the Third Reich, and features a version of Adolf Hitler with a very peculiar accent. The familiar story is played out with no surprises.
   In November 1942, Traudl Humps was picked by the Führer as his new secretary. Jump to April 20th, 1945, Traudl was now Frau Junge and the Russians were shelling Berlin on Hitler's birthday, the rats were fleeing the doomed city and Hitler was staying put. He gave up when the Russians surrounded the city, but he continued to weave stories of relief armies.
   Hitler handed round lethal pills on April 23rd. Everything was dropping to bits and people were going through the motions because they had nothing else to do; planning an heroic defence by Dad's Army and kids, and killing deserters and anyone who looked dodgy to the murder squads.
   Speer opened Traudl's eyes a bit by telling her what would happen to the Goebbels kids. Goering & Himmler jumped ship. The Führer dictated his legacy around getting married. When he killed himself, everyone lit up. There was half an hour of the film left once the funeral pyre had been lit.
   Frau Goebbels killed her kids while her husband postured and got his legacy sorted out. Everyone got the hell out of the bunker or blew their brains out. Traudl got away, and when she dared to look at a Russian soldier, he offered his mug of vodka to her instead of raping her. And she ended up riding into the distance on a bike with a stray kid.

Dracano (2013) Project Kronos is intended to head off serious volcanic eruptions and tap clean energy from volcanoes. An eruption blasts out a huge eff with a dragon in it; which eats Petra, Prof. Simon's field worker. He and his assistant, Carla, get the bum's rush from their university and the project is cancelled.
   There are rumours of large carcases and a military cover-up. The prof. and his daughter, Heather, head for the eruption site after their home is attacked; the university dumped the blame for the eruption on the prof. The prof. beats a cordon to find out what really heppened. Heather puts video of soldiers blasting another egg on her school's website.
   The military gets a bug up its ass and brands the prof and Carla armed & dangerous. Mt. Lassiter blows and releases dragons! A general admits to the prof. that Mt. St. Helens was nuked to contain the dragons. It's kill them or they'll eat the human race! The prof. is asked where to plant a nuke to keep the dragons and their queen in hibernation.
   A lady blogger gets a leak. Prof. Lowell has to go into a volcano and Oregon has to be evacuated because of the dragons. The nuke ends up in the wrong place, the President gets ready to nuke Oregon but the prof. comes up with a way to take out the mother dragon. Heather puts herself into the suicide mission.
   The nuclear strike is called off at the last second and mom dragon is done in. Then Heather is shot out of the volcano in her dragon egg. 4 months later, the lady blogger is recording a piece saying the dragon threat ain't over when she's eaten by one.

Dracula 2000 (2000) brings the story up to date as far as the pre-millennial year. A bunch of criminals crack the Van Helsing vault but they fail to find anything much. But they do stroll off with Dracula's coffin. So Professor Van Helsing's grandson (Christopher Plummer), a pensioner who injects himself with stuff extracted from leeches, pursues them. The thieves have the coffin on a plane when one of them works out how to open it.
   Everyone on the plane becomes a Dracula victim and the plane crashes near New Orleans, which is where Mary, Van Helsing's psychic daughter, is having visions of the rejuvenated count. Her priest is no help. Simon, Van Helsing's young assistant, finds the boss in the New Orleans morgue, re-killing the undead. They fail to kill Selena, the employee of Van Helsing who let the thieves into the vault.
   Van Helsing announces that Dracula is beyond the reach of death and he's the original Van Helsing, not a grandson. He has vowed not to die until he finds a way to write off Dracula. Simon gets to decapitate one of the undead after Dracula has a romp with Lucy, Mary's workmate. Mary has a long nightmare and finds her father's body. Simon has a real talent for dropping his vampire gun.
   Mary has her neck chewed and gets to drink the blood of Dracula, who is really Judas Iscariot. Mary pretends to chew Simon's neck and they get into a punch up with Dracula and 3 undead ladies. Dracula is hanged from a tacky Jesus cross, and he goes up in flames when the sun hits him.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) is a pretty faithful romp through the Dracula story with jokes by Mel Brooks. Leslie Nielsen is the vampire count and Mel Brooks is Professor van Helsing. The jokes swing from trying too hard to gross and really funny. Van Helsing is a total nutter. Dracula finds that Lucy Westenra's blood cures him and he can go out in sunlight. No, it was just a daymare.
   Lucy is swamped with ghastly garlic; to no avail, and she becomes undead. Chomp! "She's Nosferatu," sez van Helsing. "She's Italian?" sez Jonathan Harker. Best bit of the film? The gushers of blood when 'Poor Lucy' is staked in her coffin.
   Mina Seward is next, and she becomes positively weird after being nibbled. Dracula strolls off with her, with some help from the lunatic Renfield, but he ends up fried a bit by the rising sun, thanks to Renfield's blundering.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1960, Hammer) A neighbouring abbot stops a priest from staking a dead girl as a precaution against vampirism. Then he meets 4 charming English visitors to the Carpathians. He tells them to avoid Carlsbad, especially the castle. So that's exactly where the visitors end up after their coachman dumps them as night approaches.
   They enjoy the late Count Dracula's hospitality. Helen hears someone call her name in the night. Her husband goes walkabout and the butler stabs him in the back and uses his blood to revive Dracula. Charles and Diana are accosted by Dracula and a lady vampire. Diana pulls a crucifix on them and the visitors escape.
   Dracula pursues Charles and Diana to the abbot's place. The lady vampire is staked. Dracula strolls off with Diana, but he takes a bath in the water under the frozen moat when the abbot shoots holes in the ice, and that sorts the Count out!

