Stallone

Assassins
$12.97
Even if you don't like any of the actors: they give value for money with Banderas giving a bravura performance second only to "The Mask of Zorro". Donner & Co. did us proud.

Sylvester Stallone: 4 Film Favorites (Tango & Cash / Demolition Man / The Specialist / Over the Top)
$19.94
Can't turn commentary off on Demolition Man which makes it useless form me was the main reason I ordered this set

Cliffhanger (Collector's Edition)
$9.95
A VERY GOOD MOVIE DESPITE SOME DRAWBACKS. STALLONE CAN'T ACT, AND LOOKS WORSE WITH AN OTHERWISE GOOD CAST. SOME OF THE SETS LOOKED FAKEY.

Cobra
$9.98
While Stallone is most associated with the action-adventure genre, he has made the occasional foray into other areas. When he made a disaster film(Daylight) and when he tried his hand at science fiction(Judge Dredd and Demolition Man) he had reasonable success.In these cases, he selected films that suited his innate physicality and mental intensity.As such, these films became a natural extension of his propensity for playing borderline superhuman heroes.

A couple of other times, he tried comedy, and once,God help us, he tried to do a musical(the infamous Rhinestone.)These attempts were, for the most part, unfortunate.

However, in Cobra, Stallone takes his usual action hero template-and then steers it well off into the world of slasher horror. I think this was a sterling choice, and one for which he is singularly well suited. In the Rambo films, he is usually pitted against enemy soldiers, guys who are just following orders, and who are not really explored as people. They might be evil, or they might be apathetic about the whole business.

Not so in Cobra. The villains in Cobra are sick, and right-next-door to being monsters. Of course, this is nothing new. The Death Wish films, and the Dirty Harry series, were doing all this long before Cobra. Simple premise: make the bad guys so heinous that the hero is justified in doing whatever he has to to destroy them.

What you wind up with is a near-perfect slasher-action cocktail. You get one of history's undisputed action heroes in Stallone, who is right at home here. Now, his performance in Cobra never struck me as being as natural as what he does in the Rocky or Rambo films.But his physical presense is ideal. He has a distinctive look for this film. The stubble,(big in the 80's), the dark glasses, the matchstick in his mouth, the beautiful pearl-handled Colt .45. He created a look, and a mystique, for this movie, and I thought it worked well. I wish he had played this part more than once.

And, as anybody who has seen Cliffhanger would know, nobody impales a bad guy like Stallone.

The horror elements are what set Cobra apart from typical action films. The middle part of this film-in the hospital-seems to have been inspired by Halloween 2. The film's villains are depicted as quite savage and brutal, and they are utterly without mercy when staging their attacks. Some of the mayhem is pretty effectively shot. For example, when they kill that waitress, they surround her and close in quickly, like a pack of wolves tearing a deer apart. They are ruthless, and efficient, and merciless............and the perfect opponents for our hero.

Of course, the downside to a movie like this is that it is pretty one-dimensional. The good guy is good, the bad guys are bad, but nobody is explored with any degree of depth. Compare Cobra to Rambo, for example. Rambo may be an action hero, but he comes across like a distinct personality. For me, Cobretti seems more like a concoction, a stock hero who looks cool in his shades and brandishing that nice .45, but much less like an actual human being.Stallone does well in the role-but the script only calls for him to do so well.

This is pretty much all violence, action, and suspense. I gave it five stars, because the suspense is legitimate. There are a couple of moments when you actually feel like you are witnessing horrific acts being perpetrated upon innocent people.

There is one particular moment, when the film's heroine is trapped in a bathroom, and the killer is breaking through the door, that is quite good. The guy has this huge knife, and he is wearing blood-soaked rubber gloves, and he has made a hole in the door big enough for him to reach through. And he is just flailing wildly at her with his knife, while she cringes just inches out of his reach. This is as suspenseful as any scene from most horror or slasher movies.

Cobra bridges the gap between the worlds of horror and action. It doesn't do everything, but what it DOES do, it does extremely well.