For action fans looking for new movies while streaming, there are tons of car chases, explosions, and fistfights to browse. We’ll help by providing some streaming highlights.
‘Deliver Us From Evil’
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
Not to be confused with the film of the same name by director Scott Derrickson, Hong Won-chan’s Korean-Japanese revenge film “Free Us From Evil” is a breathtaking underworld story. This gangland movie follows Kim In-nam (Hwang Jung-min) and is a well-articulated version of an assassin who is about to retire but is pulled back by unforeseen circumstances. He’s burned out and doing one last job, murdering a Japanese gangster named Koreda, before retiring to the sunny beaches of Panama. But Koreda’s brother, an unscrupulous sociopath nicknamed Ray the Butcher (Lee Jung-jae), wants revenge.
In-nam is also looking for answers. His estranged girlfriend was murdered in Bangkok and her young daughter was kidnapped. He travels there and teams up with a transgender woman (Park Jeong-min) to find her. Won-chan has a highly stylized approach and prefers oblique angles and slow motion shots to drive big finishing moves. In a memorable sequence, In-nam leaps through a collapsed windshield of a moving van to free the girl from a suitcase.
“Love and monsters”
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
Seven years ago, an asteroid called Agatha 616 hit Earth. The government launched missiles that exploded the rock, but the remains rained down and mutated smaller life forms. Suddenly frogs, cockroaches and worms became hunters, humans became hunted. In a short time, these evolved species have wiped out 95 percent of the human population – a giant moth even killed the president – and people have taken refuge in bunkers, caves, and panic rooms. For Joel Dawson (Dylan O’Brien) the losses from the apocalypse are twofold: the death of his parents and the separation from his girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick).
When he learns that Aimee is occupying a bunker seven days away, he is delighted until her hiding place is threatened by monsters. Instead of losing her again, the typical frightened Joel swallows his fears and ventures outside to save the woman he loves. On his way in this lovable adventure from Michael Matthews, Joel encounters helpful people, a loyal dog named Buddy and man-eating animals, which are reproduced in extraordinary detail through visual effects. He learns courage, practices survival and, above all, he rediscovers love.
Igor Grom (Tikhon Zhiznevsky) wears a newspaper cap and a brown leather coat and looks more like a taxi driver than a policeman for what he is. A persistent investigator with no regard for politics or property damage, he is on foot in the opening scene of “Plague Doctor” and pursues a group of bank robbers who speed away in an armored van. But St. Petersburg is a lawless city where bribery takes precedence over justice. If you’ve always wanted to know what a Russian Batman escapade would be like, look no further than this Oleg Trofim adaptation of the Bubble Comics superhero story, Major Grom: Plague Doctor.
Here a vigilante who wears a plague doctor mask and is clad in black tactical armor, similar to Batman, kills crooked bankers and unrepentant murderers. Grom is tasked with finding out the identity of this wacky killer who pretends to be the people’s champion. The case appears to be traced back to frail tech mogul and philanthropist Sergey Razumovsky (Sergei Goroshko), but Grom doesn’t know how. Adorned by gloomy alleys and threatening flamethrowers, “Major Grom: Plague Doctor” scratches a gloomy itch than the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
‘Spare Parts’
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
A woman with a metallic prosthetic leg pushes a wheelbarrow through a junkyard. She comes to an apparently disused freight car. The door slides open and several severed arms are thrown into their cart. Bloody practical effects and plenty of blood cover Andrew Thomas Hunt’s gladiator grindhouse flick “Spare Parts”.
The script by David Murdoch and Svet Rouskov follows Ms. 45, an all woman punk band that played rowdy biker bars on their first American tour. Drummer (Kiriana Stanton) and bassist (Chelsea Muirhead) are loving, but shy, talented lead guitarist Emma (Emily Alatalo) distrusts the group’s promiscuous singer, Amy (Michelle Argyris). The quartet soon has bigger problems, however: The four are stunned by a seedy, Emma-obsessed punk (Jason Rouse). They are kidnapped and taken to a junkyard, where their arms are severed and replaced with weapons. They are now gladiators, forced to fight to the death to please the gods – and a raunchy emperor (Julian Richings).
As a mixture of Peter Weir’s “The Cars That Ate Paris” and Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room”, Hunt translates bloody melee scenes with saws and drills for the hands with a heavy wobbly camera. And that’s rock ‘n’ roll.
‘The VelociPastor’
Stream it on Amazon, Tubi and Vudu.
I have to thank film critic Marya E. Gates for putting the quirky raptor priest ninja film “The VelociPastor” by writer and director Brendan Steere on my radar. Right from the start, this low-budget Schlock not only knows its limits, it also leans comedically on them. Greg Cohan plays Doug Jones, a priest who watches for the first few minutes as his mother and father die in a car explosion. We don’t see the explosion. Rather, the words “VFX: Car on Fire” flash over the place where the couple once stood.
Doug travels to China to recover, a set piece that was clearly filmed in an American forest reserve, and encounters ninjas searching for a dinosaur-claw artifact. Doug becomes infected by the ancient object and turns him into a bird of prey at night. He befriends Carol (Alyssa Kempinski), a sex worker; overtakes ninjas; and seeks revenge on Frankie Mermaid (Fernando Pacheco de Castro), the man who killed his parents. The climax of the movie, an inspiring moment of the DIY spirit, sees a transformed Doug in a cheap inflatable T. rex costume ripping off Ninja’s limbs. I’ve never laughed so much before.