Dracula Untold (2014) The Turks were throwing their weight around in Transylvania in 1422, but they came up against Vlad Dracula, the Son of the Dragon. The Sultan's men arrived for tribute and Vlad refused to discuss a missing patrol. They also wanted 1,000 boys to serve the Sultan. Or else. Faced with giving up his son, as he'd been given up, Dracula slew the Turks, so he needed to turn himself into a monster.
   Luckily, Vlad knew someone who could do it. The penalty was insatiable bloodlust. Off to the mountains and out of range of Turkish cannons. Vlad's wife was horrified when he admitted what he had done. Hak! Hok! Chok! Choller! A battle at night with the Turks. A spot of sunlight completed Vlad's transition to a monster.
   An attempt to burn him to the ground flopped. Vlad's family was attacked whilst he was clobbering Turks by night. He was too late to save his wife. Vlad's vampires drank his enemies. Not a lot of impaling in the film, strangely. At the end, Vlad sacrificed his vampire army and became immortal.

Dragnet (1987, Dan Ackroyd) Bad guys are on the rampage in LA and all who stand in their path are Joe Friday's grandson and his flaky new sidekick. Capt. Gannon, Joe's former partner, is in charge of the detectives. Lots of laughs, lots of rampaging, lots of shooting and no one ever getting killed, and our heroes triumph over all adversities eventually. Natch.

Dragon Dynasty (2006) A sorcerer's apprentice conjured up some dragons when Marco Polo was about to leave China because he didn't want contact with the West. He got the emperor killed and went after Marco and his crew, which included a Chinese boy. They were captured by Mud Men but escaped after a big battle. Gao Ling had a magic cloth to wrap around the Dragon Stones to chase the demons away, but it wasn't much use.
   The dragons attacked everything on Marco's route home. At a small town, Marco collected a feisty blacksmith's daughter and Ling had some gunpowder to fight the dragons off. By the time he got home, the king who sent Marco to China had been dead for 4 years and his brother's wife had remarried.
   The dragons turned up so Marco invented the cannon. Just about everyone got killed, including Marco's brother, but one dragon survived. It returned just as the king was declaring the danger over. So Marco shot it with his portable cannon and a dragon stone.

Dragon Fighter (2003, Dean Cain) starred TV's Superman as a new security officer at a secret establishment staffed by post Cold War Americans and Russians. Their mission is to perfect cloning to replace species driven into extinction by the human race. But the mad boss-man cloned a mysterious species from 1,000 years ago and sets a fire-breathing dragon loose in the facility!
   So everyone gets written off but our hero and a lady scientist, and our hero has to find a way of helping the US airforce shoot down a dragon using modern missiles to save his own ass. And, of course, when the clean-up team arrives at the wrecked research station, they run into another clone!

