REDUNBECK REVIEWS

The Worst Film of 2009: Rob Zombie's Halloween II

2009-12-26T17:12:00.011-05:00

I hate Rob Zombie. Hate him, hate him, hate him, hate him, hate him. I don't hate him because his movies suck. I hate him because he doesn't even mean well when he's making them. Ed Wood just wanted to entertain people and express himself. Uwe Boll thinks he's carrying the spirit of independent cinema. John Derek just wanted to make his wife feel pretty. You see what I'm getting at. But Rob Zombie? He wants to make movies that are repulsive. When asked why he chooses to work in the horror genre by a fan at a convention, his response was because "it's dark and fucked up". When I think of the great horror films, those words don't necessarily come to mind. "Spooky and fun", sure. "Frightening and hard to forget", absolutely. "Dark and fucked up" sounds like a nickname for Mike Tyson. But that's how Zombie defines horror and that sentiment permeates every one of his miserable movies.

Rob Zombie's Halloween was easily the worst movie of 2007 and I rank it as one of the worst of the decade. Less a remake than a poorly written fanfic, it transformed John Carpenter's elegantly simple story of "monster chases girl, monster kills girl" into an orgy of white trash, seventies love ballads, crude language, pointlessly hateable characters, psychoanalysis, and gratuitous violence. It was repugnant for the sake of being repugnant, which I guess Mr. Zombie considers his idea of "art". I hated that film immensely and it lowered my expectations greatly for the sequel. Those low expectations were not met. When I hear people defend Rob Zombie's Halloween II, I'm baffled. Not just the people who say it was actually good, but even the people who say it stank but "at least it wasn't as bad as the first one". I question whether these people have any taste at all. Not only is this movie not good, it's not even as bad as the first one. It's significantly worse. For all it's faults, at least Halloween had a plot you could follow. Halloween II is designed to be as confusing and nonsensical as it can. As such, you'll have to forgive me if this review isn't very well organized. I was going to watch the whole damn movie over again and break it down scene by scene, but I hit my danger level of anger about three minutes in and had to shut it off.

Appropriately, the movie opens with text defining visions of white horses as a symbol of great anger.

Right there, you've pissed me off. A) that's pretentious. B) as if it wasn't bad enough watching Dr. Loomis analyze Michael for forty minutes in the last movie, you're telling me the entire two-hour movie is going to analyze him in the sequel?

And it's not even like it's going to analyze him by actual psychotherapy standards. This white horse crap is just something Rob Zombie pulled out of his ass. Like the entire movie. The film picks up at the end of the previous one, with Laurie Strode putting a bullet in Michael's head and EMT's taking his body away. I find it odd that they left the mask on him (how'd they check his pulse through that rubber?). As they drive off to the morgue, which apparently is somewhere in Sisterfucker, Kentucky judging from all the farm country they're passing through to get there, the EMTs discuss such lovely topics as raping the corpse of one of Michael's victims because she was so goshdurn purty. So distracted are they by this conversation that they fail to see the cow in the road ahead of them until it's too late. And since this cow is seemingly made out of solid lead, the ambulance is utterly decimated in the collision, leaving the sole surviving EMT to sit there in the wreckage and growl "FUCK" over and over for three minutes straight.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK

If you think that's annoying to read, imagine how bad it is to watch. So annoying it is that Michael rises from the dead just to cut the guy's head off to shut him up. Michael then sees a vision of his dead mother walking alongside that damned white horse, and stomps off into the greater wilderness of Illinois, apparently now conveniently located in Middle Earth judging by all the vast expanses of open space and green fields. Momma Myers will continue to make these appearances throughout the film, acting like some sort of bizarre pagan advent calendar reminding Michael that it's almost Halloween again, and that means it's time to go get Laurie and "bring her home" to complete the family. Yes, it is total nonsensical bullshit.

Elsewhere, Laurie is being patched up at the hospital and, in an homage to the original Halloween II, Michael shows up to chase her all over the place. This being a Rob Zombie movie, this sequence lasts all of ten minutes and ends up being a dream sequence because, ya know, we can't admit that Carpenter actually had a good idea for a movie there. Flash forward one year and Laurie is now living with Sheriff Brackett and his daughter Annie. Judging from the surroundings, they live somewhere inside Oscar the Grouch's garbage can. Seriously, this house of theirs is absurd. It's filthy and disgusting and the walls are covered in graffiti, as if Laurie went on a tagging rampage to vent her anger or something. And just to make things even dumber, Laurie has posters of Charles Manson on her wall. Would the sole survivor of a brutal mass murderer really want to idolize a mass murderer? You'd think she'd find that traumatic. Speaking of disgusting, Laurie herself is just repulsive. She has Rob Zombie's hairdo and his sense of cleanliness, too. She seemingly hasn't showered in a year and her hair is a knotted mess of sloppy dreadlocks. It's like Zombie was living some transgender fantasy vicariously through Scout Taylor-Compton. It's creepy.

Laurie's story is that she's learning how to deal with the memory of Michael's rampage. She goes to therapy, she cries on her friends' shoulders, she inexplicably loves to party at costume balls (wouldn't those freak you out after you just barely escaped a killer in a Halloween costume?). In other words, she does nothing of consequence. The vast majority of Laurie's screentime is made up of MySpace role-playing games with her gal pals at the coffee shop or wherever the fuck they work (it's never made clear because Rob Zombie doesn't know how to establish locations at all).

Finally, there's Dr. Loomis, or as I like to call him "The Human Plot Hole". Dr. Loomis died in the previous film when Michael crushed his skull and gouged his eyes out. So you, like myself, may be mystified to find out that Loomis returns in Halloween II with nary a scratch on him and his eyesight perfectly intact. That's just insulting to the intelligence of the audience. What's more insulting is how Loomis is reduced to a walking joke. No longer a good-hearted doctor at all, Loomis has instead become a money-grubbing media whore. He's published a book based on Michael's killing spree and become fabulously wealthy, to the point that he can reach into the future and buy a Blackberry phone even though this movie takes place around 1982. He's also become a total asshat, a callous and mean spirited prick who even goes so far as to insist on holding TV interviews in front of the Myers house. To put the cherry on top of the shit sundae, Loomis' book includes the revelation that Laurie is Michael's sister, something he didn't bother to tell the poor girl in person.

This movie is so God damn stupid just from a plot perspective that I could probably end there and have made my point as to why Rob Zombie's Halloween II is so awful. But the fucker just had to go and screw everything else up, too. For one thing: Rob Zombie has a shitty grasp of geography. Where in the hell is Haddonfield supposed to be located? Michael's scenes take place in vast wilderness seemingly miles from civilization. Laurie and the Bracketts live and work in suburbia, and Loomis is always show in some big city. Furthermore, it takes Michael several days to trudge into town and find Laurie, yet once he does find her it only takes him ten minutes to get back to his shack out in the middle of nowhere. Did he stop for frequent naps on the trip into town? Did he get lost? Does Rob Zombie just suck? Another issue: when does this movie take place? The previous film was set sometime in the late seventies, so one would expect this to take place in the early eighties. And yet there are cellphones aplenty, suggesting a later time, while televisions are constantly looping The Moody Blues performing "Nights in White Satin" on the Ed Sullivan Show, suggesting an earlier time than the first movie!

You want to know something even more annoying? The dream sequences. Oh the dream sequences. Laurie (or maybe it's Michael, who knows) has nightmares about...well...the great pumpkin I guess. There's some bizarre banquet being hosted by a guy with a pumpkin for a head (the credits identify him as "The Earl of Pumpkins") and Momma Myers is there with her horse...and it makes no sense. These dreams serve no purpose other than to confirm that Rob Zombie actually thought he was making an art film. Let us shame him with mockery and laughter.

Plot holes and setting confusion aside, I also must make mention of the technical issues. Namely: Rob Zombie can't direct or photograph to save his life. Halloween II is a cinematographic and editing disaster. Close ups are so close you can't tell what you're looking at, long shots are so hazy you can't tell what you're looking at, and conversations are so choppily edited and insanely close-up shot that you can't tell where people are in relation to one another. Plus, the whole movie was shot on Super 16mm film and then blown up to 35mm, which means it looks like shit. It's too grainy, the colors are faded and washed out and the picture is barely even there. Grindhouse movies produced by Roger Corman looked better than this. It hurts the eyes to behold Rob Zombie's Halloween II.

And there's one more thing I have to mention: Michael spends most of the movie with his mask off. Not only is that stupid because it goes against everything we know about the character, but it's stupid also because Michael Myers unmasked looks like Rob Zombie. Same beard, same hairdo, same exact facial expression as Zombie on the cover of the Hellbilly Deluxe album. It can't be a coincidence, folks. Rob Zombie purposefully created a jacked-up seven-foot clone of himself to play Michael Myers. So the climax of the movie is a giant man who looks like Rob Zombie trying to kill a small girl who looks like Rob Zombie. Maybe Rob Zombie has gender identity issues and he used Halloween II as a metaphor for his masculine side trying to destroy his feminine side in order to avoid having to go through with the sex change operation he secretly wants. Or maybe he's just a narcissist who likes to dress people up to look like himself and I'm just reading way too much into things. Movie still sucks either way.

The conclusion of the film is crap, but it's only fitting since the rest of the movie is crap too. After reading that she is Michael's sister, Laurie goes totally batshit crazy, to the point that when Michael is holding her hostage in his shack, she too begins seeing Momma as well as a younger Michael dressed up, pretentiously enough, as some sort of Fellini-esque clown. When Loomis, suddenly good-hearted again, shows up to save the day, he finds Laurie thrashing about as though the ghosts were assailing her, while Michael just stands there and watches, perplexed. And then Michael freaks out and kills Loomis - again - at which point Laurie turns it around and kills Michael - again - leading to an insanely stupid climax. Donning Michael's mask, Laurie stumbles outside and gets taken in by the police, who drop her off at the hospital. And then Laurie is shown locked up in a padded room, where Momma and the horse greet her (who knew lunatic asylums made rooms with bigass halls your delusions could walk down in slow motion?). So yeah, Laurie's insane and Michael probably never existed anyway.

Way to crap all over the audience, Rob.

The Box

2009-11-08T02:32:00.005-05:00

It was about an hour into The Box that a very powerful thought occurred to me.

This is stupid.

I think it was what they call a "Moment of Clarity" - a moment in your life when a single thought allows you to break through to another plane of existence and see things in a new way, a clearer way than the mind can normally achieve. It was like Col. Kurtz's "diamond bullet in the brain" from Apocalypse Now: I saw things I shouldn't have been able to. I saw the pure, raw, unfiltered essence of stupidity itself. I stared into the abyss and it stared back. Cross-eyed, buck-toothed, and with it's tongue wagging out as it guffawed like Goofy.

Yes, this movie is exceptionally stupid. To boil it down to it's very simplest terms...would require a doctoral thesis because this movie is so absurdly complicated and nonsensical that it's simplest terms are about four million words in length. The setup is that Frank Langella plays a freakishly deformed man named Arlington Steward, who gives random people an offer: push a button and receive a million bucks in exchange for someone they don't know dying when the button is depressed, or walk away from the money. His reasons for doing this are intricate, convoluted, and very, very stupid. Suffice to say it involves people who control lightning, aliens, portals to the afterlife, mind control, parallel dimensions and time travel.

Did I mention The Box was directed by Richard Kelly? Oh right, I didn't have to. Throw a bunny costume into the above equation and you have Donnie Darko all over again. But, oh, how much worse The Box is than even that.

Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play Norma and Arthur Lewis, the latest contestants on Frank Langella's bizarre little game show. Norma is a college professor who just lost her tenure and has a club foot she needs fixed, and Arthur is a NASA scientist who just got denied the right to be an astronaut (on a mars mission. In 1976. Richard Kelly is an idiot). Apparently these things sink them into financial ruin, although the fancy house, uppercrust neighborhood, and nice clothes would never belie this supposed fact. When Langella shows up and makes them the million dollar offer, it seems too good to be true. But, after a day of deliberation, Norma presses the button and much like Eve eating the fruit, she gets her family in some serious trouble with the big man. Only this time the big man is a seventy year old lightning strike victim with half a face.

Oh yes, of course there's a catch to the box. You don't just take the money and run. No, once you push the button you then have to put up with some bullshit undefined, impossibly huge and complicated and ultimately utterly pointless conspiracy that involves everyone on the face of the Earth being in on it except you. What "it" is is, well, nothing, except making you the victim of the next person to press the button. What a surprise. Yes, the whole point of you killing someone else with the box is to plunge you into a series of bizarre cirumstances that ultimately lead to you dying at the same time someone else is pushing the button. And really, the button has nothing to do with it except acting as a catalyst for your mental breakdown to start the ball rolling. Even if the next person chose not to push the button, you'd still find yourself in the same deadly circumstances. Really, the button and the death are just really well timed to happen in the same instant. And so I ask you

WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS WHOLE BOX THING?

What does this guy achieve by having people push buttons and kill themselves a few days later? Oh sure, there's a scene where he vaguely hints at the idea that he's the driving force of human extinction but...wouldn't it be easier to just unleash a virus or something? Why give us the chance that someone will break the chain and end the violence by not pushing the button (and why agree to stop the whole thing if just one person says no?)? Did Frank Langella watch The Day the Earth Stood Still and think that was a nifty idea so why not do it? IS FRANK LANGELLA KLAATU?

Better question: Did Richard Kelly rip off The Day the Earth Stood Still and use a classic Richard Matheson short story as a cover? Yes, yes he did. Between this and the numerous failed attempts to adapt I am Legend, Matheson must be driven to hard drinking just to keep the pain away. Matheson's The Box is only six pages long. How do you pad that out to a two hour movie? You fill it up. With stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. It doesn't have to make sense, and no two scenes need to logically lead into or out of one another. You just need to do random stuff and have the same actors present during all that stuff, and you can call it a story. Ladies and gentlemen, the Richard Kelly school of screenwriting. This movie just keeps throwing random things at you and it never goes anywhere with any of them. Hey, here's a newsreel about Langella's accident. Hey, here's a bunch of people spying on you. Hey, here's a water slide to heaven. Hey, here's some malarky about Arthur C. Clarke's third law. What do they have to do with each other? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

The acting is acceptable all around, which is to say that these poor people had nothing to work with and just delivered their lines the best they could. It's not their fault that this sucks. The writing and directing are abominable. Richard Kelly couldn't direct his way out a wet paper bag. He lets Diaz stop limping every other scene (and ultimately tosses in some BS prosthesis as an afterthought to explain it away), he consistently fails to give us any idea of where things are happening in relation to one another, he falls back on his needless use of CGI (Langella can't just be burned, he needs half his fucking head missing via a very fake chroma key effect that is laughably cartoonish whenever you see him front-on), and he fails to connect any of the plot strands. This was mistaken for genius when Donnie Darko came along, but by now I think we can recognize it for what it really is: Richard Kelly is an amateur and he always will be.

Oh, and did I mention that Frank Langella is a zombie? Ugh.

Whiteout

2009-09-14T02:53:00.003-04:00

So you're going to make a thriller about a serial killer, and you decide to hire a director who's worked in that area before. Good idea. You choose someone who hasn't actually made a movie in eight years, and his last film was Swordfish. Bad idea. Admittedly, Dominic Sena did make Kalifornia, one of the classics of serial killer films and arguably a flat-out classic of cinema itself, but anybody who takes nearly a decade off from work is going to be rusty, and anyone sixteen years removed from their last serial killer movie is going to have forgotten some of the steps in that all-too-easily screwed-up dance. Such is evident in Sena's return to filmmaking, the snowbound Antarctic thriller Whiteout.

I'd go so far as to argue that Sena has forgotten everything he ever knew about making a movie. I've heard of ring rust, but this is complete ring decay; the direction of Whiteout ranges from merely pedestrian to "Ed Wood would laugh that off a screen". Sometimes you feel like you're watching a really bad episode of CSI: New York with the generic "dramatic" camera pans and generally flat and lifeless photography, and other times you can't tell that you're actually watching any discernible "thing" at all. I can respect the fact that Sena had to incorporate the violent snowstorms typical of Antarctica into his exteriors, but come on dude, you don't have to crank the snow machine up so high that we can't see the actors! Even the film's climactic action scene where a main character dies is obscured by massive snowfall and excessive wind. You can just barely sketch out what happens, but you don't really see it so much as you imagine what it must have looked like in your head.

Luckily, you don't care all that much because the plot isn't the least bit compelling. Whiteout is an appropriate title for a film that feels as though lots and lots of that particular product has been applied to it's screenplay. After a merely boring first act, Whiteout plunges into befuddling second and third acts where the plot shifts to things that really don't matter because all the scenes establishing their importance are simply missing, if they ever existed at all. The film starts off with a decent enough premise: the US Marshall assigned to maintain law and order at a science station in Antarctica is preparing to retire (in two days, as cliche as it gets), when she finds her stay on the job indefinitely extended when an incoming plane spots a corpse impossibly lying out in the middle of nowhere, too far from any building for the person to have walked there without freezing to death far sooner. Soon thereafter, the Marshall receives a distress call from the dead person's home base begging her to come. When she arrives, the only person there is dead and a masked killer armed with a pick axe reveals himself and chases the Marshall out.

That's all fine. It's a perfectly good set-up for a whodunnit about the mystery corpse and how it got there, and who this masked madman is. Theoretically, this could be compelling stuff. And then you get to the second and third acts where the plot is suddenly all about a Soviet plane buried under the ice which seems to have recently been excavated and plundered. Sound confusing? Oh yeah, of course it does. I thought I was watching Smilla's Sense of Snow all over again, that awful movie where the plot changes from "how'd that little boy fall off the roof" to "how'd those alien worms get under the Greenland ice?" with no good explanation. It's a problem of two separate plot idea that were never fully fleshed out being smashed together to make one movie and save some time. Imagine Silence of the Lambs mashed up with X-Files: Fight the Future and you've come close to Whiteout, except for the fact that those two movies are far better in every regard.

