THE CROOKED WAY (1949)

Eddie Rice (John Payne) has all kinds of problems. First and foremost is he’s been in a military hospital in San Francisco for the last 5 years with total amnesia thanks to a hunk of metal he got stuck in his noodle back in the big WWII. The doctors have done all they can do, so, since he enlisted in Los Angeles, the military gives him a pat on the back and a train ticket to LA. He gets to LA and literally as he’s walking out of the train depot, the coppers pick him up and take him to the police station. There they inform him that he’s a gangster and not wanted in town. As he’s leaving the police station, the “only in movies” coincidences continue and who else but his wife sees him! Naturally, she calls the local kingpin and he and his men beat the crap out of Eddie and toss him down a fire escape! Being an idiot, none of this is enough to convince Eddie to leave town. No siree Bob. As soon as he wakes up on the fire escape (probably covered in pigeon poop and cat piss), Eddie starts a one-man war with the local gangsters. And by “war”, I mean Eddie getting knocked unconscious multiple more times.

I like THE CROOKED WAY. It's a watchable older noir with cool cinematography by John Alton, but the there just isn't enough story to properly fill the runtime and Eddie is way too dumb to have any sympathy for.

DEF-CON 4 (1985)

[Update 03/15/2023: Need rewatch this film and redo this review completely. Fix the screenshots also.]

Three astronauts are in orbit in a space station when WW3 breaks out on earth. From their high advantage point they watch nuclear missiles destroy all of the major cities on the Earth. Bummed out and depressed they float around for a few more months before their navigation computer is mysteriously taken over from somebody on down below and they crash down on an American beach. They soon learn that the survivors of the war are cannibals!

That sounds super exciting and for the first 20 minutes or so I enjoying it, but once they get to Earth the entire story falls apart and it's just your standard post-apocalyptic survival story that we've all seen before a million times, except this time there little action and no nudity.

Low budget, boring script with zero tension or likable characters, the "school girl" character is fugly and the action scenes are sub-"The A-Team" level. Skip this movie. The poster though is a real attention getter and probably the reason why 95% of the people who actually watch this movie ever wanted to see it. I know it tricked me.

DEATH NOTE (2006)

Light Yagami is a college student who naively believes that if he pursues a career in Law that he will be able to make a difference. One night he witnesses something that shatters his beliefs.  A few moments later he finds the Death Note. It's a notebook that belongs to a God of Death (think Grim Reaper) named Ryuk and there's a bunch of rules to it, but simply put: you write a person's name in the book and they die.  Also, Ryuk hangs out with Light now, but nobody else can see him.

That's a huge oversimplification of the story (I completely left out the exciting cat and mouse stuff with the brilliant crime fighter, L), but I don't want to give too much away, because one the most satisfying parts of watching DEATH NOTE for the first time is discovering all the new rules and crazy twists and turns as it happens. Yeah, some of it's silly, but DEATH NOTE is still a wicked story.  Silly and wicked.  That's my kind of movie!  I love it.  Highly recommended.

Part 2 - Death Note: The Last Name (2006)
Part 3 - Death Note: L Change the World (2008)