In the future, Highlander Connor MacLeod must prevent the destruction of Earth under an anti-ozone shield.
Let’s pretend Highlander II: The Quickening is a stand alone movie and isn’t a sequel to a Cult Classic.
The movie opens in the future setting of 1999. Apparently the Earth’s ozone is gone and people are dying by the millions, including MacLeod’s wife. On her death bed she makes him promise to stop that terrible burden on society called ‘The Sun’ no matter it what it takes. Flash forward a little bit and MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) is now leading a team of scientists. They appear to have successfully built a death ray to finally give the sun a taste of its own medicine. Oh wait, I guess it is a planetary shield. Well, same difference for the Earth.
A small group of survivors are left behind after millions of people suddenly vanish and the world is plunged into chaos and destruction.
The movie opens with Chloe Steele (Cassi Thomson) coming home from college for her birthday. Expecting to spend the weekend with her family, she is surprised to discover her father, Rayford (Nicolas Cage), has to unexpectedly leave to pilot a plane to London. This isn’t a bizarre occurance or anything, he happens to be a pilot as his primary occupation, cheating on his wife is his second one.
Rayford, an unlikable guy who planned this trip to spend a weekend away with a stewardess, says things are fine between him and his wife, but that isn’t true. I guess things really went bad in their marriage when his wife Irene (Lea Thompson) found religion and starting babbling about the Rapture. An event believed by some Christians to signal the second coming of Christ / end of the world. Would you believe that her new views, which are driving a wedge into her family, end up playing a part in the movie? Let’s watch and see.
Chloe confronts her father at the airport about his cheating ways, which he denies, and he departs on his flight. She in turn decides to take her younger brother, Raymie, to the mall after bickering with her crazy mother. While at the mall Raymie suddenly disappears, leaving all of his clothes behind. Chloe is in shock. Sure, her younger brother has played the disappearing act before (that’s what younger brothers do), but never with this level of commitment. As Chloe attempts to get some help, other people in the mall are also having a freak out. Looks like all the children are gone, and also a few adults. A driver-less car crashes into the mall. Chloe catches a special news report that says that people (mostly children) across the world are missing, and that panic has ensued. The smarter patrons of the mall see this opportunity for what it is, and massive looting starts.
Jump back to plane flight to London. It looks like a bunch of people have disappeared as well, including all the children and the co-pilot, leaving behind their clothing. Sidenote: I’m not sure I’m comfortable with a Rapture in which everyone shows up to the party naked. The passengers pretend to be upset about the missing people, but are probably secretly grateful to enjoy a long flight with more seats and no annoying kids.
Rayford can’t seem to raise anyone on the ground, and suddenly realizes there is a plane right in his flight path. I’m not a pilot, but it seems to me that once you realize something is going to collide with you, you’d want to immediately veer out of the way. But alas, I must be mistaken, for Rayford makes repeated requests for the other plane to move. That plane obviously has no pilots left, and between this, the missing co-pilot, and the small plane that crashed in the mall parking lot that I am only mentioning now, we can safely conclude that most pilots are devote Christians. Rayford finally considers turning at the last possible moment, getting his plane damaged in the process. Unable to raise the ground and with a damaged plane, Rayford decides to turn around and head back to New York.
I forgot to mention that when Chloe caught up with her father at the airport, she bumped into some famous reporter and they seemed to hit it off. That guy is on the plane, and wouldn’t you know it, he is also a pilot, or something, because he ends up helping Rayford out quite a bit, including as co-pilot and taking pictures of the leaking fuel that catches on fire.
Back at home Chloe receives a voice mail from her father about his plane’s condition and assumes he is dead. Returning to her house, she also discovers her mother’s jewelry in the shower, but her mother is not to be found. I guess Chloe knows that her mother always showers fully bejeweled, or something. She decides to mosey on over to her mother’s church, only to discover the only one there is Pastor Barnes. Barnes explains that God took all the good people to heaven, including Chloe’s mother, but left him behind to be a messenger. Not really though, he was left behind because he didn’t believe in the product he was selling (his words, not mine).