Dragonquest (2009) The entire world will be engulfed in flame if a mere kid fails to find the Stone of Virtue and defeats The Dragon. Arkady, the Keeper, is put in the care of a Knight of the Brotherhood, who has a girl versed in the martial arts as his assistant. In fact, they have to collect a set of stones, the first of which is guarded by what looks like the Loch Ness Monster!
   The bad guy, who embraced The Darkness, goes after the Keeper & his companions. A giant, but very tame, spider guards another stone. The forces of Darkness see off the Knight, the bad guy bamboozles Katya and he chucks the stone collection off a cliff.
   Luckily, the power of the stone is within the Keeper, so Arkady is able to battle the head bad guy while his blue dragon is seeing off the fiery one. And the world is saved. Hooray!

Dragon Storm (2004) is set in Carpathia in 1190, when meteorites land and release fire-breathing dragons! So lots of flaming peasants staggering around. A king is burned out of his castle and he goes to a neighbour, planning to overthrow him. A hunter, a boffin, the daughter of an inventor of a ballista, who was killed by dragons, and the 2nd king's daughter form a sort of 7 Samurai taskforce (with some helpers).
   Lots of mayhem, dragons shot out of the sky and people going up in flames before everyone ends up back at the 2nd king's castle. The dragons attack just as a coup is succeeding and all bad guys and the last dragon are zapped.

Dragon Wars (2007) is a Korean effort. Ethan, a reporter, filmed something odd and he was reminded of an encounter with Jack, the antiques dealer, 15 years before when he was a kid. A Korean Imoogi can turn into a dragon and go to heaven every 500 years. 500 years ago, a good Imoogi and a bad one were in competition, but the girl they were after was saved by her warrior boyfriend from the bad Imoogi, then both of them were killed.
   Jack told Ethan he was the reincarnation of the warrior boyfriend. He had to find Sarah before her 20th birthday and take her to the grand cave. A monster snake (the bad Imoogi) ate the elephants at the L.A. zoo. Sarah was locked up in a hospital until a snake attacked it. The bad Imoogi's human ally reassembled his army.
   The US miltary went after the snake and Sarah. Most of the business district of L.A. was taken out by the snake, the US military and the bad guy's army. A member of the FBI's Paranormal Unit tried to kill Sarah but a colleague shot him. Ethan & Sarah headed for Mexico, only to be fire-bombed to a standstill and dragged off to the final showdown.
   Ethan's pendant wiped out the bad guys. The good & evil snakes had a battle. The good Imoogi became a dragon and that was it for Sarah.

Dragonwasps (2012) A couple of spies in the South American jungle are carried off by giant wasps! Some documents belonging to Gina's missing father wash up near the Mayan site where she's working. The area is policed by US troops and full of drug dealers and other bad guys. A gang of troops, led by John Hammond, goes off adventuring with Gina and her lady sidekick and they're ambushed by terrorist/drug dealers led by the crazy Jaguar.
   The jungle goes really quiet then millions of huge wasps attack the soldiers, so they try to team up with Jaguar for mutal protection, but he does the dirty on them. But Gina sends fire-breathing wasps attack his camp. Hammond takes a ton of C4 away from the terrorists' camp and heads for the wasps' lair.
   The wasps have human prisoners, and little ones enter their heads via the ears. Gina's father is rescued but Jaguar crashes the party, so Hammond blows up himself and the wasps' nest and Jaguar. Natch, the obligatory bug bursts out of a head at the end.

Dredd (2012, remake of 1995 Stallone Judge Dredd) 800 million people live in Megacity 1. It's a hell-hole policed by the men and women from the Hall of Justice. Dredd lights up a perp then he's recalled to the HoJ to meet the most powerful psychic ever detected. Anderson, the rookie, is his new apprentice. There's a triple intimidatation homicide. Dredd does some exterminating of gang bangers.
   Anderson spots the perp. The gangsters lock down the building. The judges take out a lot of BGs. Lots of sneaking about. The BGs try to shoot Dredd's floor of the building to bitz. Hundreds dead but no cigar. The psychic interrogates the prisoner and finds out about the drug operation in the building. The prisoner grabs Anderson.
   Four judges turn up as reinforcements; all on the take. The killer tries to shoot Anderson with her gun but just shoots himself. The bent judges don't last. Anderson is also shot. The HBG has a bomb linked to her heartbeat; it will take out the whole building if she's killed. Dredd gives her a shot of her own slow-down drug and throws her through a window so she takes forever subjectively to hit the ground; out of radio range of the bomb's trigger. Anderson survives. Dredd gives her a passing grade for judgeship.