Now, even the worst of plot can sometimes be saved by good performances. Even if the material is downright goofy, one or two solid, passionate performances from actors who feel it can make a movie better. Whiteout unfortunately finds itself saddled with Kate Beckinsale and Gabriel Macht. One of the first scenes in the movie finds the camera following behind our US Marshall (dressed like Margie from Fargo) as she walks into the science base. They keep teasing that she'll show her face and you start to wonder who it could be. Is it going to be Frances McDormand? Maybe It's Jodie Foster, she played one hell of a cop in Silence of the Lambs. And then she turns around and it's Kate Beckinsale and I find myself letting out a groan. Like oh, that's too bad. Being a director and finding out that your star is Kate Beckinsale must be like finding out your brain has an inoperable tumor: you're a goner. As promising as Ms. Beckinsale may have been in her early films like The Last Days of Disco, her work in the current decade has made her out as one of the lamest actresses out there. As fine as she may look in leather, the Underworld films have done zilch for convincing anyone that she knows what she's doing any more, and Whiteout is another step in the wrong direction. Carrie Stetko is supposed to be a hardened, bitter cop who's finally going to retire after two years in self-exile in Antarctica after she lost her shit when she had to kill her partner back home in Miami when he tried to free a criminal they were transporting in exchange for a bribe. Beckinsale fails to convince us that she is bitter, that she is hard, that she's at all messed up over her partner, that she is anywhere near old enough to consider retirement, or that she is in any way proud to be in this movie. She just walks around looking bored and embarrassed the whole time. How bad must your film be if Kate Beckinsale thinks she's above it?

As for Gabriel Macht, you'll remember him as the douhebaggiest superhero ever in last year's disastrous The Spirit. And just in case you were thinking his terrible performance in that film was the fault of Frank Miller's inept directing, Mr. Macht proves you wrong by utterly sucking in Whiteout, too. The guy's just boring, that's all there is to it. He's a lifeless non-personality with a monotone voice and dead eyes who thinks growing out a five o'clock shadow will make him seem gritty, intense, and world weary. It makes him look like a hobo. In the role of a UN officer sent to handle the case, Macht is simply unbelievable. Which is to say that you'll be thinking "I don't believe for one second that this guy would ever make it as a UN officer". The guy's a dolt who wanders into bad situations, can't think very hard, and is generally an idiot. Take for example a scene where he and Beckinsale are trapped inside the plane after an avalanche, and his solution is to just blow shit up to punch a hole in the roof and hope they'll blow all the snow off, too. Sure, it works in the end (otherwise the film would be over, and they aren't having that kind of mercy on us), but he had no reason to expect it would. The guy's just a dummy. Way to bounce back, Gabriel.

But when it comes to idiots in Whiteout, the grand prize goes to the killer. As if the guy didn't look goofy enough covered head to toe in ski gear and wearing an eyehole-less mask with ski goggles over top (how does he see?), the guy makes an even bigger buffoon of himself whenever he's called upon to move. I can't believe this guy ever successfully killed someone, his every blow telegraphed from a mile away by bringing his arm all the way back and then bringing it forward with a huge, wild swing. Whenever we actually see him attacking people, he always misses and his momentum carries him ass over head to land flat on his face. On top of that, he constantly trips over his own feet and in outdoor scenes he gets knocked over by the wind, while tiny Kate Beckinsale is able to move freely without so much as her hair getting blown about much of the time. They should have dubbed in a soundbite of Thelma from Scooby Doo saying "Oh, my glasses!" over every scene this guy is in because he is constantly on the ground fumbling for his lost axe. The movie expects us to take this guy seriously, but all I could do was laugh at him.

As Whiteout progressed through it's final act with the killer captured and the plane booty revealed and one final meaningless plot twist to make you care even less, I went from confused to perversely amused and back to confused before finally walking out just bored. The movie's bad, but not bad enough to consistently enrage or entertain me. The moments of "so bad it's good" and "so bad it's pissing me off" are few and far between and are overwhelmed by many, many moments of "meh". The director's off his game, the screenplay is an obvious studio rewrite by some hired hack and the actors don't give a fuck.

Wow, this really is CSI: New York. I suppose the obligatory The Who theme song would have to be "Tommy" because

That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure swings a mean pickaxe

GI Joe:Rise of Cobra

2009-08-13T17:09:00.005-04:00

As I watched GI Joe: Rise of Cobra, a certain thought kept popping into my head over and over: Hal Needham oughta sue. I was flabbergasted as I watched this movie and realized that it was an unabashed complete and utter clone of Needham's 1982 sci-fi/action flick MEGAFORCE. It sounds absurd to say that anyone would even be aware of MEGAFORCE, a film that hasn't even been released on DVD and is rarely, if ever, acknowledged by those who are aware of it since they're all embarrassed to have seen it; a film so cheap, so poorly made, so hopelessly inept that it has gone down as a little more than a punchline for bad movie geeks' jokes. But allow me to make my case:

MEGAFORCE involves a super-secret, hi-tech army of futuristic fighting men made up of elite soldiers from around the world, which officially does not exist.

GI Joe involves a super-secret, hi-tech army of futuristic fighting men made up of elite soldiers from around the world, which officially does not exist.

MEGAFORCE battles tyranny and evil in every corner of the globe

GI Joe battles tyranny and evil in every corner of the globe

MEGAFORCE makes it's HQ in a secret bunker hidden under the sands of a desert

GI Joe makes it's HQ in a secret bunker hidden under the sands of a desert

MEGAFORCE HQ is an obvious, poorly drawn matte painting

GI Joe is an obvious, poorly rendered CGI backdrop

MEGAFORCE has an invisible car

GI Joe has an invisible suit

MEGAFORCE have motorcycles and trucks mounted with machine guns and lazer cannons

GI Joe have motorcycles and trucks mounted with machine guns and lazer cannons

MEGAFORCE leader Ace Hunter is old friends with their enemy, Duke Guerrera

GI Joe leader Duke was once engaged to marry their enemy, Ana

MEGAFORCE uses holograms to fool their enemies about their whereabouts

GI Joe uses holograms to fool the audience about the characters' whereabouts

MEGAFORCE have access to weapons thought by the rest of the world to only be theoretical concepts

GI Joe have access to weapons thought by the rest of the world to only be theoretical concepts

MEGAFORCE has to save innocent, peace-loving people from an evil gay cowboy

GI Joe has to save innocent, peace-loving people from an evil gay Scotsman

MEGAFORCE's action scenes are filmed in such a way as to render them incomprehensible

GI Joe's action scenes are filmed in such a way as to render them incomprehensible

IT'S THE SAME MOVIE. Literally every scene of GI Joe contains elements of MEGAFORCE. Blatantly. Directly lifted, not the least bit altered. It's almost a direct remake. So fuck it, if you want a review of GI Joe, just go read my MEGAFORCE review and substitute the names. There's literally no difference. It's astounding to me that this could happen. At least when Trey Parker and Matt Stone remade MEGAFORCE (as Team America: World Police) they were honest about how goofy it was and made a spoof out of it. The idiots making GI Joe don't even admit that it's a remake and they expect us to take this material seriously. Yeah right! I was laughing my ass off the entire time I was in that theater watching GI Joe unspool, laughing at how bad it is and laughing at the sheer, unbelievable audacity of it all. Screw Obama's Audacity of Hope, Steven Somers has the Audacity of Crap!

The Cave

2009-08-10T03:55:00.004-04:00

Some bad movies age like wine, getting funnier and more lovable every time you see them. MEGAFORCE, for example, is a film that never ceases to reveal yet another nugget or two of awesome, hilarious badness I never caught before. As terrible as it is, it actually rewards additional viewings just to see what other wackiness Henry Silva's evil gay cowboy or Barry Bostwick's homoerotic BeeGee impersonator had been getting up to all along.

And then there are bad movies that age like milk. 2005's The Cave is a great example. I remember seeing The Cave in a theater on opening day and having a blast with it. It was cheesy and hokey and poorly made and even more poorly acted and I laughed myself silly. I rushed home to praise it's wonderful badness on another blog that I had back then. I believe I called it "akin to Sccoby Doo, only with an old chap in place of the dog" and celebrated how the film's monsters were so fake you could almost see the zippers on their backs. It was a hoot and half and I felt it my duty to encourage others to see it.

Flash forward to today, when I sat down to rewatch The Cave so I could write this review. Oh my God, it was so awful. And all the funny had been drained out of it. Oh, I was so sad. I remembered all the parts that had once made me laugh and now I sat there watching them and wondering why they were so funny in the first place. With four years to allow my tastes to mature and the initial rush of adoration wear off, I could finally see The Cave for what it really is: an extremely boring film.

The Cave begins thirty years in the past in "Cold War Romania", where the most intrepid and inefficient team of gold thieves in history trek all the way out to some remote, nearly impossible to reach location in the Carpathian mountains. I don't know if they had already gotten the bank and the jewelery store and were otherwise out of places to hit or if they're just morons. Nah, they're just morons. They come upon a church built precariously atop a cliff so high and steep it should be insurmountable to a bunch of average joes with no climbing gear like our friends here, but they reach it anyway. Apparently, according to local legend, this church is built over the mouth of a cave containing two things: some gold, and some big, winged demons. The church is supposed to channel the holy ghost to keep the demons back or something. The thieves blow their way through the floor into the cave, only to be sealed in when a sudden rock slide flattens the church above them.

Flash forward to today, when Dr. Nikolai, one of those great movie scientists who's never pinned down to a particular field of study (because the target audience wouldn't care anyway), leads an expedition down into the same cave. Shortly after entering, he finds that it drops way far down into a big underground river and decides to call in some friends who happen to be deep sea divers who specialize in mapping underwater caves. Ah, yes, the divers. A veritable Scooby gang to Nikolai's, well, Scooby, they are just generic and good looking enough to make the perfect cast for a movie where they'll never have any character development and they're all going to die anyway. No point in getting good actors, just get some handsome guys and a hot chick and that's all that matters. The only person here (and in the entire movie) I recognize is Piper "Cinematic Kiss of Death" Perabo, a true luminary having starred in such classics as Cheaper by the Dozen, Cheaper by the Dozen Two, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Whiteboyz and the delightful sounding Slap Her, She's French. This woman is an utterly horrible actress with the pedigree to prove it.

Anyway, the team shows up and together with Nikolai and his frigid cohort Katherine, they head down to explore the ninety-mile long cave. Those of you expecting a thoughtful National Geographic film on cave mapping will be saddened when things almost immediately go wrong, the winged beasts proving to be real and an explosion sealing the way back and forcing the team to slog all ninety miles while being picked off by the creatures. And that's where it gets boring. Well, it was already boring but now it gets really boring. They walk through the cave. They swim through the cave. They walk and they swim some more. Some of them die, another gets "infected" with monster DNA or some crap and starts becoming one...and there's all that walking and swimming in between. Seriously, this is an advertisement for spelunking more than anything else. The action sequences, such as they are, are few and far between because dammit we need more shots of people stumbling their way through an uncharted area like blind fools. This movie is only 97 minutes, but it feels like 97 years thanks to all this walking and swimming being so tedious.

And it's not even like the monsters are cool. They look stupid, like big flying skeletons with gargoyle wings, made out of papier mache and moving along fixed wires like something they'd employ as Halloween decor at Knots Berry Farms. They're not scary, they're just kinda goofy. Oh, and they had to knock something off, so the monsters totally have the head of the Alien from Ridley Scott's sci-fi opus. And while the monsters are usually CGI, there are shots where they're actually guys in suits and you can practically see the zippers on their backs. So, so hokey. And yet not in any amusing way anymore. This go-round I was just offended by how little care went into them. The sets at least look decent, but I do have to question one sequence in which they, erm, forgot to build the set I guess. The characters ride down a water slide and find themsleves in a giant room which is just a water tank on an empty, darkened soundstage. When they cast their flashlights about you can even see where the tank ends and the soundstage wall begins. It's like no one realized they could have glued some of those foam rubber rocks from the other sets up there. I was reminded of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, when Supes goes to the moon and you can see the folds in the black curtains that are supposed to represent "outer space" off in the distance.

The acting is abysmal, even if you ignore young miss Perabo. This cast is so wooden you'd think they were freshly carved by Gepetto. It's just an army of blank, expressionless, faces that aren't even trying. Just watch Cole Hauser reacting to someone's death and try not to be utterly amazed at how lifeless he is. "Ah, he's dead. It's over". Like he'd just squashed a bug and was trying to reassure his sissy girlfriend she could come down off the chair now.

God, I don't know what I ever saw in this garbage. To be honest, I fell asleep while rewatching it. Mind you I had gotten twelve hours of shut eye before hand. And still, I got groggy and fell into a coma and woke up to realize I'd miss the ending. I just ejected the DVD and moved on. It really doesn't matter, because nothing can redeem this tedious piece of trash. It's just a lame twist ending trying to set up a sequel anyway. Thank God they failed at that.

A Sound of Thunder

2009-08-03T04:33:00.006-04:00

I needed that time off. There was supposed to be another review in there, but after seeing that last movie I reviewed - a film which shall never again be named - I just needed to get away from movies altogether. I couldn't even watch the good stuff, like the pile of Ingmar Bergman movies I've had sitting on my shelf. When I can't even watch my favorite film maker's movies, I know I saw something really bad to kill my love of cinema that much. You know what, though? In the end, I think that time away from movies was a good thing. I feel kinda refreshed and it also gave me time to think a bit. Things need to change around here and I've known that for a while. The long-winded, MST3K-in-type style of reviews I've done was a lot of fun for me at first but recently it's become a chore. It takes four, sometimes five hours to get through a movie that way and then there's all that writing to go back and proof read and correct (and still I miss lots of errors). It's just gotten to the point where it's too much. As such, I'm changing the format. I'm still going to go into the details of exactly how bad these movies are, but instead of breaking them down scene-by-scene, I'm going to go for more of an overall "here's why this movie sucks" approach, as you'll see in this week's review. If you're a fan of the old format, you're largely screwed but at least keep this in mind: I reserve the right to use that old format for movies that actually need it, the major landmarks of bad moviedom that actually do have something fundamentally wrong in their every moment. There would be no other way to do such films justice. But for the most part, things are gonna be different around here and hopefully this will preserve my sanity a little bit longer. With that, let's move on to this week's movie: A Sound of Thunder.

Ah yes, A Sound of Thunder. You may be familiar with the short story by Ray Bradbury, in which a man time travels to the past and while there accidentally steps on a butterfly. This simple act sends shockwaves through the time line and when he returns to the present, the man finds his world suddenly changed to a dystopian, dictator-run future. Yes, you may remember it, but now you need to forget it. Aside from the crushed bug and the destination in time where it's death occurs, this big screen adaptation has nothing to do with Bradbury's short story. Frankly, I'm not a Bradbury fan myself, finding his writings a tedious chore to read thanks to uninteresting premises and verbiage, so I actually had hope when I heard his story had been radically altered. Hey, maybe they made some improvements, I thought.

WRONG.

Of course they didn't improve anything. This is Hollywood we're talking about. They make everything worse, even things that already pretty well sucked. But man did they really go to town on this one. I mean, WOW. The first time I saw A Sound of Thunder, I didn't know whether to laugh or balk at what I was witnessing. I want to say I found it polarizing but that's not really accurate because either way there's no denying that this movie is awful. What I can say is that it is unique among my experiences in cinema because it manages to be both so awful it's funny and so awful it's infuriating. I've seen plenty of movies that were one or the other, but both at once is rare indeed.

You know what's funny about A Sound of Thunder? The CGI. This movie is chock full of CGI to what simply must be a record-setting level. Everything is CGI. Not just the stuff you'd expect, like monsters and the time tunnel sequences, but stuff like, you know, the sets. A decent portion of this movie takes place outdoors and was filmed entirely indoors in a big green screen room. The exteriors are entirely computer generated and look like they were rendered using the graphics engine of Banjo Kazooie or Superman 64 or some other Nintendo 64-bit video game. You've never seen scenery so blocky, so pixelated, so low-rez, and so unconvincing. At some points I was actually reminded of that one WWF Smackdown video game on the Playstation that let you walk about the arena full of sharp, angular, blotchy scenery and people. There's one moment I'll never forget when our heroes walk past a jewelery store window and the gold necklaces inside are literally just big, yellow pixels. I cackled so hard I thought my sides would legitimately burst. And the actors never convincingly blend into the scene. If anything, they have big borders around and they look so flat that it's like watching cardboard cutouts being pushed around in front of matte paintings from Hell.

By some accounts this movie cost $52 million to produce, but you'd never guess by looking at the backdrops. But that's because most of that money went into something else that was gut-bustingly bad: Ben Kingsley's toupee. It's bad enough that a respected Oscar-winning thespian like Kingsley, who starred in classics such as Gandhi and The House of Sand and Fog, had recently found himself reduced to drek like Thunderbirds, Suspect Zero, and A Sound of Thunder, but what makes it even worse is that the people producing A Sound of Thunder decided the bald Kingsley needed to wear Bob Barker's scalp. I've never seen a more ridiculous hairpiece in all my life than Ben Kingsley's poofy, shock-white pompadour. I was reminded of Mr. Swirly the ice cream man from the Nickelodeon cartoon Doug. But at least that guy was supposed to look like an ice cream cone! Kingsley is supposed to be a serious businessman, a Mr. Charles Hatton who owns and operates the Time Safari company, which utilizes time traveling technology to take rich people with disposable income on prehistoric dinosaur hunting adventures. When you're dealing with the fabric of space and time, you should try to look professional. Hatton looks like an old Oompa Loompa!

And speaking of Time Safari, we now encounter the aspect of the film that pissed me right off. I should preface this by saying that at the time I originally saw A Sound of Thunder, I was taking a philosophy course that actually dealt with the implications of time travel, so I was way more in tune with the inevitable intricacies of this stuff than most people are. But you know what, anyone with a working brain would still get ticked off by this movie's sheer lack of consistency on the subject, never mind the complete lack of understanding of how it should work! The whole idea of Time Safari is that they take their clients to a moment many millions of years ago where they can shoot a dinosaur and kill it. The moment in time and the specific dino have been very carefully chosen: the animal is doomed to die a few moments later anyway, since a nearby volcano is going to erupt, so their shooting it doesn't change the future since the creature had no place in it to begin with. However, if they had chosen a dino that was meant to survive the eruption, that would have been a problem because altering the ultimate fate of anything in the past causes unrepairable changes to the future. Case in point (or so the movie thinks): on one particular trip, the guns lock up and the guests become frightened and run away. One of them strays off the designated “safe” path where nothing can change the time line, and unknowingly steps on a butterfly. When the party returns to the future, everything is rapidly changing to reflect the butterfly's disappearance from the time line One problem with that: it's not like a butterfly could outrun VOLCANIC ERUPTION. That bug was just as doomed as the dinosaur and any other living thing in the vicinity. There's no way it lived and therefore there's no way it's demise should alter a damned thing either, by the movie's dinosaur logic. Does the precise location of it's death matter? That's the only thing that really could have changed, but that should be inconsequential since, again, they can kill the dinosaur in a different spot than it presumably would have been in a minute later.

