Scanlines
The Star Maker
Fri., Nov. 29, 1996
VHS Home Video
I Luv Video, 4631 Airport Blvd.
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Shattered Steel
InterplayPC CD-ROM
I'm not sure that I can find words strong enough to express the degree of disappointment I felt when I fired up Shattered Steel for this review. Of course, I'll still give it a shot. The game is a horrendous disaster. While the game fails on many levels -- the missions, the story, the characterization, and the animation are all sub-standard -- what stands out most is the abysmal graphics engine used to display the playing environment. With games like Quake and Wing Commander IV currently popular, players expect a game that takes place in a 3-D world to look three-dimensional. Somehow, the creators of Shattered Steel contrived a hideously unconvincing psuedo 3-D game. It looks terrible and it plays awkwardly. The only saving graces for this sad attempt at entertainment software is the art for some of the game set-up screens as well as one or two decent cinematic sequences, but these are hardly of enough value to even justify the expense of producing the box the game is shipped in.
-- Kurt Dillard
Full Contact
D: Ringo Lam; with Chow Yun-fat, Simon Yam, Anthony Wong.VHS Home Video
Vulcan Video, 609 W. 29th St.
Before he became blandly assimilated into the American filmmaking machine with the muddled Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Maximum Risk, Hong Kong action director Ringo Lam was giving us brilliantly out-of-control offerings like Full Contact, a beautifully shot, jaw-dropping hour-and-a-half of seedy characters, wild double-crosses, and even wilder action sequences. Hard-Boiled's Chow Yun-fat stars as a bad-ass, butterfly knife-wielding nightclub bouncer and sometime criminal seeking revenge after he is betrayed by his best buddy who has fallen in with a flamboyant, gay gangster (Simon Yam, absolutely incredible) and his outrageous entourage. Loud, violent, sexed-up, and politically incorrect as hell, Full Contact is a one-of-a-kind action film full of scene-stealing performances and the sort of loopy thrills that could only be made in Hong Kong. -- Joey O'Bryan
Brief Encounter
D: David Lean; with Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Cyril
Raymond, Joyce Carey.VHS Home Video
Vulcan Video, 609 W. 29th St.
Written and produced by Noel Coward, Brief Encounter (1945) tells the tale of two happily married but adulterous Brits from different towns who pursue one another when fate and the train schedule allows... and also when it doesn't. Framed as a flashback in which a routinized, fragile wife mentally narrates to her daft yet lovable husband what must be the cinema's most unique pseudo-confessional, this lush melodrama does not wallow in emotion, but makes it a catalyst for the film's action. Lean's cogent direction utilizes Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 as effectively as it does the actors. For all the analysis, however, Brief Encounter somehow defies dissection. Perfectly paced, dramatic, and intelligent, it is a film to fall in love with. -- Clay Smith
Tekken2
NamcoSony PlayStation
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