Driven (2001, Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds) Hotshot rookie racing driver Jimmy Bly was challenging world champ Brandenburg, but Bly was making stoopid mistakes. So his team boss brought in a hasbeen, Joe "The Hummer" Moreno, as a mentor. Joe almost killed Brandenburg in '97. The kid won the race in Toronto with Joe's dodgy help.
   The kid screwed up and crashed badly in Japan. So Joe had to adjust his attitude. The old team mate, Memo, was brought back to drive in soggy Germany and Joe did his thing off the track. Memo had a spectacular crash off the track and into a river, and both Bly and Brandenburg abandoned the race to save him.
   The team boss sacked Bly and went after Brandenburg. The kid's older brother (Dr. Wilson from House) was put in charge of making the deal. Off to Detroit for the last race of the season and the kid was allowed to drive. Joe did some pratting about on the track, the kid won by inches and he ended up world chump.

Driven To Kill (2009, Steven Seagal) Our hero is Ruslan, a Russian gangster turned best-selling author. He finds out that his daughter is marrying the son of Mikhail, his former Mafia boss. Stephan, the son, has no interest in joining the family business. Two men stage a robbery at the church where the wedding will be held, they stab Ruslan's ex-wife, Catherine, and put Lanie, the daughter, in hospital in intensive care.
   Ruslan discovers that Mikhail sent the killers and the apparently helpful lawyer Terry, Catherine's second husband, is in Mikhail's pocket. Ruslan goes on the rampage, apparently immune to interference by the cops, some of whom think they should stay well out of the way if he's killing only people who deserve it.
   Ruslan tries to buy one gun from a dealer, who's tipped off that he's a cop. So there's a big battle and Ruslan ends up with a whole bagload of guns. He works his way through Mikhail's soldiers until the man himself and 3 helpers put on police gear and invade Lanie's hospital.
   Ruslan pulls the fire alarm, which gets most of the by-standers out of the way. Mikhail's mob rampages through the place, looking for Lanie and Stephan. The hospital is trashed when they use bombs, and that's how Mikhail ends up, too.

Drone Wars (2016) Earth is a wreck, alien drones are everywhere but a grenade will fix them. The Resistance wants to take out the drones to force the yellow alien invaders to show themselves. Human cannibals in wrecked buildings are hazard. And psycho militia bods. One ex-military militia leader wants our sergeant hero's zapper.
   Our hero is daft enough to be caught by his ex-buddy but the Hornets rescue him. They built the weapon he's been using. They've cracked the drones' communication system and they're preparing explosive ambushes.
   The Hornets think the drones are purely mechanical with no biological component. The Hornet lady thinks the planet has weeks left. Our sergeant hero is given the job of using a bomb to save L.A. Natch, the militia stooges get in the way of the attempted payback.
   The scumbags overrun the military HQ. The Colonel gets away but the aliens get him. Our sergeant hero still has a bomb to take out the big mothership. He raids the militia to save some prisoners, including the blonde lady. He has to go back to the city to detonate the bomb manually. Natch, the stoopid militia guy tries to get in his way but he's vaporized. Kaboom! The mothership gets it.

The Drowning Pool (1975) Paul Newman plays Lew Harper, a private eye from L.A., who's rousted by a corrupt police lieutenant in Louisiana on a job. Iris Devereau wants to know who wrote a letter to her husband about her infidelities. She suspects Rebus, the fired family chauffeur, who was having a fling with her appalling daughter. Harper is taken for a ride by wise guys working for Mr. Kilbourne, an oil man, who wants to drill on Devereau land.
   Olivia, the matriarch of the family, is murdered. The local police chief suspects Rebus. Harper follows the trail to New Orleans and finds that the wise guys are looking for an accounts book, which Rebus has. It contains details of Kilbourne's pay-offs. Rebus says he didn't kill Olivia. Bad guys, including the crooked lieutenant, run Harper off the road when he tries to turn Rebus in and Rebus ends up dead.
   The police chief closes the case and Iris wants Harper to stop digging. Harper deduces that Iris's daughter wrote the letter. After some Russian roulette to make the lieutenant talk, Harper confronts Kilbourne, who says he was using Rebus as an industrial spy, not an assassin. Mrs. K. gave the accounts book to Rebus so he could use it to blackmail her old man.
   Harper & Mrs. K. have to escape from an improvised prison; and Mrs. K. blows her husband away. Iris is found dead next; sleepers & booze. So Harper makes her scumbag daughter confess to killing both Olivia & Iris with the police chief listening. Shock, horror! He's the daughter's real father.