But things get even worse from there. Upon returning to the present, our hero Travis notices things changing in big TIME WAVES *WAVES waves waves*, which are literal waves caused, I guess, by the fabric of the universe folding on itself or something. Aside from being so poorly drawn they look like a cutscene straight out of MYST, these time waves are utter nonsense. If the past really was altered, than that's it: everything ever since has always been different that it originally was. The time line is either one way or the other, it can't rewrite itself in steps. Just imagine being in that time line: One minute everything's normal, the next apes were never around and you're still here to ponder that. That wouldn't work: you'd simply never have existed, because the existence of humans is predicated on the existence of the apes that no longer exist. The whole thing here is that that one butterfly getting squished has altered the whole process of evolution! Oh God, where do I begin? For one, evolution affects populations, not individuals, so therefore only populations and not individuals can change the course of evolution. If one member of a species dies, that doesn't remove the entire species from history and alter the course of nature! Imagine if every time a human died prematurely we all suddenly mutated at random, and new species of plants and animals sprung up! That's essentially what the movie is suggesting would happen! Secondly, I can't accept, or even comprehend, how these evolutionary changes come in a hierarchy. Lower beings (like plants and bugs) have their evolution change before higher beings (like us) do. I'm sorry, but if you change one you instantly change the other. You can't say say that the past has changed so that plants are the predominant living thing on Earth, but human beings are still the same way they were before. They wouldn't be! And why would they remember a time before plants overran the Earth if now history has been rewritten to say that plants have ALWAYS OVERRUN THE EARTH?! Trying to sort out this movie's time line is a fucking headache that I've been coping with for four years now. If you tried to map it out it would look like one of those twisty, turny dotted line trails little Jeffy leaves behind in Family Circus.

TIME WAVE!!!!

But it gets even worse yet! Travis, in his infinite wisdom, decides to fix everything by going back in time to prevent the bug from getting squashed. Now, up to this point every other time we've seen people go back to that moment in time, they have never run into any other time travelers, including their own past selves because that's just how time travel has to work in order for them to be able to keep sending people to that same moment to hunt the same animal. Could you imagine the pile-up if hundreds of hunt parties were all existing in the same moment? So, OK, I can accept that for the movie's sake. But how, then, does this suddenly change so Travis can warn himself to save the butterfly? And why didn't he see his future self giving the warning when he took the initial fateful voyage at film's beginning? Look, it's either one way or the other movie: he prevented that bug from getting crushed in the first place or he didn't. It can't be one way and then the other because if he stops the bug from getting squished, then it never did get squished, the future never changed and he never had to go back and save the bug. But if he didn't go back and save the bug, then it did get squished, the future did change and he did have to go back. But he would have to fail at saving it...AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The only way any of this can work the way the movie wants it to is either A) there are multiple, parallel time lines and he jumped back into another one and saved the butterfly over there, or B) Ed Burns (and all humanity, for that matter) must exist outside the constraints of time and space and ergo is never affected by changes to time or space. But in one, he's really still screwed because his home time line isn't saved and the other is impossible! Holy moly, how did they screw this up so badly? None of this, not a single lick, makes any sense. It's confusing, it's nonsensical, and it is insulting to the intelligence of everyone watching. I know a guy with Down's Syndrome who could point out this movie's plot holes as he rode his four-wheeled safety bicycle through them! That's how fundamentally screwed this movie is: even simpletons can defeat it in a battle of wits.

And speaking of simpletons: the cast. Ben Kingsley remains the biggest mystery of A Sound of Thunder, but I also want to know how Ed Burns got here. Good God man, you had a career going. Why'd you like this asinine script so much? Couldn't you see the stink lines emanating from it? Couldn't you see what it would do to your career? I guess not, because anybody who actually foresaw a starring role in One Missed Call would have done anything to avoid that fate. Except Ed Burns, I guess, although judging from the lack of life in his performance he had to have known he wasn't in anything good. Maybe he owed someone a favor. I feel a little bad for him as he slumps his way through his performance as Travis Ryer, the leader of Time Safari's hunt parties who's also a scientist who hopes to use time travel to collect DNA samples from past animals and repopulate the Earth with them now that some vague virus has wiped out every non-human mammal and reptile. I don't know why that particular plot point is thrown in there, since he never goes anywhere with it and certainly doesn't accomplish his goal. In fact, when newly-evolved animals start showing up in the time waves, he seems quite frightened of them and to want them gone again. I guess baboonasaurus monkey/dinosaur hybrids weren't one of the things he was looking to clone.

What could go wrong with these things running around?

Other than Kingsley and Burns, the cast is made up of a bunch of no-names (or at least they're no-names to me) who range from mediocre to Godawful. They're all utterly forgettable, though, even the rather crucial character of Sonja Rand, inventor of the time travel technology. She's one of those dystopian movie scientists who “always knew my discovery would ruin the world if used recklessly”. Travis has to rely on her to explain the time waves and how to change everything and she has to help him rebuild the time machine and send him back, blah blah blah. Catherine McCormack, who you may remember from absolutely nothing, does so unimpressive a job with the role that I can honestly say I don't remember if she was bad or merely average. She certainly mustn't have been any good, because every time I think of a scene she was in she's just a human blur in my mind. Yeah, that's some quality writing and acting right there.

All in all, if you want to know how stupid this movie is, I provide you with a plot point that serves as perfect metaphor: near film's end, Sonja sends Travis back in time but she must stay in the present to operate the time machine. Just after Travis poofs into the past, another time wave rolls over, this time one that affects human being evolution. What, exactly, does the movie posit we should evolve into? What could possibly be superior to humanity? Giant catfish. No joke. I'd be willing to bet that when it comes to the writers, producer, cast, and director of A Sound of Thunder, such a move truly would be an upgrade, at least in intelligence.

Apocalypse Later, Week Two: Warrior of the Lost World

2009-07-13T05:45:00.012-04:00

Every once in a while I encounter what I like to call a "Seinfeld Movie", which is to say a movie that is about absolutely nothing. Warrior of the Lost World is such a movie, a mishmash of cars and motorcycles blowin' up real good with no plot to explain or justify them doing so. I know that normally I would break this down for you, scene by scene and prattle on about how stupid it all is, but this time I just can't. If I did it once, I'd have the whole movie in a nutshell:

Guy rides around on motorcycle. Guy runs into baddies. Guy fights baddies and gets hurt. Guy gets away in the end.

There's nothing else to it. There is absolutely nothing else to it. There's no rhyme or reason, there's no attempt at plot or acting, there's no point to it. Warrior of the Lost World is the personification of sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven't seen anything this mindnumbingly tedious since I foolishly subjected myself to last year's Direct-to-DVD Cloverfield knockoff Monster, a film which contained literally no action at all and instead consisted solely of two American women wandering around Tokyo running and screaming hysterically while three tentacles waved around in the distance like wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube men and Japanese locals went about their daily lives like nothing was happening. That was the longest 73 minutes of my life, but Warrior of the Lost World comes damn close to beating it.

Production values are non-existent. Locations include a two-lane road in the desert and an abandoned factory, neither of which is all that convincingly futuristic. Special effects, such as they are, consist of the typical gratuitous explosions and nothing else (they couldn't even be bothered to add in the lazers coming out of the lazer weapons!) and they really aren't all that special. How many fucking times can you watching things blow up just because they ran off the side of the road? I'm sick of it!

And then the acting. First of all, the casting perplexes me. I have no idea why they bothered getting Donald Pleasance to play the bad guy. Why go to the trouble of hiring the man who played an iconic character like Halloween's Dr. Loomis only to waste him in what amounts to a glorified cameo as a lame, vaguely homosexual Dr. Evil clone? Anybody could have played that and done about as much with it as Pleasance does, which is to say nothing. And then there's Persis Khambatta as whatsherface, the damsel in distress. Most people remember Khambatta for her bald-headed appearance as an alien in Star Trek: the Motion Picture, but I remember her best as Princess Zara in Hal Needham's hilariously bad MEGAFORCE, one of the first movies I ever reviewed here. I can't honestly say that Warrior of the Lost World is beneath Ms. Khambatta, because it's not. Aside from Star Trek, her career in film was nothing but one stinker after another, not the least among them a cameo in the mercifully failed Casablanca TV series. I kinda like Persis Khambatta despite her propensity for picking the absolute worst roles, because she did at least try and she clearly wanted to do her best. She tries in Warrior too, but her role is so severely underwritten that it's all for naught. All she gets to do is stand around and look pretty, walk around and look pretty, and lie around and look pretty. She's good at that much, at least. Robert Ginty is simply a non-entity as the hero known only as The Rider. He has no backstory and he does nothing, so there's nothing to say about the character, either.

So Warrior of the Lost World is a poorly made and boring film. But more than anything I found it annoying. Between the ham-fisted cuts, the grating sounds the weapons made and the nails-on-chalkboard voice of Rider's talking motorcycle, I couldn't fucking wait for this movie to end so it would stop bugging me. This movie has more beeps, boops, bings, zings, zaps, zonks, tweets, thwaps and toots than it knows what to do with and there's no musical score to drown any of it out. The only respite afforded to us is the constant dropping-out of the audio, as if the microphones were being turned on and off every minute or so. At least half of this movie is utterly inaudible. That may just be a defect in my copy, I don't know, but it only added to the cheapness and badness of the movie.

Ultimately, Warrior of the Lost World's worst offense is it's mere existence. That anyone would be stupid enough to make a movie solely off of a poster and then release said film in any fashion (I have no idea if this ever made it to theaters, but I'd be shocked) is just appalling. This is without question one of the laziest productions I have ever watched. There was zero effort involved on the part of the filmmakers and it shows badly through every single moment. This movie is just bad and there's nothing else I can say about it.

Apocalypse Later, Week One: Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn

2009-07-06T04:47:00.007-04:00

3-D movies have been making a comeback the last few years: Monster House, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Nightmare Before Christmas, Bolt, Up, Hannah Montana, Jonas Brothers, My Bloody Valentine...Hell, National Geographic has even started releasing their documentaries in 3-D. The reason for this is quite simple: the studios feel like they need a gimmick that can only work in theaters to draw in audiences who might otherwise wait for the DVD or illegally download. Plain and simple, it's a money-grab that lucked into happening at the same time the technology it's based on is taking great leaps and bounds, the new RealD digital 3-D offering better imagery and more comfortable glasses than the 3-D movies of old. It's synergy at it's finest.

This isn't the first time this has happened, though. Go back about thirty years to the early 80's, and you find the same trend: the 3-D technology improved, and the studios capitalized by cranking out hokey movies that existed solely to exploit it by the dozens in hopes of taking some drawing power away from that newfangled video tape technology that was bringing cinema into the living room. The result was a flood of some of the worst movies of all time. A short list of examples would include Friday the 13^th Part 3D, Spacehunters (a Molly Ringwald sci-fi epic of all things), Jaws 3D, and today's subject: the one and, thank God, only Metalstorm: the Destruction of Jared-Syn. Metalstorm has the unique status of not only cashing in on the 3D trend, but also cashing in on the simultaneously popular “Post-Apocalyptic” trend. You know, those movies that are filmed out in the desert with the cast wearing lots of leather and face paint and which are supposedly set in the year 2112 or whatever. Stuff like Yor, The Hunter of the Future.

Indeed, July is dedicated to Post-Apocalyptic films from the 80's, but I thought there was no better way to kick things off than with a movie that crossed that shitty gimmick with another, even shittier gimmick. So strap in, put your red and blue glasses on and get ready to duck some flying shit as we dig into Metalstorm: the Destruction of Jared-Syn!

The movie makes the fatal mistake of opening with an apparent homage to Manos: Hands of Fate. The first five minutes of this movie are nothing but some guy driving. Driving his tank down a road, driving the tank over the desert, driving into a valley, driving hither and thither. And nothing else is going on. Interminable? You betcha. The tedium is eventually interrupted when the tank is attacked by a bad special effec-I mean a flying speeder bike ala Star Wars. After flying around for a bit like a cardboard cutout on a string, the bike meets it's demise when our man shoots it down and it suddenly turns into an actual physical object just long enough to hit a cliff wall and blow up. And then...the man pulls over to dick around with the engine. Thrill!

Elsewhere, an old geezer and his New Jersey mallrat-looking daughter Dhyana are, respectively, hitting rocks with a pickaxe and zapping rocks with a glowing light-up hair dryer. Dhyana delivers the first line of the film and it seems oddly appropriate: “We're wasting our time”. They're looking for vague, undefined crystals of some sort even though the last owners of this particular mine found nothing there. Dhyana complains of how she hates being in “nomad territory” because them nomads sure don't take kindly to trespassers. But then she unearths a crystal (kinda looks like the exploding crystals from Santa with Muscles) and she and her father are happy as clams in mud because this makes them rich somehow.

Of course, some baddies choose right now to show up and spoil everything. Led by Baal, a man who looks like some bizarre cross between a Power Rangers clay soldier and the cast of Space Mutiny, these bad guys smash the crystal and then spray dad with some Nickelodeon Gak, which seemingly sends him to an alternate dimension where he gets...um...rubbed to death by a crystal-wielding bad guy overlord named Jared-Syn. Jared-Syn looks like Ivan Ooze from the Power Rangers movie, only without the purple skin.

Elsewhere one again, our mystery man is still driving. What the fuck, where is he even going? I don't think he even knows what his destination is. He's just out for an aimless Sunday drive through the desert and having a pleasant time aside from the speeder bike that he disposed of in ten seconds. And what the fuck is he driving? It looks like one of those home-made tornado tanks that storm chasers use to ride into the eye of the storm. Which is to say, it looks cheap and ramshackle and like it'll fall apart at any moment. But on he drives and drives. The only action in this scene is when he opens the window and then shuts it again for no reason five seconds later. Did Vincent Gallo direct these scenes? I feel like I'm watching The Brown Bunny again.

FINALLY, this maroon stumbles upon dad's corpse and hops out of the car to investigate only to find himself at Dhyana's gunpoint. Mystery man introduces himself as Dojan, a ranger (whatever that means), who's patrolling the area apparently to inform locals that the treaty with the nomads has been broken and things ain't safe. Gee, thanks, she never would have guessed from looking at her father's mangled body! The two dunderheads prattle on for a while, Dojan explaining that he is hunting Jared-Syn to stop him from inciting the nomads to more violence, and wow is this some terrible line-reading. I mean, that's all it is. They're not acting, they're just reading the screenplay. Alpha Five (will the Power Rangers references ever cease!?) had more believable emotion than these twits. And that's really too bad for all of us since the next scene is papa's burial, complete with Dhyana's “emotional breakdown” which comes across more like she's on quaaludes. “He...was...a...dream-er...and...I...loved him,” she intones with all the passion of someone asking for the salt shaker at dinner.

Oh come on, even with glycerin tears she doesn't look sad. This woman is hopeless!

Dojan happens to be in possession of what looks like another piece of Jared-Syn's life-sucker crystal thingy but doesn't know what the heck it is and asks Dhyana to take him to her weapons dealer so he can examine it. The test results come back positive: it's a life-sucker crystal thingy, alright. Apparently it sucks out your soul and stores it within the crystal until...I don't know what or when. Weapons dealer man tells Dojan he can find someone to lead him to Jared-Syn in the next town over. Dojan wants to leave Dhyana behind because, you know, she's an icky girl with cooties or something, but she's stubborn and insists on tagging along. And so it's off to drive some more, only this time Baal and his goons pull up in their tanks and they, too, drive around a lot after falling into line with Dojan's tank. Why Baal doesn't start firing on Dojan is beyond me. I guess he really just wanted to go for a nice Sunday drive. Too bad it doesn't last very long, as Dhyana's blood lust bubbles over and she fires on one of Baal's tanks, causing it to hit one of those ever-convenient natural objects that coincidentally happens to make a perfect jump ramp, in this case a sand dune, and then another tank just randomly runs into a wall and blows up like Hiroshima.

Unable to stand idly by and witness this unprovoked slaughter any longer, Baal and his remaining men corral Dojan and Dhyana in so Baal can spray Dojan with, I dunno, a tear-drop's worth of that Gak, which is enough to send Dojan to death's door. Seriously, he got hit with a fleck the size of a booger. But that's enough to send him, and for some reason Dhyana as well, into that weird alternate dimension so Jared-Syn can menace them a little. Yeah, he doesn't just get them with the life-sucker crystal thingy, he just says “I'm coming to get you!” and then vanishes. What, is he the Boogeyman now? Oh, and just to slap some diarrhea icing on the shit cake, Dojan and Dhyana are compelled to kiss like lovers after the vision goes away. Shouldn't you save that for then end? You know, after they've gotten to know each other and they've survived a big adventure and fallen in love? Oh, never mind.

And so Jared-Syn lives up to his promise to get 'em as he teleports Dhyana away mid-kiss. Apparently Jared-Syn's transporter technology isn't quite up to Star Trek standards as judging by Dhyana's screaming, it must be excruciatingly painful to get zapped around this way. And while Dhyana is off in the bad guy's clutches, Dojan is left to fight what looks like a nuclear Beetle Borg. Yet another in a long line of lame special effects. Somehow or another, Dojan intuits 1) that this thing can be killed by water and 2) that he can make water appear just by shooting the ground. And so he does and so it is. Gee, anti-climactic much? I hope Dojan has named his gun the Deus Ex Machina.

With that annoyance taken care of, and his health miraculously restored, Dojan heads off for that town. And then he gets there. And then he walks around. And walks around. And walks around. And walks around. You didn't have to show us this part, movie. Eventually, Dojan wanders into a cantina and finds the guide he's looking for, an old washed up drunk named Roads. Roads refuses to take Dojan to this so-called “Lost City” he's looking for since, you know it's fucking LOST and no one knows where it is. Overhearing the sounds of a whoopin', Dojan heads outside to find two, um, guys beating up another guy, which turns into a Mexican stand-off for no reason other than to have Roads swoop in to save the day and randomly join the mission.

And so they drive off to find the lost city. And they drive. And they drive. This movie is 90% filler at this point. I mean, seriously, look back over the things that have happened so far and then consider the fact that we are past the halfway point in this film. Barely anything has happened except one death, a chase, a kidnapping, and two fights. That would be the pre-credit sequence in any other action film, but the makers of Metalstorm managed to make it the entire first act and half of the second just by padding it out with lots of driving. Unbelievable. The two men come upon on obelisk which warns that they are nearing Cyclopian (who? What? Dunno!) burial grounds and that anyone who enters is a dead man. Roads pusses out and says he's done his end of the bargain since the Lost City is supposed to be just ahead, but Dojan just starts driving again before Roads can get out and he doesn't protest one bit either. It's perplexing how passive this Roads guy is. Your life is in danger! Jump out the door or something! Oh, and the scene ends with the most superfluous 3-D effect ever as the car drives away and the camera closes in on a prickly protruding branch for no reason whatsoever, except to have it pop out of the screen. Seeing the movie shown flat you'd think the cinematographer was just a botany enthusiast.

