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films 1990s A mixed decade on film for Mokae- A Rage in Harlem, Slaughter of the Innocents and Krippendorf's Tribe are best forgotten, but Dust Devil is a cult classic. And Mokae can still appear in major Holywood films such as Waterworld.
Directed by actor (Predator) turned director Bill Duke with Gregory Hines and Danny Glover. 1991. Mokae in drag, one of his worst roles.
Directed by Randa Haines with William Hurt as a doctor who becomes a patient. Haines had worked with Hurt before in Children of a Lesser God, but this is a significantly weaker film. 1991. When Hurt is exposed to the humiliations of being a patient, his own arrogance and professional aloofness falls away. Mokae is one of the specialists treating Hurt. A good small character role.
Directed by Eric Red. 1991. Spare part surgery turns into horror. Jeff Fahey plays a psychiatrist who loses an arm in an accident. Experimental surgery means he is given a transplant, but the arm came from a mass murderer and seems to be taking over Fahey´s life. Mokae plays Detective Sawchuck who originally captured the mass murderer and saw the transplant operation where the killer died. A good character role. Mokae and Fahey would work together again in Parker Kane.
Directed by Richard Stanley. 1993. A cult horror classic with the Dust Devil roaming the deserts of Namibia. A wife disappears and the husband looks for her. Mokae is the detective who understands the real cause of the multiple deaths, the shape shifter. He is thoroughly convincing, well up to his best horror acting.
Directed by James Glickenhaus starring Scott Glen. 1994. A brutal killer and a policeman on his track. The murderer is a Charles Manson type, wild hair and howling at the moon who, waiting for the flood, has built an ark in the canyons and is collecting two of everything. The policeman uses his psychic schoolboy son to pursue the killer. The film is a confused mixed of genres, with the director unable to decide if the film is horror (with shades of Dust Devil and Silence of the Lambs), adventure (The Gate) or paranormal (Dead Zone). The young child, played by the son of the director, is particularly annoying.
Mokae has a tiny role as the janitor in the library. Because he has been negligent and not cleaned the tables, fingerprints are preserved giving a vital clue.
Directed by Wes Craven starring Eddie Murphy. 1995. Murphy plays the vampire and is reasonably different from his usual Beverly Hills Cop role but it is not sharp enough: the comedy, horror and storyline get in the way of each other. Mokae is the expert on vampires but not expert enough to impale the vampire through the heart. A disappointingly small role considering his central role previously for Wes Craven.
Directed by Kevin Reynolds and starring Kevin Costner and Dennis Hopper. 1995. A water epic, a sort of Mad Max but in a world of sea with no land. The Mad Max references include feral children, pirates and flying machines. Mokae is one of the settlers on a water colony which is attacked by the techno pirates.
Directed by German director Wolgang Peterson (Das Boot) with Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland and Morgan Freeman. 1995. A disaster film, as a virus and the inevitable government conspiracy threaten the word. Mokae has a short role on the site fire-bombed by the military to wipe out the remains of a virus. He gives his usual intelligent performance, but it seems as if a sub-plot has been edited out. A ju-ju-man appears and the scientists want to speak to him, "no" says Mokae, "he talks to me". But the witch doctor (and Mokae) don't appear again.
Directed by Todd Holland starring Richard Dreyfuss. 1998. In Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana the spy invents missile bases to make his bosses happy. Here an anthropologist invents a tribe. But the film veers close to racism, with whites acting the role of savages...
...and no black men or women in academic roles, despite it being based around a modern university. Mokae plays Sulukim, appearing briefly at the end as a "real" savage (on the phone), who helps in the plot twist.
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