D-Tox (2002) FBI agent Ed Molloy (Sylvester Stallone) is chasing a serial killer, who is targetting cops with no discernable pattern. After killing another cop, the killer phones Molloy to tell him he's the next target, and by the way, the killer's about to do his wife in. The perp is spotted, Molloy goes after him but he gets away.
   3 months later, Molloy's boss hauls him out of a bottle and packs him off to a rehab centre at the back of beyond in the middle of winter. The place is run by a cop for cops, and it's full of misfits from both sides of the Atlantic. A guy is shown dead in an icy lake and Molloy's boss makes of bog of ice-fishing in the neighbourhood.
   The communications at the clinic go down, someone steals all the medication bottles and the male doctor in charge goes missing. Attention focusses on Jack, the psycho, who was given a job at the clinic. 2 guys go off for help so, of course, they run off the road and end up dead. That's when I realized it's the plot of Alien with Jenny, the lady doctor, as Ripley.
   Malloy finds that all the personal files have been stolen and burnt so that the infiltrator can't be identified. Everyone starts waving guns around and going nuts, and they lock Molloy up; but he gets out. The killer is impersonating the guy in the icy lake, and he's the cop-killer from earlier on. So Molloy has to save Jenny to make up for not saving his wife and he gets to make sure of the killer this time.

The Dukes of Hazzard (2005) How will the film shape up to the TV series/? There's a big race upcoming and the lads wreck their car. Luke Duke has won for the last 4 years but Boss Hogg has brought in a former resident as a ringer. Cue a major rumble in the Boar's Nest. A much tougher version of Sheriff Roscoe puts a stop to it. Boss Hogg is also less of a joke.
   The lads' mechanic friend revives the General Lee and Uncle Jesse isn't best pleased that his moonshine delivery was screwed up. The sheriff gets him evicted from the farm by planting a still in the barn and he plans to sell the General. Boss Hogg is grabbing land; turns out he plans to strip-mine Hazzard for coal. The Dukes find this out by stealing Boss' safe.
   Boss gets the lads locked up. Daisy helps them to escape from a transport car. The streets of Atlanta are turned to a race track. Boss kidnaps Uncle Jesse and Pauline but they are rescued. \Luke leads a whole gang of cop cars in to the Hazzard Road Rally. Beau heads for the courthouse to fix Boss's wagon.
   Luke beats the ringer on the track and a whole gang crashes the sheriff's road block so that Boss Hogg's mining plan can be tossed out of court. Daisy charms the Governor of the state when Boss tries to get the lads busted.

Dungeons & Dragons 3: The Book of Vile Darkness (2010) The blood, hide and bones of a really vile sod were used to create a really vile Book, which was separated into its components. An order of knights dedicated themselves to making sure that the bits were never reunited. The son of their leader failed the induction test and joined a gang of treasure hunters led by a bossy witch with bad tattoos. And slew the dragon they had to fight.
   The gang rescued some prisoners and the nearby town threw an orgy for them. Our hero had to ravish the witch to avoid being chucked out of the gang. The witch tried to steal the town's treasure. Our hero negotiated a deal for half for slaying the dragon but the gang still slew everyone in the town.
   Our hero poisoned the 7-foot Goliath and framed him for stealing the treasure. Another guy turned stroppy and the witch had him killed. Then there were 3 to go back to the original plan. The witch tormented a child monster to get the cover of the Book.
   Our hero found his father being held prisoner and refused to kill him. So the head bad guy extracted liquid pain for him to use as ink for the text of the revived Book. But the witch helped our hero to kill the HBG and everyone else.

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