And so, more driving. You think it's getting repetitive in print? Try watching it. This is the most monotonous, vehicle-obsessed sci-fi movie this side of 2001: a Space Odyssey with all it's long, lingering shots of space ships slowly drifting about doing nothing. But hey, they shake it up with some walking! And they walk and walk and walk over a small hill and walk over some rocks and finally come upon some old statue holding a bucket. Dojan opens the bucket, unleashing the golden glow from the Pulp Fiction briefcase, and reaches inside to find...I dunno, some kind of mask I think. It looks like a piece of Lucite with some twigs glued to it. Which is exactly what it is, I'm sure. Meanwhile, Roads finds himself being sucked down into a hole in the ground which has been following them, as if one of those sand worms from Beetlejuice were about to burst up at any moment or maybe like that homicidal shadow from the X-Files. Dojan's brilliant response is to take Roads' rifle away and then get sucked down himself. Oh yeah, take the weapon so you can save yourself and fuck the other guy over. What a hero. With their legs buried under the sand, the heroes find themselves accosted by sand worms that look like hokey hand puppet versions of Alien Hominid. Dojan zaps one with his rifle and Roads scares the other one away by going “BLAARGGHH!” like someone imitating a monster for the amusement of a two year-old. And then the two men climb out of the holes and calmly saunter away. Wow, such action, such drama, such tension.

Running (or, more accurately, slowly jogging) away, Dojan and Roads run into some Cyclopian warriors. Roads throws Dojan under the bus and blames him for taking the mask, but that actually causes the Cyclopians to say that Dojan lives and Roads has to die because I guess they like being robbed. Dojan credits Roads with the robbery to save his ass, but then the Cyclopians say both men have to die for coming on their land. So why'd you just say that Dojan gets to live because he took the mask? Which is it? Roads, suddenly becoming a blabbermouth, talks the Cyclopian leader into fighting Dojan with their freedom on the line. This epic, two-minute battle consists of some lame sword combat (look out, he's swinging at the camera!) ending with Dojan beating the Cyclopian, but refusing to kill him because he's all noble like that. We'll just ignore all of Baal's henchmen that he killed without provocation earlier on. So the Cyclopians send Dojan and Roads on their way and not only do they let them have the mask, they even give them directions to Jared-Syn's hideout. Wow, how convenient.

The two of them immediately crash into Baal's encampment and smash the place up like their tank is the proverbial bull in a china shop. This isn't a coordinated attack, it's just the two of them driving uncontrollably and accidentally running into shit. Shit which, of course, blows up. You know, I feel pretty bad for Baal. I mean, sure, his dad is the bad guy and he does his bidding, but he hasn't really done much of anything to Dojan to incur all this violence. Baal is a downright beleaguered fella at this point, losing vehicles and minions left and right while he adamantly refuses to fight back. After committing another senseless slaughter, Dojan pulls over and puts the mask on. This zaps him to that alternate dimension again, where he chops down a burning bush and it bleeds. And then he comes back. Uh, what? Back in reality, Baal corners Dojan and Roads to perhaps finally exact some revenge. Well, no. The two-timing Cyclopian shows up to toss a Koosh ball of doom into Roads' face, while Dojan rips Baal's fucking arm off at the elbow. Good God, leave the poor guy alone!

Roads survived but has to be left behind while Dojan heads off to find Jared-Syn. And so he walks. And walks. And walks, following the trail of green slime leaking from Baal's arm stump. He walks all fucking day while the sun goes down and after night fall he finally stumbles upon some tribal council Jared-Syn is holding to sacrifice Dhyana to his magical crystal. Baal and Jared-Syn want to kill him, of course, but the Cyclopian says they're friends and that Dojan should be allowed to speak. Friends? You just tried to kill him! Dojan says that Jared-Syn is the one causing all the land conflicts (?) and that they should stand against him. And everyone takes Dojan's word for it. Too bad for them that Jared-Syn has MAGIC and can ZAP HEEM with magical lasers and whatnot. Dojan uses his mask to deflect the rays and in doing so causes a bush to get zapped and catch on fire, like his vision. If you think that's meaningful, you're wrong. It just happens. Baal smashes the mask, only to get stabbed to death by the Cyclopian for his troubles. Poor, poor Baal.

Jared-Syn uses his magic to teleport away, but Dojan takes a speeder bike and flies off...into the sunset (the magic of editing)...to find him. Turns out Jared-Syn is on a speeder bike of his own and so the chase is on...in the broad high-noon daylight. The blue screen work here is reminiscent of Ace Hunter's flying motorcycle from MEGAFORCE, which is to say it's Godawful terrible. And it gets worse when Jared-Syn uses some incantation to open a portal straight into the cover of Dark Side of the Moon. What in the fuck?

Jared-Syn gets away by shutting the portal after himself, and Dojan returns to the camp and blows up the big magic crystal. I guess that's supposed to take away Jared-Syn's magical powers? With that pyrotechnical display out of the way, Dojan and Dhyana wander off down the road until Roads drives up in the tank and offers them a ride home. And then the movie ends.

This movie sucks. It's not the worst thing I've ever seen, but is nonsensical drivel. There's barely any plot and it's padded out with interminable driving and walking sequences that serve no other purpose than dragging this thing out to feature length. The acting is wooden, the screenplay is just a list of sci-fi cliches, and the directing is so focused on the 3-D crap that things like framing, timing, and composition get utterly ignored. It's a badly made, boring film that doesn't even work as “turn your brain off” entertainment. It's just that bad.

Oh and one more thing. THEY DIDN'T DESTROY JARED-SYN. What the hell is with the title, then?

A Slice of Nostalgic Heaven: TMNT Coming Out of Their Shells

2009-06-20T17:03:00.004-04:00

I don't think it's any secret that I'm a nostalgia fiend. I just love to look back on my childhood and revel in the things that so easily entertained me and made me happy. Take a gander at my DVD shelf and you'd know it right away: The Land Before Time? Got it. Short Circuit? Bought it the day it streeted. The Brave Little Toaster? Can't remember a time without it. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Movie? Still have the VHS, top that! The Wizard? Displayed prominently in a place of honor in my entertainment center, soon to be enshrined under the theatrical poster (vintage, no reproductions allowed here!). I worship these movies because my childhood is the closest thing I have to a God. I love it that much.

One of the biggest components of my childhood was undoubtedly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The cartoon series was at the height of its popularity when I was a wee tot, and I fell in love with those unavoidable heroes on the halfshell just like every other kid on Earth did. I watched the cartoon, I had the action figures, I had the Halloween costumes. The only thing I didn't have was the movies, ironically. Having seen them as an adult, I guess I understand why my parents drew the line there. The first one – a shockingly excellent entry in the superhero movie genre, I'd like to add – is too dark and scary for the littlest kids to see (and they swear a little, which probably didn't help). The second one was tripe that no one would want to suffer through and the third one is dead to me so let's not discuss it. The point is, my Turtles love was strong, but incomplete. It wasn't until this very week that I realized it was actually even more incomplete than I used to think.

I'm sure most anyone who reads me has probably discovered the joys of The Nostalgia Critic, a very funny man who puts all other retro-reviewers to shame with his gut-buster videos. I've been a fan of his for a long time and never miss an episode of his show. Lo and behold, one of his latest reviews – a crossover with The Angry Video Game Nerd (also a great man), was TMNT-related. It was also utterly baffling, as they reviewed The Making of Coming Out of Their Shells. Coming out of Their Shells being a Ninja Turtles concert tour, of all things, that seemingly was lost like dust in the wind for two decades until these two dedicated geeks dug it up. I had never heard of this thing before, but after glimpsing the Spinal Tap-like fake documentary about it, I knew I needed to see it NOW. And through the magic of internet piracy, I was able to. I downloaded that baby and watched the whole thing through straight away.

The background on Coming Out of Their Shells is thus: The Turtles love pizza. Pizza Hut makes pizza. Pizza Hut spent a whole lot of money to put together a Ninja Turtles live show to plug their pizza. Simple as that. Why they made it a concert is beyond me (other than so they could sell cassette tapes at the restaurants, I guess), but then again I've never understood Pizza Hut's tie-in promotions. They did a tie-in with The Land Before Time for God's sake, and what do dinosaurs have to do with pizza? All I know is that my VHS copy of that movie has a Pizza Hut ad instead of trailers and I saw it so many times as a kid that I can pretty much recite it from memory if I want to. Also, the LBT hand puppets they handed out with the kid meals were atrocious.

But I digress. Point is, Pizza Hut commanded a Ninja Turtles concert tour, and so it came to pass. To launch the tour, they simulcasted the kick-off performance from Radio City Music Hall (yes) on PPV, and to make it extra special for the kiddies, they added a PLOT to the concert. This wasn't any old song and dance show, it was an EVENT and more or less an episode of the cartoon show, except live action and way, way cheesier if you can imagine it.

So the turtles take the stage and bust right into their first song, appropriately titled “Coming Out of Our Shells”. An unmistakably early-nineties pre-packaged bit of pop fluff, this catchy little ditty is basically an explanation of how in the blue fuck four freakishly mutated ninjitsu-practicing turtles got into music. That explanation is the simplistic, but typical, “everyone has the music in them”. They just let it out and noticed that their sewer has lovely acoustics and now they're a rockin' band. And they brought the sewer with them, as the set seems to suggest. Got to have the acoustics. Yeah, it's pedestrian but like I said, it's oddly catchy and it's harmless so I can't complain about it. The kids eat it up and give a thunderous cheer at song's end, which leads to Michelangelo uttering his signature line of the night: “Thank You! We love you! Thank you!” They repeat this over and over and over throughout the show and it's the exact same recording every time. It's the one thing in this show that annoys me because he says it so weirdly. He emphasizes the word “you” so much and it doesn't even sound the least bit right. I'm nitpicky like that.

I like how Raphael chooses this point in the show to say he's “having a great time so far”. You're three minutes in, dude. I'm sure The Rolling Stones were having a great time three minutes into Altamont... Mike chimes in with another round of “We love you”s, and even Leonardo is already sick of it. And then...the bantering. Minutes upon minutes of bantering. They explain how the big video screens work, they talk about how music is a better way to express yourself than fighting (so shouldn't the cartoon have switched over to something like a “Josie and the Pussycats” model?), they hype the shit out of their instruments, they remind us that they love us, thank you. You'd think they'd lose the kids with this stuff, but they don't. I find it funny that they go to the trouble of discussing the instruments, crediting Donatello for making them, and talking about how they're cooler than weapons AND they tell us to check them out with the next song...and then they don't even use the instruments in that next song. There's music, alright, but the turtles are too busy dancing to touch their instruments. Whacky with an H.

During this interlude there's a flashback (of all things) to Splinter telling the turtles (who suddenly look completely different, because they're now being portrayed by hokey costumes from a Halloween shop instead of the way better-looking and more detailed suits used in the concert. Was there no continuity editor to check this kind of shit? And why did they bring along two sets of costumes anyway?) that music can touch people and spread good messages better than weapons and violence can. I have to wonder...were they parents' groups filing complaints about violence in the cartoon show? They go out of their way to discourage fighting and encourage the arts throughout this show and while that certainly is noble, it goes against everything the turtles are about (with the exception, perhaps, of Donatello). Anyway, flashback ends and we immediately transition into a song about, what else, “Pizza Power”! They don't actually use the words “Pizza Hut”, but the shilling is so thick you can cut it with a chainsaw nonetheless. The gentle reminder that pizza power “can be delivered to your door”, in particular just screams “buy this shit!”. Oh yeah, and there are dancing Pizza Hut delivery boys. So I guess they did kinda use the name.

With the end of this song comes the arrival of Splinter and by far the most baffling thing to ever happen in the Ninja Turtles universe. After giving a zen-like speech about how everything we do is like a skipped stone making rings on the surface of water (yeah, I'll bet five year olds really grasp the significance of the parable), SPLINTER SINGS. And I'm almost certain his singing voice was provided by John Stamos because it has not the slightest hint of Splinter's Asian accent, and it can't carry a tune to save it's life and attempts to compensate by doing that hushed whisper style of singing that earned Stamos a spot in the Beach Boys for that pathetic “Kokomo” comeback. The mind boggles at the experience of watching and listening as Master Splinter, the wise-old rat of few words being moved to sing a really, really goofy ballad about “Skipping Stones” as the children in the crowd are confused into a bewildered stupor. What in the hell is happening here? Also, I have to note that this singing ratman doesn't even look like Splinter. He looks like a rejected raccoon character from the Chuck E. Cheese jamboree wearing some rags. They're not even purple for Christ's sake. Couldn't they have dragged the costume from the movies out of the mothballs? It's not like it was being used for anything else. And what is the deal with his choreography? I know Splinter is supposed to be old and crippled with arthritis, but was “crouch into a fetal position and then stand up again...and walk a little bit” all they could think of within those limitations?

Well, apparently the badness of this song simply could not go unnoticed, as Splinter and the turtles are frozen in time as Baxter Stockman takes the stage and The Shredder makes a grandiose evil speech on the video screens, talking about how Baxter's latest invention – the Deharmonic Convergence Controller (you know, something simple and easy for children to remember) – will allow them to STEAL THE MUSIC and thusly (somehow or other) render the turtles completely powerless. Whacky. And also the most cornball thing I think I've ever seen, as this is easily the cheapest Shredder there's ever been. Tin foil helmet. Check. Bed sheet tied around neck as a cape. Check. Mascara oddly reminiscent of Sam Jackson playing The Octopus. Check. Two-dollar voice distorter mic. Check.

I've seen costume characters at flea-bitten traveling carnivals that more closely resembled their cartoon counterparts than this actor in a CORPORATE-SPONSORED MULTIMEDIA EVENT resembles The Shredder. I mean, I'll forgive the costume for argument's sake, but couldn't you be bothered to get James Avery to record the voice? I mean, come on, James Avery IS The Shredder for anyone who loves the cartoon show. We want Uncle Phil, dammit! Anyway, Baxter and some Foot soldiers start laying down parts of the music sucker doohickey and generally being evil in the most delightfully pandering way. This guy playing Baxter Stockman is gold. He knows it's dumb, he knows he's not better than this, he gives it all his heart and soul. I know the mutated Human Fly Stockman in the cartoon is classic and all, but this human dweeb version is aces. And you know what? Despite my complaints, The Shredder is pretty funny, too. Putting aside all the many, many things that are wrong with him, his gleeful evilness is so amusing. I especially love when he tells the kids not to tell the turtles that he was there “because I'll be watching!” Yeah, not “I'll get you” or “I'll take your toys” or any other threat. He'll just be watchin'. Oh no, not that! But that's awesome because it's so goofy! The kids don't listen to him, either, because as soon as Baxter and the Foot run off and the good guys unfreeze, the building erupts with shouts of “Shredder!”. The turtles don't believe it and laugh the notion off, even when April shows up in the audience and insists it's true. Poor April is utterly ignored – the turtles never even address her directly – and I guess she just leaves with her head hung low and her tail tucked between her legs because her mic gets cut off and she just vanishes, presumably consumed by the sea of children that flocked to her the instant the spotlight hit her.

So rather than taking the word of thousands of children and the best friend they've ever had, the turtles instead break into another song, a rap about keeping it straight up funky fresh dope and real. IS that how Vanilla Ice-ese goes? I think so. I think it's supposed to be about being yourself or something but it's really just gibberish if you think about it too hard. Obviously, a crowd of kids isn't thinking at all, so it goes over like gangbusters. I've got to mention something, here. Watching the dancing in this number brings my attention to a rather unfortunate aspect of these turtle costumes: every time they bust a move, their crotch flaps come up and reveal a part of their shell that happens to look decidedly vagina-like...which is just so weird on a turtle. I mean, really, they couldn't design those flaps to stay down or just make those shells look a little less...poontangy? Oh, and another thing: the turtles look stupid with those big, floppy tails on their masks flopping all over when they shake their heads. It's like they have Hulk Hogan haircuts, all bald on top and a pony tail in the back. It doesn't work for The Hulkster, it ain't working for these guys.

Well, after the DJ Lameass hour ends, it's time for the seemingly inevitable Beach Boys knock-off as they sing a pop/rock ditty about surfing in the sewers. At least they went for “Surfin' USA” Beach Boys and not “Kokomo” Beach Boys. The most notable aspect of this number is the presence of dancing crocodiles in grass skirts and men riding on roller skates, things which have nothing to do with surfing! There is a bit with surf boards, but it's the silliest excuse for choreography I've ever seen. It's like the person planning this show just said “stand on those surf boards and, uh...spasm a little”.

And after that song, and an impromptu game of Jeopardy, April pops up on the video screen and tries once again to warn the turtles only to have her feed cut off by a sinister laugh that the suddenly pussified turtles try to convince themselves was just “ground hum”. Yeah, that's what ground hum would sound like: A Snidely Whiplash cackle.

And hey, let's go back to rappin'! Inspired by the Jeopardy answer (What's a turtles favorite word? Cowabunga!), Michelangelo breaks into a rap called, wouldn't ya know it, “Cowabunga”. Again, I have no idea what this song is about. All I know is I really appreciate the definition of “Cowabunga” being splashed across the screen for the benefit of anyone here who somehow hasn't seen an episode of TMNT. I'm pretty sure even the parents must have known what Cowafuckingbunga means. This is probably the one real stinker of the show because even the kids don't give much of a reaction. Indeed, they seem more interested in what follows, as the turtles freeze once again so Baxter Stockman and the Foot can finish building the Decombobulatory Converging Crapper or whatever it's called while The Shredder makes another grandiose speech, revealing that the next piece of music played will activate the machine and turn the stage into an auditory black hole, sucking all the music out of the whole wide world. So, of course, when the bad guys vanish and the turtles unfreeze, Michelangelo has to go and start doing his impressions of Dean Martin and Elvis.

And this is where this show takes a turn down Ed Wood Lane. As the machine turns on and makes the instruments blow-up (if Fourth of July sparklers can be called “blowing up”) while the turtles battle the Foot in the single lamest fight scene this side of an Uncle Elmer match in the WWF. You know, fight scene choreographers will tell you that what they do is really just an elaborate dance that happens to look like it's painful. So why then, if we know these people can dance just fine despite being covered in these goofy costumes, does this fight scene look so goofy? Everyone moves at Mae West speed and whiffs their kicks and punches by a country mile. They don't even try to make this look good.

