Danger Makes You Feel Alive

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Australian thrills and a trip to the American Old West.

BEAST OF WAR (2025)

The one follow-up to Jaws that really should have been made is the one we never got: a prequel showing the ordeal military man turned fisherman Quint endured during World War II when his United States Navy cruiser the USS Indianapolis sank in shark-infested waters. When Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, and Sting director Kiah Roache-Turner was informed that his producer had access to a water tank in Malta, he knew they had to make a shark film - “And the only shark film I’m interested in seeing is the USS Indianapolis speech from Jaws made into a film.” Unfortunately, they didn’t have the budget to properly bring the USS Indianapolis story to the screen, so Roache-Turner drew inspiration from a different real-life event: “the HMAS Armidale sank off the coast of Western Australia. It was the same story — ship goes in the water, no distress signal sent, lots of poor Aussie guys doing amazingly heroic things, some were killed by sharks and many were never seen again.” Still, sticking to the facts would be too bleak. Roache-Turner wanted to make a shark movie that would be “unashamedly fun,” so Beast of War is only loosely based on true events.

Set in 1942, the film spends twenty minutes introducing us to a group of Australian soldiers, most notably Will (Joel Nankervis) and Leo (Mark Cole Smith), guys who understand that all you have on the battlefield are your mates, and the racist douchebag Des Kelly (Sam Delich). We watch them make their way through training – and then, when they’re sent out to sea on a ship, that ship gets attacked and sunk. The survivors climb onto the floating pieces of wreckage... and soon, a massive great white shark starts picking them off, taking every opportunity to drag men into the water or bite off pieces that come in contact with the water. 

Remember that line in Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue when he mentions a fellow soldier “bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist.”? Well, Roache-Turner brings a variation of that moment to the screen when one of the several soldiers gets taken out by the shark.

With a running time of 87 minutes, Beast of War spends more than twenty minutes out on the water with the soldiers as the shark hunts them down – and I have to admit, the movie did not have me enthralled for that entire hour. I felt that it dragged at times. By the time it reached the end credits, I was very ready for it to be over. But I think Roache-Turner did a decent job of bringing a USS Indianapolis-like story to the screen on a lower budget.

One of the best things about Beast of War is the fact that the writer/director wanted to take a practical effects approach to the shark. Given the fact that most shark thrillers these days are filled with CGI creatures, seeing a practical shark in this one was a refreshing change of pace. Roache-Turner wanted to present his shark as a monster as well; chopped up by propeller blades, with broken teeth. It also gets a busted air raid horn stuck on it at one point, so the horn makes a creepy sound reminiscent of a wolf howl when the shark comes swimming around.

This wasn’t as exciting as I hoped it would be, but I still had a good time with it overall.

APEX (2026)

Thrill-seeker Sasha (Charlize Theron) is mourning the death of her partner Tommy (Eric Bana), who was killed in an opening sequence mountain climbing accident on the Troll Wall mountain in Norway. So, five months after Tommy died, Sasha heads out to the Wandarra National Park in his native country of Australia to honor his memory with some white water rafting. 

Once she gets out to the middle of nowhere, she gets more thrills that she expected when she realizes that the spot she picked is the hunting ground for a twisted young man named Ben (Taron Egerton). Not only does he have a “Most Dangerous Game” situation going on where he likes to hunt people through the wilderness, but he also believes that no part of the corpse should go to waste. He turns his victims into human jerky.

Directed by Baltasar Kormákur from a script by Jeremy Robbins, Apex is serviceable survival action thriller; an enjoyable way to spend 95 minutes. The opening sequence was interesting, and so was the set-up for Sasha ending up in Ben’s territory, as he pretends to be a nice guy suggesting a pleasant, secluded spot. Once Ben’s true nature is revealed, I felt that the early stretch of the hunting sequence was a bit rough – but the movie pulled me back in soon enough and I didn’t have any issues with the rest of the ride.

Suspenseful thrillers are a popular pick in this household, and Apex fit the bill. And it was kind of cool to have a cannibal villain in a movie that wasn't an outright horror film.