Despite a damaged plane which is leaking fuel (sometimes on fire) at an alarming rate , Rayford takes the time to investigate the disappearances of people around him. He finds a few Christian items amongst the co-pilot’s, missing stewardess’, and missing passengers’ clothes. His conclusion? They all shopped at the same airport gift shop before leaving for London. Rayford tells the stewardess he was having an affair with about his wife’s statements concerning the rapture and he thinks all the good people have been taken off the Earth. The stewardess is more concerned to learn that Rayford was married than she is to learn she is one of the damned left to suffer the Apocalypse. Priorities, I guess.
Meanwhile, Chloe, seeing New York City going to pot and thinking her whole family is gone, decides to climb the Brooklyn Bridge (or some other bridge) and commit suicide. Just as she is ready to jump she receives a call from that reporter guy. They don’t have anywhere to land and they are dangerously low on fuel. Chloe was, of course, the logical choice to call in this situation. Chloe procures a truck and manages to clear a space for the plane to land. The remaining passengers and crew deplane only to see New York City in flames. The reporter says it looks like the end of the world, but Chloe tells him that it is only the beginning (of the end). Things are looking up for that stewardess though, because Rayford’s wife is out of the picture.
If you look at that IMDB description at the top you’d see a couple of glaring inaccuracies. To me is suggests most of the people were taken off the Earth, but that isn’t what happened. Also, the world isn’t plunged into chaos and destruction until the end of the movie.
This movie is apparently based off a series of books which mostly focus on the aftermath of the Rapture as those “left behind” deal with a crumbling world that apparently no longer has any good people on it.
Jinn, a 2014 movie staring Dominic Rains with supporting actors Ray Park and William Atherton, is so lost that even the people trying to sell it can’t decided what the movie is about.
Netflix’s description
An earthly crisis prompts a race of beings called the jinn, who’ve walked invisibly among us since the beginning of time, to make themselves known.
IMDB’s description
Shawn, an automotive designer, enjoys an idyllic life with his new wife Jasmine until it is interrupted by a cryptic message. The message warns of imminent danger and a curse that has afflicted his family for generations. Having lost his parents as a child, Shawn doesn’t believe this unsettling revelation of his past….until strange things start to happen. Unable to explain the threats and fearing for his life, Shawn turns to Gabriel and Father Westhoff, a mysterious duo claiming to have answers. With their help, and the aid of Ali, a shackled mental patient, Shawn discovers that there is far more to this world than he ever imagined. These revelations set Shawn on a collision course with the unknown, and he alone must find the strength protect his family and confront the ancient evil that is hunting them.
Amazon’s description
After receiving a cryptic message from his past, Shawn Walker learns of an ancient curse haunting his family. He discovers man is not alone on this planet… and that he is in the middle of a war between good and evil that has waged on for centuries.
Rotten Tomatoes’ description
In the beginning, three were created. Man made of clay. Angels made of light. And a third made of fire. For centuries, stories of angels and men have captured the imagination and been etched into history crossing all boundaries of culture, religion and time. These two races have dominated the landscape of modern mythology, shrouding the evidence that a third was ever created. This third race, born of smokeless fire, was named the jinn. Modern man has all but forgotten this third race ever existed. It is time for him to remember.
That last one is the opening monologue of the film.
The movie opens in India, circa 1901. A man enters a cave, reciting scripture passages, and occasionally addressing a slumped figure sitting in the middle of the cave.
Based on the number of times we keep going back to this same shot, I can only assume it was the most expensive shot in the whole movie, and they wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth.
The man says that it can keep the body, but he wants the girl back. He throws some random things in the corners (mirrors?). I kept thinking, these mirrors are going to do something important, like trap the creature. That was my own foolishness, they ended up doing nothing. The guy confronts the demon creature, falls in a hole, climbs out, throws some water in the creature’s face (which only serves to enrage it) and pulls out a dagger. At this point the creature says it is going to kill him, and his children, and his children’s children, and so forth. You might be thinking, wait, if he kills him AND his children, that should pretty much end the line right? RIGHT? We’ll get back to that.
Flash forward to the present day, in Michigan. Shawn is some kind of car designer. He has random car decorations in his house (like a hood) and drives some kind of special edition Camaro that looks like a Firebird, called the FireBreather. That may seem like a lot of information about a car in a movie about Jinn, but don’t worry, we’ll get back to that as well. As Shawn is sitting around his house doodling, his wife Jasmine (Serinda Swan) answers the door and receives a mysterious package. She doesn’t need to sign for it, and it is very poorly wrapped. Shawn opens it (because in this world he has never heard of terrorists) and discovers a VHS tape inside. His wife wisely questions how they would even watch a VHS tape in this day and age, but for some reason Shawn conveniently has a player at his work.