And the children love it. So fuck it, I'll shut up. The Foot are entirely ineffectual, giving the turtles ample time to make quips as they dispatch of their foes. “This is one thing Bo don't know! Get it?” Actually, I don't, but I think we just had a Ghosts Can't Do It reference and that alone is a ten on the “How to Amuse Redunbeck” scale. Ooh, ooh, make a Cru Jones joke, next! April comes up on stage in the midst of this fight for no other reason than to get chased about. So...she was in a remote location the last time we saw her...and she heard there was a brawl going on on stage and she thought “Well, the best thing to do is to go up there and clutch at my heart and swoon for my heroes until a Foot soldier notices me and makes me scurry”? OK. She gets saved rather quickly, throws a high five and then retreats to a balcony, where a Foot soldier scoops her up. This causes instantaneous coma for the poor lass. So the turtles get rid of the Foot and it is at this point that The Shredder finally takes the stage. Left-field strategizing...yes, it's crazy enough to work for forty-five minutes or so...

Despite standing on the balcony, cackling loudly, and HAVING A SPOTLIGHT ON HIM, The Shredder is still invisible to the turtles for a couple of minutes, even when they look right at him. This, of course, is just to whip the kids into a frenzy, which it does, so it's actually really great. Eventually spotting the evil interdimensional-traveling time lord who's right there, the turtles make a rush for him only to be repelled by the Deharmonic doohickey, which looks to all the world like three industrial fans and a long string of Christmas lights shrouded behind a light mist. So the turtles are all becoming powerless, The Shredder's plot is falling into place, great tragedy is befalling the world...and HBO cameramen choose this point in the show to walk on stage and get into the long shot. Way to break the tension guys, and way to make the turtles look like wusses. They collapse and die at the sight of this machine, but Ralphus is just fine and dandy tooling around in the background. The turtles run away down their man holes and The Shredder heads front and center to thunderous boos. This guy has what pro wrestlers call Monster Heat. He's like Andre the Giant right after tearing Hulk Hogan's shirt off on Piper's Pit: people want his head served up NOW. So. Fucking. GREAT. This guy in a tin foil and polyester suit has earned the profound hatred of thousands of children and their endlessly amused parents by erecting three fans and some tinsel and chasing four turtles down holes. Think about that.

So The Shredder has Baxter tie April up and then he announces (in perfect Dick Dastardly style) that all the doors are locked tight and no one can escape! And while the baddies are busy completing construction of their evil devices, they're going to herd all the crowd into the lobby so they can't see how it works. Or, in other words, intermission time.

TO THE CONCESSION STAN-erm, I mean, to the lobby to cower in fear. Yeah, that's what this is really about. Just ignore all the vendors peddling t-shirts and toys in the background as TV newsman Kip (I swear he's played by the guy who hosted Shop 'til You Drop or some other 90's game show...God it drives me nuts because his name is on the tip of my tongue. Help me out here!) asks the kids what they should do. The answer is a resounding “Let the turtles save us”.

Borrowing a light-up sword (only $9.95, Mom and Dad. Little Timmy would love one!), Kip heads to the basement to look for the turtles. He acts all afraid of the dark, which is funny seeing as his crew has the place lit up brighter than Hiroshima the day the bomb dropped. After a lot of wandering and cowering, Kip eventually finds the turtles sitting around like dopes doing nothing to formulate a plan. In fact, all they're talking about is how upset they are that they didn't get to sing more songs. Um, hello? MUSIC BEING DESTROYED. WORLD FALLING INTO DESPAIR, LEADING TO ENSLAVEMENT. YOUR WOMAN IS TIED UP. And why are you referencing Barry Manilow lyrics (“She came and she gave without taking or something...”). After a lot of pointless prattling and a horrendously confusing attempt at compressing The Shredder's backstory into one whole sentence, Kip determines that the turtles are weenies.

Back in the theater, the baddies take the stage once more to tie April and some random...technicians, I guess, to the Deharmonic whatsit (April helpfully wiggling her way into her bindings. Good timing on that zoom-in, cameraman). April's bindings are basically a harness and a rope with enough slack for her to freely wander the entire stage. Wow, that'll keep her from interfering. So, with a literal captive audience, a giant machine that allows him to rule the world, and the turtles on the run, The Shredder embarks upon...

AN INSULT COMEDY ROUTINE. He just starts picking on the people in the front row. “Who's that? Your cousin? What, couldn't get a real date? BWAHAHAHAHA!!”. Apparently the role of The Shredder is being played by Don Rickles this particular evening. And he goes on, and on, and on, and on. Like someone missed their cue and he had to fill time or something. Not that that's the case. Eventually, he starts showing off the Deharmonic thingy. Here's how it works: you toss an album, sheet music, a cassette, or anything else music related into a trash can with a “No music” logo on it, and the music gets transformed into fanciful confetti which the foot spray over the crowd with big air guns. Whee!!! I like it! Confetti easily distracts and amuses me. The point of this whole scene is, shockingly, that The Shredder hates music. Hates it so much that...he sings a song about it. Uh, OK.

This is where the show reaches yet another new level of transcendent surreality, the sight of this man in a two-dollar Shredder costume prancing about all fancifully and crooning a song...It's like watching a Salvador Dali movie or something. No, scratch that. Dali wasn't nearly this weird. Appropriately, this song is really, really bad. I'm saddened, though, that it doesn't end with The Shredder pulling out a tape recorder and confetti-izing a recording of his own song. That would have really driven the point home. Next best thing: he destroys New Kids on the Block. Thank you, Shredder.

But now back to April. Not only does she have free range to wander the stage, she also has a working microphone. That's just dumb plot-wise, but she's only here to work the kids up into a frenzy anyway, so we need her back there shouting “Boo!” I guess. Kip pops up on the video screens, and The Shredder pushes a button to ZAP HEEM (I can make Ghosts Can't Do It references, too, by God), and I guess Kip dies because this is his last appearance on the sh-DAVE RUPRECHT. That's who it was. Supermarket Sweep, not Shop 'til You Drop. I can't believe he doesn't list this on his resume. You might not be so shocked, but once you know that he DOES list five episodes of Small Wonder, it's surprising. This is so much better than that piece of shit ever was. Anyway, Kip bites it. And then some turtles appear on screen. I say “some” turtles because they look nothing like the ones we've been watching all night.

What we see on stage:

What we see in this video insert:Uh, yeah. So anyway, The Shredder goes off to scheme or something, and April's buddies start lamenting their inevitable deaths, prompting April to sing them an inspirational song. This song...

This SONG.

THIS song.

THIS SONG IS SO FUCKING GREAT. Never mind the appearance of musical accompaniment from thin air (awesome enough in it's own right), just listen to it. There hasn't been something this bombastic and magnificently overwrought since the heyday of Wilson Phillips. Actually, this was made during the heyday of Wilson Phillips...but you know what I mean. Wilson. Phillips. I mean, seriously, do you get that “Hold On” vibe off of this, or is it just me? And I mean that as a great compliment, because the overwrought cheesiness of Wilson Phillips is rare magic indeed. I want an MP3 of this NOW. NOW DAMMIT. And I'm not the only one: there are people waving lighters in the crowd like it's Stairway to Heaven. This...this is the stuff dreams are made of. My dreams, at least. After that majestic bit, the turtles and Splinter pop up to peek at the scene and notice that April's singing made the machine's power fluctuate. And then they run away again.

The Shredder, having heard the impossible power ballad, runs in to shut April up with a round of Barry Manilow puns followed by ZAPPEENG HURR (Beat that horse 'til it's dead) with a ray gun that steals her voice. I have to say, kudos to this chick playing April for selling so strongly for a “ray gun” that's essentially shining a flashlight on her. It's so whacky. Also whacky is the TV news insert showing how The Shredder's evil machine is already affecting most of the country.

So The Shredder and Baxter Stockman wander off to do other evil things, giving the good guys the chance to come up on stage finally. So they can banter. April tries to explain her predicament through a game of charades, but the turtles are retards so they think she's going for “Gone with the Wind”. When they figure out what's wrong, they get all sad and that gives the Deharmonic thingy it's power back. Splinter figures that the machine only works when no one has faith in the music. So the turtles figure, hey, let's sing a song (they have some wonky cloaking devices to keep the machine from working on them). And the song they sing is, uh, kinda heavy, actually. “No treaties/After the wall!”. Is that a Berlin Wall reference? Dude! Raphael brings some levity to this, as his mouth animatronics are suddenly broken and his mouth has stopped moving. You thought Mill Vanilli were bad lipsynchers? The song doesn't work and the turtles all flip out and start bickering, giving the machine even more strength. Raph realizes they just need to follow their hearts...and sings a song about it. THAT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING. Except provide more comedy from the slack-jawed mouth just hanging wide open as he sings.

With their cloaking doohickey's losing power, the turtles turn to the audience to save the day and teach the kiddies an easy song that they can sing to mess up the machine. And then they vanish backstage and shape shift into those other turtles again for another appearance on the video screen. And then they run out on stage in the other costumes...and no one notices the difference. They lead the audience in the song to shut the machine down and then they engage the Foot soldiers in another slow-mo fight. Quickly dispatching of those dweebs, they give The Shredder a whacky beat down until he jumps into an escape pod to get away. But the turtles plug the pod into the deharmonic thingamajigger and ZAP HEEM to another dimension and righteously save the day. And then they rock. And they rock. And they rock. They really want us to know that we can count on them.

Upon my first viewing, by the time the show was over my soul was glowing and I was misty-eyed like a housewife watching a Rock Hudson movie. This concert is utterly terrible, but it's terrible in the best way imaginable; a rickety, cheap, cornball carny attraction all gussied up trying to look like more than it was, designed solely to make money off impressionable children, and yet still somehow a sweethearted and earnestly entertaining spectacle in a “Golly gee whiz”kinda way. I mean, yeah, it was the product of greedy corporations to turn a profit, but dammit the kids in the audience loved it so much that I could care less about the motives for making it. They made those kids happy, by God, and that's a good thing. They also produced something that, twenty years later, serves as a perfect time capsule of everything it was to be a little Turtles-freak; a time machine to my innocent days. For that, it has earned itself a place of honor on the shelf, just as soon as I buy a blank DVD and burn it.

Fucking Hell, and Hell Fucking Yeah

2009-06-15T07:50:00.003-04:00

Well, after battling with Norton Internet Security, which actually went HAL 9000 on me and started blocking my internet access when I wouldn't buy the upgrades it wanted me too (and then actually refused to be uninstalled!), I finally have a reliable internet connection again. You'd think that would mean this month's reviews would finally go up, but no. One, I'm too angry to be bothered doing all that formatting right now and secondly, and more importantly, the reviews I wrote this month are terrible and will never see the light of day. Turns out I cannot make Mannequin and Mannequin 2 funny in written word. What an epic fail that you will never know.

To make up for this, I will instead be presenting an impromptu review sometime this week. Inspired by a recent episode of The Nostalgia Critic, I immediately tracked down "TMNT: Coming Out of Their Shells: the Tour", and if the making of tape they reviewed over there was bad, the show itself is an all-time epic of wonderfully terrible cheese from my childhood that so floored me when I saw it (which would be all of three hours ago, admittedly) that I immediately knew I HAD to write about it and spread the joy. And if all goes well, this will be a video-laden bonanza for full effect. So keep an eye out for that!

Yabba Dabba Don't: Viva Rock Vegas Review

2009-05-18T06:07:00.009-04:00

For the last few months, I've been planning a trip to Las Vegas for the Memorial Day weekend, and like a kid waiting to go to the amusement park I find myself thinking more and more about that day the closer it nears. I just can't wait. And now, only a few days away from my flight, as I think of Las Vegas, another pair of words also enters my mind. A pair of words inextricably linked to that gambling mecca to such a degree that I'm sure you know them instantly.

Sin City? Nah.

Win Big? C'mon now.

High Roller? Don't be silly.

The Flintstones?

Ding Ding Ding! Jackpot!!!! I mean...it's obvious. They go together like...like...like TNT and a human asshole. Recipe. For. Disaster. But someone had the brilliant idea to mesh Sin City and the Bedrock Bunch and the result was this week's lame-duck comedy, Viva Rock Vegas, which I am suffering through just to prove that I really did earn this vacation (as if two months of Steven Seagal chased down with The Spirit wasn't proof enough).

Normally this is where I would talk about the original Flintstones movie to give you some background, but the last (re:only) time I saw it was when I was eight and it was new in theaters. All I remember is being ecstatic when I had to pee and thusly had an excuse to leave the theater because I was pretty well bored. When you consider that insomnia cures like Indian in the Cupboard and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers positively enthralled me as a child, I think this really says something. So, sidestepping the background I'll just cut to the chase and tell you that Viva Rock Vegas is that most dreaded of beasts: the prequel. Are these ever good? I mean, name a good prequel, please! The only prequels I can even think of are the Star Wars ones and...the less said the better. Of course, this isn't really the first Flintstones prequel lest we forget...

Uh, yeah, on second thought let's forget. Viva Rock Vegas takes us back to a time when Barney and Betty and Fred and Wilma aren't yet married, but by golly those boys are a-tryin'! Boy, I wonder if they'll succee-oh yeah, we already know they did. See, that's the problem with prequels: you know exactly where they're going. Dramatic tension: lost. Admittedly, this isn't the kind of movie that's going to rely on such a thing as tension – after all, it's a comedy and you're just supposed to laugh as the characters do everything you expect them to from the get-go – but still, at least a little bit of uncertainty would be nice so I had something to care about. But we ain't got that here. Don't worry, though, the filmmakers replaced it with something much better:

LET THE LAME PREHISTORIC PUNS BEGIN

Well, I'll give the movie credit for a surprising opening. Rather than plunging us straight into Bedrock, they instead have a spaceship fly out of the studio logo, a spaceship containing that annoying sidekick The Great Gazoo (Alan Cumming) and what appears to be his entire race. After a forced “cutesy” moment where they do indeed see the “Univershell” logo orbiting the planet (ha ha, it is to laugh), one little green man tells Gazoo he's a screw up and will be banished to Earth since there's “almost no civilization to fuck up”. At first I thought I simply misheard “muck up” but the little man very emphatically shouts “quit FUCKING up” a moment later. Wow, and this got a PG rating? Anyway, they lock Gazoo in a capsule and launch his ass to Earth to observe how humans mate. I suppose I can appreciate the effort needed for a wrap-around story, but did we really need one? I mean, come on: Gazoo sucks. He was never funny in the cartoon and there ain't no way no how he's going to be funny here. Not to mention that he and his people are just flat-out visually unappealing: live-action human heads CGI'd onto claymation bodies straight out of Pee Wee's Playhouse or something. Was this movie made in 1986? The California Raisins looked better than this.

Down on Earth, Fred (Mark Addy from The Full Monty if you can believe it) and Barney (Stephen Baldwin?) head to work at the rock quarry (crossing a horrendously fake-looking live dinosaur bridge to get there) and talk about some big test they have coming up. Fred says he'll just cram the morning of the test but, oh ho ho, Barney tells him the test is today! Actually, right now! The test involves Fred piloting a fake-brontosaurus to see how well he can use a beast as a crane. Despite some “comical” mishaps, he winds up passing in the end. And then he kills his proctor by dropping a boulder on the poor man. Meanwhile, Barney gets called in to work on a “backfiring brontosaurus” and you know what that means! DINO-FART! YAY!!!!

Elsewhere in town, a bridal shower presided over by Joan Collins (presumably the old crone is playing herself) is happening at a big ass, fake-looking mansion (can you say “facade”?). The squeaky, annoying bride receives a vacuum cleaner (re: horribly fake-looking dinosaur puppet) from Wilma, who's nowhere to be found. That's because she's off on a balcony staring into a giant matte paintin-er, that is she's looking out over the completely photo-realistic city skyline.

Wilma is played by Nicole Bass-lookalike first class Kristen Thomas, best known as that really manly-looking woman on 3^rd Rock from the Sun. Oh yeah, she's exactly what I think of when I hear the words “Wilma Flintstone”. Good God, she's frightening to look at.

Then again, next to Joan Collins...

So Joan Collins, who I guess is Wilma's mom, comes along to tell Wilma that she should never fraternize with the low-life townies, blah blah. You know where that's going. They head down to the party, where Wilma is laughed out of the place when she suggests the girls all head into Bedrock to go bowling. I'm with the scoffers on this one, myself. Who the fuck bowls for their bridal shower? Bring on the Neanderthal dancers who club you and drag you home by the hair. Alas, the only man to be had at this party is polo-playing stud Chip Rockefeller (what, was "Rock Hudson" too obvious?) (played by Thomas Gibson, aka Greg from Dharma & Greg) riding in astride...Yoshi?

Chip is the obligatory, one-dimensional jerk who wants the fair maiden's hand in marriage, apparently just because. He's an utter cliché, right down to the way he hisses about talking business with Wilma's dad and how he “wants to invest in a certain girl”. Ugh. The other girls try to talk reluctant Wilma into accepting the proposal with some really terrible rich girl jokes like “We'll go shopping together, and play tennis...and browbeat our husbands. Just like our mothers!”. You hear the cymbal crash in the distance, I swear.

That night, and inexplicably on a beach, Fred and Barney talk about their dead-end lives and how the only way to make life worth living is to get women. If you made them women and had them talking about men, this would be decried as sexist pap. As it is, I imagine feminists everwhere nodded their heads in agreement with every word. *steps off soap box* Anyway, this miserably boring scene is made even worse when Gazoo falls out of the sky. The boys are foolish enough to let the annoying bastard out of his capsule so he can start insulting them like a total prick whilst he floats about looking like the worst special effect ever. It's hard to explain in words, but basically imagine if someone moved a cut-out of a character all about in front of pre-recorded footage which is also moving all about, but not in a fashion that even remotely corresponds to the cut-out's movements. It looks like spastic bullshit, and when you couple it with the hokey claymation look of the alien, it's like what would happen if the guy who made Manos: The Hands of Fate discovered optical printing. F-A-K-E.

The next day, I guess (or maybe it's night where the boys are and day where Wilma is at the same time), Wilma is suddenly just in Bedrock and stumbles upon a drive-in diner ("Bronto King", oh ho ho) where she meets car hop waitress Betty (Jane Krakowski, who is so much hotter than she has any right to be in the ridiculous prehistoric get-up). Wilma is reluctant to order anything, since she forgot to bring her money when she ran off from home, and Betty mistakenly assumes she's a “caveless person” who needs some charity, and promptly invites Wilma to stay at her place.

