Shameless Self Expression

Set in a Polish ‘work camp’ (read: death camp) during WWII, Alan Arkin plays Jewish prisoner Leon, who bravely attempts to orchestrate a mass prisoner escape from their brutal Nazi captors. Joanna Pacula and a Russian Rutger Hauer play two other prisoners instrumental in planning and carrying out the escape. Jack Shepherd plays another prisoner who only slowly – and gut-wrenchingly – realises that his family has been exterminated in the ‘showers’.     If you can get your eyes on the full 2+ hour version, this 1987 TV movie from director Jack Gold (The mediocre “The Medusa Touch” ) is really worthwhile. It’s an important film about an important story that should never be forgotten. Possibly due to being a mid 80s TV movie that has more recently been viewed in truncated form (with about an hour cut out!), it seems to not be spoken about much these days. However, it was widely viewed on original run, and won Golden Globes for the film itself (in a tie with another TV film) an...

Soldier Nomzamo Mbatha confronts Bruce Willis over her husband Mustafa Shakir’s current comatose state. Shakir is a drone pilot in the military, with Willis his superior. It turns out ‘drone pilot’ means something different here, as Shakir was part of a top-secret experiment using human bodies as drones . Basically, the mind of one soldier being able to be transported into the body of another. Now the technology has fallen into the hands of bad guy Dominic Purcell, and Mbatha will have to enter a drone body herself to flush him out and kill him. Barry Jay Minoff plays Marko, one of Willis’ not very nice associates.   If this 2023 film is as reported to be Bruce Willis’ final film, then he hasn’t gone out on the worst of notes I suppose. That’s about as charitable as I can be here, I’m afraid. If you’re still on the Bruce Willis train at this point, you should know what you’re getting here, it’s neither the best nor the worst of the direct-to-DVD/streaming era but not really wor...