Shawn watches the tape and discovers is a message from his deceased father, just before he and his mother died in a fire that consumed their house. He says Shawn comes from a long line of special people who can fight these demons called Jinn. His father says that there are people who will help him, and that Shawn needs to succeed where he failed.
Shawn returns home to find that his apartment has been randomly rearranged and his wife is missing. He calls the police, only to have his wife return home and they realize that nothing is actually missing. They put everything back and go to bed. Shawn has a nightmare about the night his parents died. He remembers seeing someone in the fire. He wakes up and goes to get some water, only to see that his furniture has been rearranged again. Him and his wife look out their window at the strange silhouette (I forgot to mention a creepy silhouette in the window across the street). Earlier the wife speculated it was a movie cutout. Not surprisingly, as they are staring at it, it moves. At this point, I would like to mention that this movie is supposed to be a suspense horror. It is neither of those things.
The next morning Shawn tells his wife he’d like to have a child. She says she has a dark secret, she is incapable of having children. She says he understands if he wants to leave her for his. Shawn, being the super jerk that he is, DOES leave her, to go to work. Shawn is at work, and he receives a mysterious call saying he has to go to a church. For some reason he does this. At the church he meets Gabriel (Ray Park) and Father Westhoff (William Atherton). These two guys knew his father, and want to help him stop this Jinn uprising once and for all. They say that as soon as one of his family members has an heir, the Jinn kill the parents. So when that Jinn from the beginning said he was going to kill the guy’s children’s children and all that, he meant it. This Jinn patiently waits for the next male heir to have a kid, then he strikes. Anyways, Shawn doesn’t believe them, but Father Westhoff gives him a magic dagger just in case. I’m just going to call it the Ajanti Dagger.
Good for killing the Golden Child and Jinn alike.
Anyways, he takes the dagger. Also Gabriel says the Jinn is hunting him because he has a male heir. How’s that? Oh yeah Jasmine is pregnant. Also, she’s been kidnapped. No one seems all that concerned about the kidnapping though. Shawn just kind of meanders around, occasionally saying stuff like “what is next on the bucket list before we find my missing wife?” (not a direct quote). Ray Park (which I have decided is now the star of the show) goes to a mental institution (Insane Asylum isn’t PC) to see a guy who might be able to help. Turns out it is Shawn’s crazy uncle he didn’t know he had played by Faran Tahir.
I like the idea of mental institutions today still using the classic ‘chain him to the middle of the floor’ treatment plan.
His uncle tried to take this mental test of worthiness and he lost his mind because he failed it. Now he is insisting that Shawn take the same test. As they are talking to the estranged uncle somehow the Jinn starts taking over the other patients in the institution. They all start attacking Ray Park and Shawn. This happens to be the highlight of the film. Ray Park gets to go all Darth Maul on these guys. At one point he creates all these little particles of light and goes super slow motion and beats down a bunch of patients, essentially punching the evil spirits out of them. This is also a common treatment plan in modern day institutions. This is by far the most interesting part of the movie. Shawn forgot his keys at the front desk, so Gabriel (Ray Park’s alter ego in this movie) uses his mind to retrieve the keys and get them to Shawn. To bad in the process he gets swarmed by escapees and beaten down. Not even Toad’s spit could save him.
Shawn returns to Father Westhoff, and the good Father starts him on the trial. Shawn then goes through several different times and scenarios, trying to fight the Jinn but failing. Then at some point he taunts the Jinn, and then runs for his car. He jumps in his car and drives off, as the Jinn becomes Lord Voldemort’s wispy flying black cloud thing. Shawn then drives all over town, pleading with his car to ‘show em what we got’ and ‘don’t fail me now.’ Which might sound good, if you had forgotten he was basically just fleeing the creature with no other plan. He drives back to his house and confronts the Jinn again. I can’t remember at what point his dream / trial ended and real life began again, but it doesn’t seem to matter. His suddenly lucid uncle shows up to help him, but is immediately beat up. Then the Jinn grabs Shawn by the throat and lifts him off the ground. Now Shawn has another dream sequence. This time set back in the cave in India, where he suddenly develops telekinetic powers and defeats the Jinn. Then we go back to him being choked by the Jinn, and he is able to grab its throat, there is a struggle, and then they both fall through his window into his pool / water feature. Now at some point Father Westhoff had given him a flask of holy water (at least, that is what he calls it). In the pool the flask comes undone and now all the pool water is holy. The Jinn disintegrates.