Back on the dark side of town (seriously, did the editor really not notice the glaring continuity error here?), Fred and Barney get ready for bed when Gazoo asks them to start having the sex so he can observe. Barney seems all too willing to oblige...

...but Fred, not so much. Rather than bring the scene to a logical conclusion and then transitioning to the next, the film rather just shows the boys showing up at the drive-in so they can run into the girls (who have finally caught up to the night time) and get this movie over with that much quicker. And for that I can actually be thankful for lack of creativity. But before we get to the schtupping, we have to – for no good reason – have a bit where Fred finds out only he and Barney can see Gazoo, and thusly everyone thinks they're crazy folks talking to thin air. I have no fucking idea why. Anyway, Betty skates on up and Fred hits on her by acting like a drooling moron (no, really, he planned it this way) and IT WORKS AND SHE AGREES TO DATE HIM. And then she sets Barney up with Wilma so we can have that old “switcheroo” problem where everyone's with the wrong person and, oh no, will they ever straighten this out?

Yeah, they will. In fact, they realize the error in the next scene when they all go to a carnival and Barney and Betty chuckle at the ridiculous idea of a “Jurassic Park” ride (boy, that sure was witty) when they all have dinos as pets anyway, and they realize they have complimentary giggles. Really. So the two of them are off and having fun while Fred and Wilma are left alone to- Holy shit, Fred's wearing a digital watch

HELLO?! How do you not catch that? I'm having flashbacks to Charlton Heston's Rolex in The Ten Commandments.

Anyway, Fred and Wilma fall in love over bowling and wind up winning a dinosaur egg as their prize. An egg which soon thereafter hatches Dino, who is the latest in this film's endless barrage of horrible, cheap-looking latex puppets (sometimes a horrible, cheap, latex-looking CGI monstrosity. Or maybe claymation, I really can't be sure). And then it's back to the dark side of town as Fred walks his lady home and gives her a goodnight handshake, at least until Dino fixes things by tripping the two of them up so they can fall into each other's arms and kiss the least romantic kiss ever. And then - I swear to Christ – there's a romantic montage of the two couples set to “You Get What You Give” by The New Radicals, a song not only wildly inappropriate for this movie but one that was also passe and forgotten about by the time it came out.

Gee, that's not...totally nonsensical or anything. This is like the Double Dragon video game popping up in the Double Dragon movie. The movie's universe should have imploded at this impossible self-reference.

Anyway, that night (or on the dark side of town), Joan Collins (having given up completely on the prehistoric gimmick and now just wearing the kind of gaudy outfit she really does anyway) shows up at Betty and Wilma's apartment to drag Wilma home, but she won't go. So momma has to be a bitch and guilt trip Wilma into going by mentioning that dad's birthday is coming up and *sniffle* he might not have many more left, after all. And that's almost certainly true since papa Slaghoople is played by Harvey Korman, who looks positively ancient. Wilma invites Betty and the boys to come along, even though she's afraid they wouldn't like her if they knew she was from a rich family on the hill. Here's an idea: DON'T INVITE THEM THEN. But there they are and she's all nervous, like they “found her out” or something when she actually gave herself away. Fucking stupid.

And so we get a long, tedious scene of everyone discovering just how nice Wilma's house is in a lame duck effort on the movie's part to create tension when Fred decides against proposing marriage since the only ring he can afford looks measly next to the glorious plastic and foam-rubber antiques littering the awfully fake-looking Slaghoople estate. Also, we actually meet papa Slaghoople, who is senile and utterly convinced he's waging a war. I guess that's supposed to be funny. Eventually, Betty winds up telling Wilma off, which sends Wilma off to that balcony to ponder the matte painting again. But then papa shows up to give her her trademark pearl necklace because, oh ho, he thought it was her birthday (I swear I hear that cymbal crash in the distance).

Dinner goes rather uncomfortably, especially when Fred tries to make a toast and Joan Collins and Chip do their damnedest to shame him into shutting up, until Dino shows up (why? Dunno. How? Dunno.). Then it just gets loud and annoying. I love when Dino jumps into Fred's arms and suddenly becomes a puppet with Mark Addy's hand clearly up it's ass. Thems good special effects, they is. Joan Collins gets all mad and tosses the commoners out, prompting Wilma to denounce her family and run away with Fred and the gang because they're nice and mama's a bitch. Chip follows after and randomly invites everyone to Rock Vegas (Look out, it's the point of the whole damn movie!) to see the grand opening of his newest casino, to be celebrated with a concert by “Mick Jagged and the Stones”. Oh ho ho my, will the witty plays-on-words ever, um, begin?

So slam, bam, thank you ma'am we just immediately find ourselves in Rock Vegas, where a ten billion year-old Ann-Margaret, reprising her role of Ann Margrock from the cartoon, regales us with a wheezy gasbag rendition of “Viva Rock Vegas”, a not-so-subtle reference to the movie Viva Las Vegas, in which Ann-Margaret co-starred with Elvis. Seriously, I haven't heard anyone sound this in need of an oxygen tank since Orson Welles literally recorded the voice of Unicron for the cartoon Transformers movie from his death bed. So anyway, the gang have a goofy good time while Chip watches on thanks to surveillance cameras (?) and schemes to break Fred and Wilma up. A-Doi! We finally find out why (I guess “because” wasn't good enough for the first time ever): turns out Chip is actually near destitute and has been borrowing money from the mafia, and now they want it back. Wilma is loaded, and Chip intends to marry her and rob her parents blind to pay his debts. Gazoo watches all of this (he's been in most of the last few scenes, actually, though not doing much) and just finds it entertaining.

Speaking of Gazoo, he finally does something decent, believe it or not. Fred has been hitting it big at the craps tables, and Gazoo points out how funny it is that Fred rolls all winners in Chip's casino. Like some kind of...plot or something. But no, plot could never factor into the Flintstones, could it? Fred won't listen, of course, and soon Chip shows up and talks Fred into playing on the high roller tables. Even dopey old Barney can see the risks, but luckily he's easily distracted by food and Chip's showgirl hench-girlfriend and wanders off. But, oh dear, Betty spots Barney with the showgirl and seeks comfort in the arms of Mick Jagged (Alan Cumming, again). I've never seen a hammier Mick Jagger impersonation, but then again how else would you play it, really. The performance is awful, is the point. Mick, like his real-life counterpart, wastes no time talking the lovely lady into coming to his room. As for Fred, he just keeps on winning until Wilma gets fed up with his cash obsession. THAT'S when Chip calls off the fix so Fred can lose. Well if Wilma already got angry, why's Fred need to lose? Just to rub salt in the wound? Wow, Chip is almost becoming an actual character. Of course, Wilma likes Fred better when he's poor, so really this is all destined to backfire.

So Fred loses everything and finds himself massively in debt to Chip, who says he'll forgive it all if Fred just leaves Bedrock forever and gives Wilma over. Fred isn't down with that so Chip steals Wilma's pearls from the vault, plants them on Fred and pulls the theft alarm so all the guests, including Wilma, will be in the lobby to witness Fred being caught with the pearls. But not before a bunch of other people admit to other crimes, including one guy fessing up to poisoning all the dinosaurs to drive them to extinction. Heavy. Anyway, Chip asks Fred to empty his pockets and he obliges, revealing the necklace. Of course, if he was willing to empty the pockets, that seems to me at least evidence if not proof that he didn't know they were there. I mean, what thief just gives himself away? Why would anyone believe he really did it? I don't get this movie cliché no matter how many times I see it. Security drags Fred off to jail and, hey, why not collar Barney while we're at it? Why? Because!

Although the jail cell is fitted with bars so widely-spaced you could drive a car through them, the boys are just hopelessly trapped. Gazoo shows up and even though he's only supposed to observe, Fred and Barney try to talk him into helping by doing a crying act. But then Barney just, ya know, walks out of the cell to get some tissues and it dawns on everyone that prehistoric prison operates on the honor system, and these dopes have no honor. They bust loose, steal some showgirl outfits and sneak into the casino. After being spotted by security, the boys take refuge in what turns out to be Mick and Betty's room and since Mick is a boring twat, Betty sure is glad to see Barney again. And when Barney lets it spill that the showgirl he was with was Chip's girlfriend, Betty realizes that – A-Doi! - if they tell Wilma Chip has a girlfriend, she won't marry him. And just for good measure Barney El Kabong's Mick (complete with the actual Quick Draw McGraw El Kabong sound effect) so Fred can go on stage with The Stones and sing a love song to Wilma. And then he proposes marriage and she says yes. What happened to the girlfriend?! So they get married and the wedding party (including William Hanna and Joseph Barbara themselves, on hand to witness the tragic death of their franchise) celebrates by singing the Flintstones theme song. Again, the universe ought to implode from the impossibility of it all.

“Death” is the operative term in that last sentence, because this whole movie feels funereal. The closing song and dance number is downright nihilistic, the attempted faux-gaiety being no match for the embarrassment and despair in everyone's eyes. There is no hope or meaning here, only suffering and, indeed, death. Viva Rock Vegas is a wretched film; from the scatter-brained plotting and heartless jokes to the ugly, fake-looking sets and hurried, sub-par special effects, this is one of the hokiest and cheapest-looking movies to reach theaters in recent years. Frankly, it looks like a Direct-to-Video title that got to the big screen only by mix-up (and since it's released by ever-inept Universal Studios, mix-up is far more likely than you might first think). There's probably a multi-million dollar big-budget flick that wound up DTV in this movie's place. Regardless, I refuse to believe that anyone intended for Viva Rock Vegas to wind up in cineplexes the world over. Back when Sony Cinemas were around and this kind of tripe would have been distributed to them by Cannon Films or TriMark? Sure. But in the year 2000, no way.

Viva Rock Vegas would barely pass as one of those Interactive Movie rides at a theme park. It's a total disaster as a feature film. It's not the worst thing I've ever reviewed*, and it certainly wouldn't come close to a Top Ten Worst list (or even Top Twenty or Thirty), but for the typical moviegoer, this would be the kind of thing you'd ask for a refund for. It's dreadful. Mark Addy is passable as Fred and Jane Krakowski is cute as Betty, but Kristen Thomas and in particular Stephen Baldwin are just the pits. They cannot act, never have been able to, and never will be able to. But even with that said, they sink to new lows of bad here. Thomas is as far from Wilma Flintstone as you can get; she's not nice, she's not pretty, she's not a good spouse and she's not attractive in any way. She's hammy and broad and not the least bit amusing. Baldwin is the death of thespianism. You've never seen a more grating Barney Rubble impersonation in your life. The voice is nails on a chalkboard, the mannerisms are equivalent to one of those mechanical cymbal-banging monkey toys, and the overall effect is sheer hateability. I loathed the man for every second he was on screen. His nomination for Worst Supporting Actor at the Razzie Awards was well-earned (though I will not dispute his loss to Barry Pepper from Battlefield Earth).

[*Granted: that may be only because I go out of my way to find truly horrible films that go way beyond the pale]

The sets are, frankly, an embarrassment to the art of production design. They tried really hard to emulate the look of the cartoon, but the problem is that everything looks like the plastic and foam-rubber it's made from rather than looking like actual rocks. They couldn't even be bothered to put real boulders in the freaking backgrounds (they opted for papier mache instead). The dinosaurs look terrible too, a combination of hokey puppets and pathetic CGI that don't live up to the standards of Sesame Street muppets let alone a theatrical film. I'd believe Kermit T. Frog was real before I'd buy into Dino or the Brontosaurus cranes.

This movie was clearly meant for the littlest of kids, but even they would be bored by it and I wouldn't take my kid to a movie with instances of the word “Fuck” anyway. How'd they get that past the censors, and what were they even thinking? This movie isn't totally appropriate for kids and it's too dumb for adults, so who's the true audience then? Looking at the receipts, no one.

I'm Redunbeck, and I'm off to the real Las Vegas to drink away the bad memories.

It's a Snoozer. Literally: Dream Lover Review

2009-05-11T05:51:00.003-04:00

This may well be either the shortest or longest review I've ever written. Shortest because of the utter lack of anything happening in this week's film or longest because of my angry ranting at the filmmakers for producing something so Godawful dull and boring. Either way, I have a feeling this will be a record-setting entry in Redunbeck Reviews.

The film at hand is the 1986 somnambulation thriller Dream Lover, which I'm sure you've never heard of. If I said “Kristy McNichol art house movie”, you may understand why this is so. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with Kristy McNichol; she's the cutest damn thing I think I've ever seen and given a good script and director she could turn in one hell of a performance (see the long-lost, but recently discovered White Dog for proof of that, believe me). But come on: Kristy McNichol art house? Who wants to see this beautiful girl just sitting around talking about theoretical bullshit and staring ponderously into the empty space of a room while the director gets a hard-on from thinking he's making something to rival the contemplative masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman? Blech. But that's ultimately what we've got here, a film that thinks it's art when it's really just a plotless snoozer with some visual references to Cries & Whispers, a film I cannot believe I have sullied by naming it on a blog such as mine. Sorry, Ingmar.

This film is so dull that I seriously wonder what it is I think I have to say, but then again I got so angry the first time I saw it that I literally began chucking things at my television screen, so maybe there's hope after all. Hope for you, anyway. Nothing but despair for me.

OK, I know I don't normally discuss DVD covers here, but I have to mention this one:

Who the fuck is that woman on the cover? She isn't Kristy McNichol, that's for sure. The shadow on the left, sure. That's Kristy, I recognize the frizzy “I'm scary now” look because she seemed to do that a lot for some reason. But the chick on the right...I have no clue. She's not anywhere to be found except here.

Anyway, there's not much point in discussing anything related to the DVD since the cocksucker doesn't work in my computer. It's a DVD-R, part of Warner Brothers' new budget line called the Archive Collection. DVD-Rs don't playback on PC, so I had to go and REBUY this movie as a video-on-demand download so I could watch it on the computer to write this. But it turns out I can't take screencaps off the VOD, so now I'm piss-boiling mad and I haven't even started the movie yet. God damn motherfucking Dream Lover! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

So the film opens with Kathy (Kristy McNichol) lying in bed and dreaming about attending an opera where she and her date are the only attendees. They literally just sit there and watch the off-screen stage for a minute or two while the credits role by. And I must note one of these credits. This film was lensed by none other than Sven Nykvist, Oscar-winning collaborator of Ingmar Bergman on literally dozens of films. Dream Lover's hack director, Alan J. Pakula, really must have thought he was making something to rival Bergman. He even steals the fade to red effect from the aforementioned Cries & Whispers. Fuck you, buddy! You're not even close. God that pisses me off. Why waste someone as talented as Nykvist? And Sven, why'd you take this pap on? I mean, I know Ingmar had retired by now but wasn't Liv Ullman directing something she could have used you for? Why fly over to the States to shoot crap like this? Christ.

Also, I should note that this sequence takes place in deafening silence, as if the soundtrack were actually emitting a noise-cancelling signal to silence your very thoughts. This is pin-drop quiet and given how still the characters are you could easily think you had the film on pause. So after this literal nothing-happening credit sequence we see Kathy playing flute in her music improv class and then getting an offer from her instructor, Kevin or Bill or something (doesn't matter), to play with his band in New York. Only problem is Kathy will have to break off the vacation to Japan her father wanted to take her on. At the opera (no, that dream wasn't foreshadowing anything, this movie is just uncreative is all), Kathy tells a little white lie to her father Ben (Paul Shenar, from not much of anything), that it's a master class she wants to go to. Their friends encourage Ben to say yes but he just says “I'm sure she'll do whatever suits her” which is code for “I will kill this bitch if she doesn't go to Japan and she knows it”, I think. The movie seems to think so to, as the next scene is Ben's friends driving home, the wife flat-out saying that she blames Ben for his wife's death. But just forget this ever happened because these people are never seen again and Ben's wife is never mentioned again.

STOP! Creepy Time! There's something fundamentally wrong with cutting to Kathy and her father in bed together with Kathy NIBBLING HIS EAR. What the fuck?! And when Kathy says she'll go to Japan after all, they peck each other on the lips. Ewwwwwwwww. This ain't right. And it's all pointless as Ben changes his mind and cancels the trip a couple of minutes later. Why was it even in the script, then? It didn't affect anything, it created zero dramatic tension...it just happened and then they move on. Utterly useless. And then it's dream time again as Kathy nods off and has one of her recurring nightmares, where in she walks down a long ass hallway, opens a big door, gets frightened by what she sees and then leaps out a window. There's an inexplicable costume change in there somewhere, I don't know why. The symbolism (I assume that's what it is) is lost on me.

So Kathy moves into her NYC apartment and on her first day there she's rather shocked when a strange man walks right in. Apparently he's the boyfriend of the previous renter and and since he didn't know she had moved out (helluva chick he's got), he just let himself in since the door was open. Rather than just apologizing and leaving, this awkward man makes a goof of himself trying to convince Kathy he's nice and not at all weird, which is pretty much a fail as he knocks shit over as she shuffles him to the door. Later that night, after totally bringing the house down with her electric flute (?!) at a club, Kathy and her instructor guy (Kevin, I think...?) head back to her place for an even more awkward moment: while the two of them are cleaning up some mugs he broke with a failed juggling act, Kevin moves in to kiss Kathy and gets within a fraction of an inch of her lips, but then randomly backs off. And then they just stare at each other for a good thirty seconds before coming together for a mutual kiss. The best part of this is the way Kathy keeps shifting her eyes from Kevin's eyes to his lips, back and forth and back and forth, like she's trying to figure out what this strange, lip-based human custom is. It's like she didn't realize you could do this with someone who isn't your fucking dad. And then they, erm, make beautiful music together. And afterward, they shake hands. Swear to God. She boots him out (Daddy's coming over today!) and they shake on it like they just cut a business deal or something.

During a nap, Kathy has the hallway dream again but this time the door has something nice to show her, a living recreation of that famous Sunday in the Park painting (the one Cameron stares at in Ferris Bueller). She likes it so much she walks right on in and joins the fun. Back in the waking world, that creepy dude from earlier is back and standing outside Kathy's bedroom shaking his keys like he's trying to call his dog for a car ride or something. The director sees fit to linger on this forfuckingever. Why, I don't know. Kathy wakes up and heads out into the kitchen to make a cup of hot milk. Creepy dude pops up, tackles her to the ground and then...shakes the keys in front of her. He says his girlfriend gave them to him and I guess that's supposed to explain how he got in. If only Kathy hadn't been shown locking the chain lock before all this happened. I could drive a semi through that plot hole. Anyway, they stare at each other for a long time, creepy guy asks where his girlfriend went and threatens to shove a frayed lamp cord up Kathy's hoo-hah as torture, they have a fight, she throws the scalding milk at him (misses, but he just acts like he got burned because there are no retakes in Dream Lover, by God), and finally Kathy buries a knife in the guy's back and kills him.