DRIVING FORCE (1989)

A decade after Australian filmmaker George Miller kicked off his Mad Max franchise with the 1979 classic, a team of Australia-based creatives were planning to make their own vehicular-action film in their home country – but then financial issues dictated that their movie was going to have to be filmed in the Philippines, with American actors in the lead roles. The resulting film, Driving Force, is one of the odder Mad Max knock-offs, which blends elements that were clearly inspired by Miller’s franchise with some things that are reminiscent of the Sylvester Stallone trucking / arm-wrestling drama Over the Top.

Flash Gordon himself, Sam J. Jones, stars in the film as Steve, a widower trying to raise a young daughter (Stephanie Mason as Becky) in a vaguely dystopian future. Struggling to make ends meet, he takes a job as a tow truck driver – which puts him in direct competition with a group called the Black Knights. Patrick Swayze’s little brother Don Swayze plays Nelson, a criminal who causes car accidents so he and his tow truck driving associates (including a character played by martial artist Billy Blanks) can profit off of cleaning up the mess.

Steve and the Black Knights cross paths and butt heads in scene after scene, and in between those scenes we get a subplot in which Steve is at odds with Becky’s maternal grandparents over custody of the child, which is the story element that had me thinking of Over the Top. Of course, when the Black Knights realize that Steve has a child in his care, it gives them a whole other, more intense way of messing with him.

We also get a bit of a love story in the mix, as Steve bonds with a woman he meets along the way, The Dukes of Hazzard star Catherine Bach as a wealthy character called Harry.

As if all of this weren’t enough, we even get a bit of a subplot that gives deeper insight to the character of Nelson, revealing that he becomes more determined to wipe out his enemies after he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness. He wants to take Steve out with him.

Driving Force is a bit overly complicated and surprisingly dull for a Mad Max knock-off. Even when Steve customizes a truck so he’ll be more prepared to stand up against the Black Knights, it doesn’t open the door to anything spectacular – but there are some decent moments of action, and the movie is oddly watchable. I enjoyed spending some time with it, I just have to provide a warning: it’s for B-movie connoisseurs only.

SILVERADO (1985)

Directed by Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchise veteran Lawrence Kasdan from a script he wrote with his brother Mark Kasdan, the Western film Silverado did okay when it was released in 1985, though ranked #7 on its opening weekend (it did rise to #5 the second weekend) and ended up being #24 of the year when it came to domestic box office. It made $32 million on a budget of $23 million. But even to this day, more than forty years later, it’s not rare to see a glowing reference to the film, as many people look back on it so fondly, you’d think it was one of the biggest hits of the ‘80s.

That’s always been slightly confusing to me. I’ve tried to watch Silverado multiple times over the years and have never really been able to get into it. It wasn’t until I really understood what it was that I was able to sit through it and get some enjoyment out of it I still can’t say I loved it, but now I get it. Once incredibly popular, the Western genre was all but dead by ‘85 – and this was Kasdan’s tribute to the classic American Westerns he grew up on.

I always found the movie to be slightly off-putting because it feels scattered and takes it time coming around to a point... but now I see that the episodic nature is due to the fact that Kasdan was trying to fit as many classic Western elements into the story as possible. Everything in the movie is purposely a play on scenarios we’ve seen before; it’s Kasdan putting his stamp on everything that Westerns are known for.

He assembled a great cast for this tribute. The heroic cowboys are played by the likes of Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, and a scenery-chewing Kevin Costner, and they share the screen with Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese, Jeff Goldblum, Linda Hunt, Brion James, and Jeff Fahey. Ray Baker plays the evil rancher our heroes will eventually focus on taking down, with Brian Dennehy as his lead henchmen.

I still think Silverado is too long at 133 minutes and could have benefited from a story that’s more focused from the beginning, but now I see why so many fans find it to be such a good time.

I can’t cross paths with this movie without thinking back on an experience I had back in 1997. I was on a road trip with my father, who was a truck driver, and we stopped for the night at some massive truck stop somewhere along the line. This place had a pitch-dark screening room where movies would be shown, free of charge (on VHS, since that’s what we had to work with in ‘97), to anyone who wandered into the room. When I wandered into the room, Silverado was being shown, coming up on the climactic action sequence, to an audience of truck drivers who were very in tune with the film’s sense of humor, laughing at every joke. Now, I would see that as an ideal viewing experience and would have stuck around for a while... but in ‘97, I wasn’t feeling it, and walked out after only a minute or two. Ah, youthful mistakes.