At this point a bunch of other Jinn warp into town. Shawn takes off his shirt and gets ready to fight them (not sure why that shirt was encumbering him, but I guess it was). The leader says there is no further need for hostilities, and Shawn stabs him in the head. Man is always the aggressor in these kinds of things. Shawn finally remembers his wife was kidnapped, and demands they give her to him. The remaining Jinn just teleport away. Shawn returns to the church and discovers his wife, who apparently had been kidnapped by Gabriel, you know, for safe keeping, was there the whole time. Also somehow Gabriel is alive. Now, during the movie it was said Gabriel was Jinn who was on the side of humans. But I assumed he is an Angel, since all this power is highlighted with white light, instead of the red fire we see other Jinn using, and he is named after an angel. But that question is left for a sequel, or something.
Flash forward a year, the baby is born and Uncle Ali now lives with them. As they are preparing breakfast, the baby’s pacifier falls to the ground. Before any of the adults can pick it up, the baby uses telekinesis to get it back. Everyone just kind of sits there and looks at the baby. Roll credits. After the credits we see that same cave scene with a Jinn sitting. In this 97 minute movie I’m pretty sure that cave scene represented about 400 minutes of the film.
I watched this movie as a kid and thought it comically bad. So now I’ve re-watched it so I can share its awfulness.
IMDB’s description
A warrior seeks his true origins in a seemingly prehistoric wasteland.
Yor, the Hunter from the Future opens in a prehistoric setting where an old man and his adopted daughter are hunting a small creature. Suddenly they are attacked by a triceratops (or close enough). Who should come to their rescue, but Yor, the title character, a nomad warrior. Yor dispatches this massive dinosaur with a stone axe. After all the hard work is done then some other people arrive to help. For saving the old man and the woman (Ka-Laa) Yor is treated to a celebration dinner back at the village.
Yor, the Hunter from the Future
Ka-Laa is clearly smitten by Yor, and proceeds to dance for him and bring him drink. Throughout this movie Ka-Laa is constantly asking her adopted father why Yor seems so different from other men. Which is pretty stupid of her, because the differences are obvious. Yor is the only man anyone has ever seen with blonde hair, he doesn’t wear a shirt, and he has a mysterious medallion hanging around his neck. The village wise-man asks about Yor’s medallion, to which Yor has no answer. He then informs Yor that there is story about an ‘angel’ in the desert who has a similar medallion.
The party is only just started when a rival clan of black fur wearing men attack the village. They kill most of the men and kidnap the women. After killing a half a dozen or so of the raiders, Yor manages to escape with Ka-Laa and her father. They decide it is important to rescue the captured women. While tracking the Black Fur Clan, Yor and company is captured. The leader of the clan takes Yor’s medallion, believing it to the be the source of his fighting prowess (I personally believe it is on account of his toned muscles and the blonde hair). Yor somehow escapes, uses a large bat as a hang-glider, rescues Ka-Laa and her father, and then promptly destroys this cave settlement with a massive flood. What about the captured women they came to save? We don’t know their fate, but I assume they drown.
Yor and company
Yor and company now head into the desert to find the ‘angel’ woman. Yor enters the village of the Sand-People, who would be better described as Mud-People, and is promptly captured. For all Yor’s fighting ability, he sure gets captured a lot. Yor is brought to Ayshe, which is a blonde woman who wears a medallion which matches Yor’s. Ayshe lives in a slowly melting ice cave, which has other people also wearing medallions frozen in ice. She is a prisoner, as the Sand-People worship her, but also won’t allow her to leave. Ayshe says that all strangers who come to the village are sacrificed, and Yor is no exception. This means there is no way the wise-man from the village could have heard about Ayshe and her medallion, but whatever. Yor manages to escape, grabs a large flaming sword, and reaps destruction on the village.