As the cops question Kathy about the incident, Ben shows up and takes her aside to tell her that she absolutely must lie about what happened (specifically, to say “everything went black” and she can't remember what happened) because if she says what really happened, they'll send her to the chair. Seriously, he says she was in the wrong here. Um...last time I checked here in the states you have the right to kill any strange person you see inside your home. They don't even have to touch you; if they're in your house without an invitation, you can murderize them real good and you're legally in the right. It's called self-defense. So, the point is this whole scene is nonsense. I mean, they even read Kathy her rights.

After five solid minutes of literally nothing happening, Kathy relives her ordeal in a nightmare. And then, later that same day, she relives it again during a nap. This bitch does nothing but sleep and jam on the electric flute and sadly that flute is not coming back for the rest of the film. She goes to a doctor who says barbiturates would help, but also that she can't have any. Nyah nyah nyah! A despondent Kathy goes home for a soothing bath and – For God's sake! She falls asleep again!! Is she narcoleptic? She has the nightmare again, which inspires her to go this sleep center her doctor mentioned. Only problem is it turns out to be a research facility, not a treatment center. Lucky for her, scientist Michael (Ben Masters, best known for his utterly hilarious drunkard character Julian Crane on world's wackiest soap opera Passions [how I miss it]) takes an interest in her and, after showing her around his wacky underground laboratory, offers to do a brain scan on her while she snoozes and he even teaches her some wacky trick to wake herself up before the dream gets scary.

Since Kathy can pass into a coma at the drop of a hat, and since Michael coincidentally has jammies in her size, they decide to do all this crap right away. But first Kathy needs Michael to soothe her to sleep with her old childhood bed time ritual, which involves Michael drawing a “magic circle” in the air and reciting a silly poem. Ooooooo-kkkk... Michael's trick works and Kathy wakes up before the bad parts happen and then, just for fun, the two of them pore over the five miles of paper from the polygraph recording of Kathy's sleep. Also, somewhere in between Kathy waking up and Kathy coming out of the bedroom, a full day seems to pass as Michael talks about all this happening last night. It was broad daylight when they went down there in the first place. My plot hole semi keeps on truckin'. Michael gives a science lesson about how your brain is sending signals to your body while you dream, and how some chemical paralyzes your muscles so you don't sleepwalk, and how some people don't have that chemical so they do sleepwalk, and how he randomly intuited that Kathy might be one of those people, and how his test results show that she actually is one of those people, a little bit, not enough to actually walk around but enough to move about in bed, blah blah blah blah blah. This is the part of the movie where the writer seems to be trying to put you to sleep so you can sleepwalk out of the theater and sleeptalk the box office into giving you a refund, but not before you sleepslaughter the projectionist and commit sleeparson on the fucking print of this fucking movie. Good God, shut up and do something! No, don't play a tape of your sleepwalking cat! Fuck this is boring!

The point of this bullshit is...well, OK there is no point (seriously, I'm not just saying that to make a joke. There's no point), but Michael does mention a drug he concocted that cancels the paralysis chemical and turns test subjects like his cat into sleepwalkers. Why would you invent that? I mean, what purpose does it serve? Shouldn't you invent the opposite drug so people who naturally sleepwalk can be cured? What good does it do to make people into sleepwalkers other than to give you something to laugh at as they bump into shit and mumble about nonsense? Who funded this research, anyway? It couldn't possibly serve any practical purpose.

That night, Kathy has the nightmare again and this time she attacks Kevin in her sleep, thinking he's the attacker. She goes to Michael and he has her sleep with the brain scan deal again, but this time he tells her how to change the dream when it gets too scary rather than waking up. She plans to just run out the door when the bad guy shows up but when this actually goes into motion, she runs out the door and sees the creepy, shadowy knife-wielding image of herself we saw on the DVD cover earlier. And then she stabs herself and in reality she runs around and attacks Michael. And when she wakes up they just recount the attack again. Seriously, fifty percent of this movie is made up of replays of that one scene and people talking about that one scene. The monotony is excruciating. Finally, they try the experiment again and this time the door reveals that lovely painting.

So the next day Kathy tells her dad she can't go to Japan...again (she has a record deal in London that you really don't care about, trust me) and then heads home to find Kevin boinking another woman in their bed. Rather than, you know, flipping out she just heads off to say goodbye to Michael, who's all excited because he tried the sleepwalking drug on himself. Well, he's excited for a moment anyway, but he winds up deflated when he reviews the tape and realizes he only tossed and turned and never actually sleepwalked. Worse yet he doesn't even remember the dream because he didn't wake up right away or some bullshit. Kathy offers to wake him up after his next dream and – woo hoo – it's time for more science crap. Michael can't make this sleepwalking shit work and decides that his dreams, whatever they are, aren't powerful enough. But aren't we lucky that Kathy's nightmares are so potent? So they trade places and Kathy takes the drug and once again she has the nightmare, only this time it takes place in the lab and with Michael in place of the attacker. This part of the movie is utterly insufferable. It goes on for fucking days with dream Michael molesting Kathy and real Michael watching Kathy sleepwalk and inappropriately sexy music playing on the soundtrack... Ugh. Really, nothing is fucking happening, at least not anything of consequence. This is where I started hucking things at my television because it's just awful.

Kathy finally wakes up and quite rightly asks Michael why he didn't wake her sooner and he has no answer because he's a totally uncaring creep who knows full well he just exploited a human being for his research. Kathy leaves in a huff and later on Michael notices that he forgot to give her the anti-sleepwalking serum. Wait, you have that?! Why aren't you sharing that with the world?!?! You selfish asshole! So now Kathy's liable to just go around sleepwalking every time she sleeps and since she takes a nap every five minutes, I suppose that's bad news. Michael heads over to Kathy's place to give her the drug, but she's already on her flight to London. Soon enough, it's nap time again (Good grief, my Grandmother can stay awake longer than this chick) and Kathy sleepstabs Kevin with a plastic knife. Luckily he, and everyone else on board, is asleep and the act goes unnoticed.

In London, Kathy sleepwalks the hallway dream in the hotel, much to the confusion of an onlooking guest who catches her when she makes the swan dive. Waking up in the man's arms, Kathy realizes that she didn't get the second drug and is rather upset when she can't reach Michael on the phone. But that's only because he's flying to London already. Kathy tries to call her father only for his secretary to tell her he's already in London. She goes to him and tells him all about what's been going on, and Dad's answer is to get her some barbiturates and drug her all to hell. Yeah, that's the ticket! While pops is away, Kathy wanders around his hotel room hiding all the sharp implements and closing the windows but (dun dun DUN) she misses a butter knife sitting on the table! So what, she's going to kill someone with a butter knife? You'd have better luck trying to cut them with a balloon. Kathy goes down for another nap (seriously, seek help) and has a pleasant dream about being a little girl again, which she acts out in sleepwalking. Dad comes back and knocks on the door since apparently she has locked him out. This somehow changes her dream to the hallway dream, during which she grabs the butter knife, which she hides in her pocket. Letting her father in, finally, she dreams that he's the apartment attacker and, of course, she whips that butter knife out and stabs him. And she actually draws blood with A BUTTER KNIFE. Kathy dashes out onto the balcony (the top of a castle tower in her dream...don't ask) and perches precariously on the edge just as Michael arrives. He can't get into her room and has to resort to going through a neighboring suite and climbing from balcony to balcony to get to her. Kathy gets to the swan dive part of her dream and leaps from the balcony. In the dream, she goes splat but in reality Michael catches her, she wakes up, the writer runs out of ideas, and the movie just stops.

The Unfathomable Badness of The Spirit

2009-05-04T06:11:00.007-04:00

The Spirit is nothing less than a blight on my very soul that cannot be removed or in any way repaired or improved. I have never before walked out of a movie knowing with absolute certainty that I had just stared directly into the death of cinema. But there I was for two embarrassing hours feeling like Dave in 2001: a Space Odyssey as he rides into the black hole: seeing things so terrible they make your mind snap and hearing a chorus of wails and screams – the sound of the human spirit itself being irreparably crushed. The trek to my car afterward was a long, cold, dark journey of the soul as I tried not to shake and sob so hard as I realized what I had just been through. And then I began to seethe.

And then I got really, really pissed off.

Part of me is convinced that there simply are no words for this movie. I could write a book and illustrate it with hundreds and hundreds of frames from the movie and you still wouldn't understand if you hadn't seen it. The Spirit is a place where sight and sound converge in a way that no one has ever experienced before and, hopefully, never will again. Nothing in the history of motion pictures, dating all the way back to nickelodeons in the 1880s, has ever been so uniquely horrible. Trying to describe the experience of The Spirit in words is like trying to explain the new color you just invented to someone who has never seen it. Good luck, pal.

Ed Wood is no longer the punchline of bad movie jokes. Frank Miller has stolen the throne in the kingdom of cinematic shittiness and he will reign in perpetuity. Not even the worst of Wood's output – Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 from Outer Space, or even those weird softcore horror pornos from the 70's – is anywhere near as inept as The Spirit. It is a rare thing indeed to be be able to say you've witnessed the birth and implosion of a career in the span of but one movie, but Frank Miller has given us all the ability to see this phenomenon which henceforth will be known as The Miller Effect.

Now I know what some of you are saying right now. “This is Frank Miller's second movie! Sin City was first!” Yeah, well, fuck you because you are wrong. While Miller was graced with a co-director credit for Sin City, he had zilch to do with directing it. He was a consultant, there only to verify that the visuals of the film reflected the style of his comic book. Robert Rodriguez is just a huge geek who got a hard-on from the thought of people thinking he actually shared the lens with a comic legend like Frank Miller. We can, then, blame Rodriguez for unleashing this scourge upon us because it sure didn't take long for that credit to go to Frank's head and make him think of himself as an auteur. What's weird is that Miller didn't bother adapting one of his own books, choosing instead to dredge up a largely forgotten about character from the Golden Age of Comic Books back in the fucking forties, a detective from a cheerily colorful universe of Dick Tracy-ish crime bustin'. The Spirit comic is the exact tonal opposite of Miller's hopelessly self-aware, self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing hard boiled noir garbage. What's the deal, Frank? Did you know how clueless you were and figured you should just ruin someone else's beloved stories rather than unleashing yourself on yourself? Or did you think you could apply that faux-gritty, Rorschach blot-looking style of yours to anything and give it The Miller Touch? Did you trick yourself into thinking you were actually elevating The Spirit by completely altering it all the way down to the very DNA level?

Whatever it was you were thinking, if it wasn't “Hey I bet I can totally fuck up and forever shame myself”, you were hopelessly wrong. Because you did just that: you forever branded yourself with the deepest shame by producing an unprecedented turd. I think it no mere coincidence that distributor Lionsgate saw stocks take a free-fall a week after The Spirit hit the cinemas.

The Spirit is pretty much a self-reviewing film with the way it's opening credits start over a flat-line heart monitor. It's dead on arrival, alright. Up in his pretentiously stylized belfry, The Spirit, clad in fashionable boxer shorts and Zorro mask, gets a phone call informing him of something big going down down by the river involving the mysterious Octopus, a hard-to-catch criminal. It is here that the movie commits a fatal flaw of bad moviemaking: referencing better movies. The Spirit's answer to the phone call is simply “I'm on my way”, the catch phrase and movie tagline of DICK TRACY, which was made into a masterful film by Warren Beatty back in 1990. When I saw The Spirit in theaters and heard that line, I considered leaving and stopping to snatch up Beatty's film from the video store along the way. I want to do that now! Bad move, Frank.

Throwing on his all-black suit and bright red low-rez CGI tie and looking NOTHING LIKE THE COMIC BOOK COUNTERPART, The Spirit goes jumping from rooftop to rooftop and running all over and climbing shit and WHY DON'T YOU GET A CAR?! And at what point did you step in a puddle of radioactive semen?

God, these visual effects make no sense AND they suck. This shit looked hokey in Sin City, but it looks downright amateurish in The Spirit. There's a laughable bit here where Spirit runs along some power lines, which would have been cool oif he wasn't clearly a CGI silhouette. It looks like one of those Office 97 clip art men being pushed across the screen. The animation is so stiff it's barely animation at all.

And to make it all ever worse, Spirit starts doing this cheap Max Payne knock-off “noir” voice over with needlessly complex and obtuse language that means nothing. And since alleged “Actor” Gabriel Macht insists on half-whispering, it's hard to decipher some of it, too. God, two minutes in and I already hate this movie! And oh God, this Macht guy. Horrible. I will try so very hard to find words to capture this performance on the page, but forgive me if the task turns out to be to herculean for anyone short of Yahweh himself. Anyway, after doing all kinds of acrobatic bullshit, Spirit realizes “Oh shit, I don't have time for this!” (direct quote) and decides to go save some screaming woman from danger. He does so...I think (the whole thing is shown as silhouettes on a wall, but it's fucking night time, so how are we supposed to make this shit out?!)... and in the process gets a knife stuck in him. No worries, he casually pulls it out and then stares blankly like a mindless tool as he tries, and fails, to think of some way to explain this to the baffled woman. And then he distracts her by tossing the knife (Ooh, shiny! Women can't resist shiny!!!) and runs.

Down by the river, informant Dusty is surprised when a nubile woman, the poorly named Sand Serif (Eva Mendez), rises out of the water and director Frank Miller magically transports him from dry land to the middle of the water in just one ham-handed edit. Gun shots ring out just as Spirit and Leibowitz, a cop who's car he commandeered, arrive on the scene. As Dusty tell his tale in that wheezy “I'm a-dyin'” way, a flashback reveals that Sand is innocent and a mystery shooter took out Dusty. Sand dives to the bottom as said shooter keeps gunning for her. She arrives on bottom to retrieve a pair of treasure chests from her partner, and winds up with only one of the chests as she makes her escape. The mystery shooter takes the other. When they reach the surface, Sand's partner says that they're dealing with the Octopus here.

Oh, alright. This could be interesting. Fans of the comic book know that The Octopus was never shown except for his gloved hands, so that means that Frank Miller could give the character pretty much any look he wanted. Wonder what he came up with.

A drag queen. Of course. You fucking moron. It's like Frank had just seen Pink Flamingos and said “Hey, that Divine character looks real menacing and evil. Let's go with that!”. I apologize to Divine for tying her to something this bad. She was so much more talented than anyone we're gonna see in this turd.

Anyway, upon reaching the surface, The Octopus (poor, poor Samuel L. Jackson) spots the Spirit and initiates what is, without question, the single worst fight scene I have ever seen. It's a drag queen and a guy in a Zorro get-up reaching into hammerspace - that other plane of existence that exists just off-screen in cartoons, where the characters can reach to grab giant hammers and other objects – and bringing back random items such as severed heads, kitchen sinks, and at one point a seven-foot long pipe wrench, with which to bash each other as they make lame puns. It's an opus of jaw-dropping badness. The humor is so shallow that if it was a puddle you could stand in it and not get your feet wet. You cannot grasp the awfulness of this scene by merely reading about it. My dreams are haunted by Sam Jackson hitting me with a commode and bellowing “Come on! TOILETS ARE FUNNYYYYYY!” This is what most movies would call a “gag take”, the cast just fucking around with some props to amuse themselves while the lighting guy fiddles around or what have you. In The Spirit, that's good enough to make the final cut.

Fuck it, I need alcohol to get through this one. Some might find it uncouth to drink a Sam Adams at 4 AM. I deem it necessary. They wind up stumbling and mumbling like drunks anyway (“You talkin' ca-razyyyyyyyy talk, Octopus!”) so I can say it all ties in together.

Spirit collapses from his injuries and wakes up in the arms of Dr. Helen (someone or other), the lovely and lonely woman who loves him. She begs him to go to the hospital but he's the Goddamn Batman-er, I mean he's the Spirit, and he has bad guys to beat up. And yes, that is how he describes his job. “I beat up bad guys”. Woo hoo, so scary. Our old pal Dusty finally dies, and in doing so reveals a locket hidden in his hand. Spirit takes it, prompting an angry speech from Police Chief I Can't Believe It's Not Bob Hoskins (Not Bob Hoskins), who is also afflicted with the Max Payne syndrome and talks like a character out of His Girl Friday for no good reason.

Elsewhere, Octopus heads for his lair with one of his goons in tow and now is as good a time as any to discuss said goons. Octopus has an army of clones who work for him as henchmen, all named things like Ethos and Pathos and Logos, etc. They are all fucking retards and incredibly annoying. Imagine an even dumber George “The Animal” Steele with a lisp and a “follow you like a puppy” complex and you basically have these guys. They make me want to suicide so badly. Thankfully, Octopus shoots the one in this scene, but there's plenty more left. This is also a good time to discuss a rather bizarre running gag in the film: the Octopus' obsession with eggs. Half of this guy's dialogue is related to eggs for never-explained reasons. He just keeps bring them up, like when Pathos says he'll go to the hospital for his broken arms and Octopus says “Everyone would know that an evil genius like me couldn't afford medical insurance for employees. That's egg on my face. I don't...like...EGG!...ON MY FACE!” Every other scene has this shit going on. I can only assume Frank Miller saw Funny Games and thought the whole egg theme was just brilliant.

Spirit looks inside the locket he took, and which Dusty grabbed from Sand's neck earlier on, and sees pictures of Sand and himself from when they were kids. Flashback time~! A young Spirit, real name Denny Colt, has pawned his bike to buy the locket for Sand, his one and only beloved, but just before he gives it to her she spots some serious bling in a passing car and, being a woman in a Frank Miller product, she's instantly infatuated with SHINY! OOH, SHINY!!! SHINYSHINYSHINY! Ya know, like real women are, all obsessed with material things and crushing boyhood dreams. Christ, Frank... The DVD chapter is even called “Something Shiny”. Of course, I have to wonder why some rich woman drove through a low-class neighborhood hanging her gloved and diamond-bedecked hand out the car window. Other than to give Frank Miller an excuse to be a piece of shit.

Young Denny offers Sand the less-shiny locket he bought her and while she excepts it, she makes sure to make Denny understand that this doesn't make her his girl. Yes, I think we can all see why Denny loves her. It's so...obvious?

This...this is what defines my entire existence.