Yor and Ayshe meet up with Ka-Laa and the old man. Ka-Laa is extremely jealous of Ayshe, since Yor is obviously very taken with her. Her adopted father says “the men in our village have multiple wives, why can’t Yor have two?” Ka-Laa is far too feminist and progressive to have to share her man with someone else, and promptly goes off to have a fight to the death with Ayshe. As they are rolling around in the sand attempting to kill each other, the Black Fur Clan shows up. Somehow they survived the flood which ruined their settlement. Yor and the old man, who is an accomplished archer, end up killing them. But not before Ayshe falls and hits her head on a rock and dies. Prehistoric medicine is the worst, but at least this clears the way for Ka-Laa to possess Yor only for herself, just like the selfish woman that she is. Yor gives Ka-Laa Ayshe’s medallion, probably as a prize, for helping to get her killed.
Ayshe, the second wife Ka-Laa would never let Yor have
Yor and company are then traveling and come upon a group of teenage girls being attacked by a Stegosaurus. Yor and the old man manage to kill it. Small wonder dinosaurs became extinct, given the ease in which they are killed. The girls are so grateful they take them to their seaside village. Upon arriving the chief tells Yor that his daughter (the oldest of the ones saved, but still probably only 15 or 16 years old) belongs to him now. Yor says he already has a woman, and won’t take her. This is probably because Yor now knows Ka-Laa would kill the girl otherwise.
What would have been Yor’s third wife, if Ka-Laa hadn’t been such a monogamous prude
The chief of village says a strange creature came and terrorized their village with heat and lightning, and with great difficulty they killed it. When Yor goes to examine the remains, he finds a large spotlight which has a radio broadcast. The chief tells Yor the strange creature originated from an island in the ocean which is surrounded by storms.
Later that evening the village is attacked by planes firing laserbeam weapons. It destroys the village and kills a bunch of people. Yor’s backup wife is spared, but her father, the chief dies. By now we are starting to see a pattern to Yor’s life and we now realize why he is a nomad. It is because every village he comes in contact with gets destroyed in some way or another (current tally, four).
Yor, Ka-Laa, and the old man (who might be named Tag, I didn’t bother to remember) then take what seems like the only remaining fishing boat from the surviving villagers and head out into the ocean. They are caught in a huge storm, and Yor is lost overboard, Ka-Laa and her father crash into rocks. Roll credits! Oh wait, they survived.
Yor awakens on a beach and begins wandering around. In a futuristic room, a man in a dark cloak watches via a crystal ball and orders Yor’s capture. Yor is promptly attacked and captured (like always). He did manage to decapitate one of the men first with a rock, only to discover it was a robot. Yes, Yor decapitated a robot with a rock. Yor awakens in a futuristic room with a woman monitoring his condition. She tells him is the son of a resistance leader who fought against the Overlord and was banished to the mainland. This woman (and seemingly everyone on the island except the Overlord) is also a member of the resistance. The Overlord apparently wants to get rid of the human condition known as “being alive and free of will” in his subjects and turn everyone into loyal robots.
Yor and the robots
Meanwhile Ka-Laa and Tag are on the beach and get rescued by a resistance fighter from the robots. They hatch a plan to detonate the nuclear reactor on the island and escape to the mainland via a shuttle they have prepared. Yor is allowed to wander around the facility looking for Ka-Laa, in the hopes that he’ll lead the robots to the resistance. After a bunch of aimless wandering, Yor finally meets up with Ka-Laa and the race is on to plant the bomb before the robots get them. Yor kills a robot with his bare hands, and then picks up its laser weapon and begins firing it with perfect precision. I guess he really is the Hunter from the Future, considering he grew up alone on the prehistoric mainland.
Yor stabs the Overload with large pole (instead of just shooting him). This is to create the illusion of suspense, as after Yor plants the bomb on the reactor, the Overlord has like five minutes or something to turn it off before the place goes up in smoke. The resistance manages to override his robots, so eventually the fighting stops and the few island survivors, Yor, Ka-Laa, and Tag head to the mainland to begin a new life. Yor’s curse of finding a new settlement and seeing it destroyed is once again realized as the island explodes.