The two do eventually kiss and all that cutesy kid shit, but then things go wrong in a sequence that I will never understand. Denny's washed-up boxer uncle Pete gets into some kid of trouble with a mugger and Sand's dad, a beat cop, steps in to help but accidentally gets shot in the process. Dumb old Pete thinks it was his fault and blows his own brains out on the spot. Sand and Denny show up and Sand gets mad about Pete and tells a TV news crew that she hates cops and then she and Denny wander into an alley and she starts complaining about wanting money and jewels and dresses and...way to care about your dad dying, bitch. Jesus Christ, the depth of Frank Miller's woman hate is unfathomable. And it's indecipherable. I mean really, she's mad that Pete died and she hates her cop dad? What the fuck does that even...AHHHHH! And then she wanders off into the night and Denny never saw her again.

Back in the present, in his secret underground sewer dojo (???) Octopus has a meeting with the Thos' and his henchwoman Silken Floss, played by the incomparable Scarlett Johansson. Incomparably terrible, that is. She makes Gabriel Macht look like fucking De Niro by comparison at every turn. Again, here's a performance you have to see and hear to understand fully. Her woodenness, lack of effort and obvious contempt for the material she is reading are so incredible. Did Frank Miller even bother directing her at all, I wonder? She seems like she's been left on her own to do whatever and she just can't think of anything to do. Not that I have time to ponder that right now, because the scene we're in is another one like the fight scene – it makes no. Fucking. Sense. Octopus is dressed like a samurai in this dojo of his and when he opens his treasure chest he finds Jason's Golden Fleece. This is bad because he actually wanted the contents of the other treasure chest: The Blood of Heracles. How two mythical objects like this came to exist and then found their way to the bottom of a muddy river in Central City, USA, is never explained. It just makes no sense. Somehow or other, the Blood of Heracles is supposed to give anyone who drinks it (ewwww) God-like powers, and that would help Octopus conquer the world.

But since he has the Golden Fleece instead, he knows Sand Serif must have the blood. Enraged by this turn of events, Octopus turns into a cartoon and kills the Thos'.

I loudly shouted “WHY!?” in the theater when this happened. No one had an answer. And then Silken and Octopus discuss the situation as the background morphs into a cliché Japanese “Rising Sun” image. What sense does that make? I don't get it. This scene...my God. If it's on youtube...just watch it.

Elsewhere, Sand Serif has a meeting with the art...related person...who was supposed to find her the Golden Fleece. Or, as Sand calls it, “The shiny thing to end all shiny things”. Also, she randomly photocopies her own ass for no reason. Except so she can ogle it, because I guess she's a secret narcissistic lesbian or something. You know, like all women are. Anyway, she knows the art dealer/stealer guy sold her out to Octopus and takes all his money or something and then gives the options to either kill himself or see his life ruined when Sand sends photos of him getting close with a teenage girl to the news. He takes the first choice. Wow, harsh.

Over at the hospital, Spirit is getting checked out by Dr. Helen, who tells him he needs some bed rest. Spirit tells her she's the one who needs bed rest because she looks like a dog. Mind you, she looks perfectly fine, but she's a woman in Miller-dom, so she can be insulted at will. Of course, Helen is so charmed by the way Spirit treats her like dirt that she gives in completely to his sexual advances, even begging for them. But then Not Bob Hoskins and his cutey rookie bust in to remind Helen that she “looks like Hell”. Mind you, Not Bob Hoskins is Helen's dad. And he very angrily told her she looks like Hell. Lovely. And to cap off Helen's woe, Spirit can't help but hit on Officer Morgenstern, the rookie who's tagging along.

I...Wow. Just wow. The misogyny is just overpowering. The two-timing, skirt-chasing piece of shit is our hero and the hard-working doctor woman is a dog who looks like Hell and gets crapped on by every man she meets. Whatcha trying to say, Frank?

As Spirit, Morgenstern, and Not Bob Hoskins walk down the street, Spirit nonchalantly stops a mugger, delivers an impromptu TV PSA about dental hygiene, and hits on a news anchorwoman all in under a minute. Whatever. The point of this scene seems to be just to say “Sand Serif” a lot as the three discuss her returning to Central City, which apparently is like a crime or something. I guess the Central City Anti-Tourism Board stepped in when they saw money show up in the toll booth for the first time in fifteen years. Turns out that Sand sent the art dealer's money to the police force as an “anonymous” donation, but they tracked it to his office and found his corpse. And the tell-tale ass photocopy. I can at least say that this scene doesn't suck, but it is boring. The only really good thing here is that the actress playing Morgenstern is both cute and plucky and she's actually entertaining to watch. And she gets to be intelligent, too!

You know, I'm starting to question the significance of the Octopus to this movie. Our next scene is with him and, again, it's just plain damn silly and does nothing to establish his villainy. He's in a lab looking at a fucked-up Thos clone that's just a foot with a head (?) while Silken Floss complains of falling profits from their drug dealing or something else that doesn't matter anyway. This scene is pointless.

Spirit finds Sand in a hotel and tries to arrest her but instead they wind up in one of those “masked man trying to let on his secret identity” deals as Spirit tries to make Sand realize he's Denny, but she just does the old “He's dead! You're dead!” thing and accidentally shoves Spirit right out a window. What a lightweight wuss he must be. Luckily, his cape catches on a gargoyle on the way down so he can hang there and be insulted by none-too-impressed pedestrians down below. Oh yeah, make your hero out as a tool and someone the people hate. This is like when Jimmy's name gets booed at Video Armageddon in The Wizard. Why would you do that? Anyway, since his cape can't hold – and since a glass elevator of women who need to be hit on is going by – Spirit resorts to using his belt as a lasso to swing himself to safety. Too bad his pants fall down and reveal his boxers.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, he takes a cell phone call from Morgenstern, who tells him one of Octopus' goons was found dead and covered in industrial salt. And after getting to safety, he starts narrating out loud like a crazy person on a subway car as he tells the Octopus he's coming for him. You talkin' ca-razyyyyy talk, Spirit. As he heads off to an industrial salt plant Spirit dispatches of some Thos' and then runs into Silken. And being a womanizing asshole, he immediately gets all kissey-kissey and gets an injection of knockout juice for his stupidity.

And now, Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls, Children of All Ages. The. Worst. Scene. Evarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!! Spirit wakes up tied to a chair and is as bewildered as the rest of us when Octopus walks in...

Dressed as a Nazi. This is where I again outright shouted “WHYYYYYYYY?!” And no one had an answer. And again, this Octopus scene is totally worthless, as his grand speech about death is interrupted by a phone call (record-scratch on the soundtrack and everything). Even Spirit can't tolerate this scene, “Man I am getting old just listening to you”. The sheer buffoonery of the Octopus is so...so... God damn stupid! Anyway, Spirit manages to get Octopus to get to the point, which is explaining why the two of them are so invulnerable. Flashback to Officer Denny Colt's death, gunned down with jizz bullets in the grand Frank Miller tradition, after which Octopus used his body as the test subject for an immortality serum. It worked, and Denny rose from his grave days later reborn as unstoppable crime fighter The Spirit. And Not Bob Hoskins is shown to be fully aware of who and what Spirit is, but that really doesn't matter much to the plot so I wonder why they bother with it. Octopus shot himself up too, and here we are. And now Octopus wants the Blood so he can do the God thing...yadda yadda. And then the scene goes from stupid to despicable when Octopus feeds an adorable kitten a botched batch of serum just so they can watch the creature melt and run down a drain. For the first time, Spirit actually wins me over as he vows to avenge the cat.

Spirit gets his chance quickly as Octopus' Parisian belly-dancing henchwoman Plaster, of Paris (Paz Vega) frees him from his bindings after...what else...remembering the time they fucked. Spirit gives Octopus a whoopin' and then he and Plaster head topside where they kiss all random-like until Plaster runs a sword through Spirit's gut and leaves him to die as she dances right on out of the movie. Yeah, that character was necessary. Spirit stumbles down to the docks and falls into the river, where he finally embraces Angel of Death Lorelei, a specter who's been haunting him at every near-death experience in the movie but who's role is so limited (she just says “You're so close” or “You're almost mine” and nothing else) she's hardly worth mentioning. I don't even care who played her and you can't tell since the wonky effects obstruct the view of her face. As he dies, Spirit sees ol' Sand flash before his eyes and he decides to keep on living for Christ knows what reason (she's a whore!), much to the chagrin of Lorelei. This is quite literally where the movie dies, as indicated by the flatline:

After collapsing on the beach, Spirit wakes up in Helen's hospital and jumps out of bed after being clinically dead for three hours. His first thought? He wants a new tie. Secondly, he wants the Octopus dead. Elsewhere, Sand and Silken meet up to exchange treasures (scene underscored with raunchy softcore porno music because dey is pretee gurlz and Frank like pretee gurlz). And of course, the women have to act dumb as they talk about how fabulous they look and how fun it is to be naughty with the guns and whatnot. Ugh. Not Bob Hoskins and Morgenstern are spying on the deal, Morgenstern armed with the most recockulous cannon I've ever seen. Things go awry during the exchange as the Thos clone on hand starts shooting and Octopus pops out of Silken's truck. But then, oho, The Spirit shows up...and gets gunned down. The coppers rush in guns a-blazin' and airships a-flyin'. This bit is just the worst kind of comedy because it makes everyone look so god damn ridiculous. Octopus and the Thos' whip out their guns and just start waving them around and firing into the air at the choppahs and they look so silly doing so. Like spastics.

Morgenstern puts that cannon to good use finally and blows the Octopus up something good, even if it only takes one of his arms off. Not Bob Hoskins steps in to finish the job with several bullets to the head, but Octopus just bends over and shakes them out. And then he goes to drink the blood, but spends too long howling “YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!” into the heavens, allowing Sand time enough to shoot the vase and spill the blood. Spirit, who was wearing a kevlar vest it turns out, runs up and shoves a grenade into Octopus' gut, bellowing “Let's Die!”, which is the best bad hero phrase this side of “The Good Guys Always Win, Even in the Eighties”. Sand has other ideas, though, as she covers herself and Spirit with the Golden Fleece (why is a fleece that big? Was it actually the Golden Comforter?), and they survive the blast. Spirit returns Sand's locket (aw) and the kiss (aww) right in front of Helen (oh). Spirit and Sand say their goodbyes and then Spirit has the audacity to go over to Helen and tell her he loves her and she just accepts it, I guess. Elsewhere, Silken finds Octopus' finger crawling across the ground and declares she's starting over! Finally (finally) the movie ends with Spirit vowing to always protect his city because he is...it's Spirit.

Thank God that's over. This movie is SHIT. It's unadulterated, putrid, festering SHIT. The Spirit is stupid, unfunny, undramatic, ugly-ass looking, sad-sack ass directed, barely-acted shit. Everything is wrong with this movie. It can't decide if it's serious or satire, but either way it is definitely malicious towards both Spirit-creator Will Eisner and the movie-going public. Every frame of this movie reeks with contempt for anyone who would watch it and condescension towards anyone who would like it. This movie is aimed at the lowest common denominator, the people too dense to know the movie they like is openly mocking them for doing so. It's quite clear that Frank Miller's game plan here was “Eh, I'll just do whatthefuckever because all the idiots out there will buy it for my name and suck my cock 'cuz I Am a Geen-Yussss!”. Yeah, well we all saw past the bullshit, Frank. The Spirit bombed like Nagasaki and made Miller look like the joke he is. The reviews were universally savaging and audiences were pathetically small (less than twenty people per screening on average, by my math). Were it not for the record-setting disaster of Delgo around the same time, The Spirit would have gone down as the new slang word for Box Office failure.

Plain and simple, this movie does not deserve anyone's money. It is to my eternal shame and embarrassment that I not only saw it twice but actually paid for the dishonor both times. And when I count the hours I have spent viewing it, writing about it, and thinking about it, I see that my life is almost a day shorter and that makes me sad.

In closing, there are but four words to sum up The Spirit:

Frank Miller: Epic Fail.

Steven Seagal Month Finale: On Deadly Ground

2009-04-22T06:01:00.003-04:00

It's been a long trip through the land of Seagal, but it (finally) ends today with On Deadly Ground. I have feared this day from the beginning, for On Deadly Ground is the one film in Seagal's ouvre that everyone can agree absolutely fucking sucks. It was even listed as one of the 100 Worst Movies Ever in the Razzie Awards book. When you're keeping company with Sextette, The Color of Night, and Ghosts Can't Do It, you know you're one bad movie. What made this movie so bad? Two words: Seagal. Directing. Letting any actor step behind the lens for the follow-up to the biggest hit of their career is a pretty bad idea, but it's even worse when said actor is interested in making an activist film. At least other actor/directors stick to making “art”. Seagal had other intentions, namely: to save the Earth.

Oh yes, Steven Seagal is a well-known environmental activist and, as the word “activist” suggests, he insists on forcing his worldview on everyone he meets. So when he grabbed the world by the nutsack with Under Siege, he saw his chance to cram some Grade-A bullshit down our throat while we screamed in pain. Of course, he had to cast himself as the Christ-like hero of the film and, of course, he had to make sure he could get in more of those bizarre Seagalian one-liners than ever before. Oh, and a lengthy lecture or two about the evils of oil. And lots of “shame on you, audience” finger-wagging. And Joan Chen as an Inuit.

Let's take a look at this bizarre, self-indulgent bomb and get this whole endeavor over with.

Things have gone to shit right off the bat as a lovely nature montage is interrupted by a raging fire at an oil rig. Firefighters are helpless to stop the flames and people are doing that weird movie thing where they run around in circles and flail their arms in the air. What does that accomplish, anyway? The movie itself seems not to be concerned as the music stays weirdly serene and we see more of a circling helicopter than we do of the fire itself. The helicopter touches down, prompting some old coot to say “Thank God!”. And he has good reason to say that as SEAGAL himself steps out. Steps out, mind you, in alligator boots and a buckskin jacket, which seem to contradict the whole “Environmentalist” image Seagal wants to conjure here. This is on par with the president of PETA treating her diabetes with animal-tested insulin in terms of sheer hypocrisy. Save the animals...unless they're fashionable! And just to cap the dumbassery of all this Seagal is puffing on a cigar, which he later tosses into a snowbank, destroying it's pure white beauty. What an ass.

Quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever witnessed. I don't know why, but I do feel that way.

Old coot Hugh runs up and immediately begins berating Forrest (Seagal) for what his “God damn pal Jennings'” lousy something or other has wrought. And then the helicopter door flies open (again?) to reveal Jennings himself (Michael “I'll do anything for money” Caine) sitting inside. Jennings happens to be the owner of Aegis Oil, who run the rig, and he doesn't take very kindly to his underling Hugh cursing him out. Weirdly (word of the day), this moment, amidst a catastrophic oil rig fire, is played for comedy with Jennings making his entrance just in time to cut Hugh off mid-sentence with a “my lousy what!?” as the door opens, like something out of Laugh-In. As they amble towards the fire, Hugh and Forrest debate whether or not this is purposeful sabotage by Jennings, with Hugh taking the affirmative and Forrest taking the negative. Hugh is appalled that Forrest would doubt his cockamamie theory about a multi-billion dollar corporation sabotaging it's own production, and walks away hootin' and hollerin' about what a “whore” Forrest has become.

Anyway, the entire point of this scene is a moment so Goddamn absurd, nonsensical, ridiculous, and mind-bogglingly stupid that it deserves to go down in history as “Biggest Dumbass Move of all Time”. Unable to put the fire out with water, Forrest turns to the onlookers who, with the exception of Jennings, hit the deck as he produces a detonator from his pocket and BLOWS UP THE FIRE. Yeah, that'll show those flames what's what! Make them bigger and more volatile and completely destroy the entire complex while you're at it! What in the blue monkey fuck were they even thinking when they wrote this?

I mean, was the rig outfitted with explosives “just in case”? Does Forrest always carry a detonator in his pocket? Does fighting fire with fire actually work? I can't for the life of me figure this out. “Der, Seagal no make fire go away. Fire make Seagal angry! Seagal set fire on fire! YEAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHH!”

Apparently I'm the only thinking person here, as the rig workers do happy gold miner jigs and cheer for joy as precious oil is reduced to a Hiroshima-rivaling fireball rising into the sky (again, way to help the environment, Steven. I'm sure Mother Earth really loved all that smoke and pollution you're inane stunt gave off). Assumedly successful, Forrest and Jennings get to da choppah and fly away home, Jennings feeding Forrest a load of disinformation bullcrap about how faulty equipment had nothing to do with the fire and how it was human error all the way “like every fire you've ever seen, Forrest”. Forrest seems to be wise to Jennings' crap all of a sudden, noting how “I blew up all the evidence, didn't I?” when Jennings asks why he'd sabotage himself.

And now it's time for the Billy Jack scene of the night~! After a short, pyrotechnical day at work, Forrest hits a bar for some beers, but can't relax for long as a vile white devil randomly picks on and assaults an Eskimo, like all white people do. Because we're evil. White devil is dumb enough to turn his attention to Forrest (who I guess is supposed to be an Eskimo, then), which is a very bad move. In fact, everyone in the bar knows just how bad of a move it is and they all start backing away and whispering “oh shit”. Forrest rises and approaches the man and then...walks right on by to take a seat at the bar.

And, oh goody, Hugh shows up to once again prattle on about the lousy preventers causing the fire. What, is Hugh one of those old coots who just picks a person and spends all day following them around trying to make them care about something through constant nagging? But just as soon as Hugh is about to start blaming the darn kids today, white devil starts harassing the Eskimo-folk again and this time Forrest can't sit idly by. He takes on a whole posse of random oil workers in a fight that shows just how worn out Steven Seagal fight scenes are getting. Unable to think of any creative moves, Seagal is reduced here to kneeing men in the groin, to which they loudly (and comically [in the wrong way]) scream “MY NUTS!”. Seagal was so fond of this phrase, in fact, that he dubbed it in over more than one man, even in shots where you can clearly see that the actors' mouths aren't moving. Also, there's over-usage of “bone crunching” sound effects which are loud and entirely fake sounding and also used in inappropriate moments. I'm sorry, Steven, but a hip toss would not make that sound. This whole fight is ludicrous, simple-minded, and aimed squarely at idiots who think “MY NUTS!” are the two funniest words in the English language. Not only is it uninventive, it's downright condescending.

Finally, only the white devil himself is left. Forrest challenges him to – I'm not joking – the Hand Slap game, rules being that if your slap misses, you get punched. White devil misses, of course, and takes a punch in the gut that levels him. The man is foolish enough to let this happen twice, and winds up puking his guts out for his trouble. Even though he has clearly had enough, the bar patrons thrown the man back for more and since he knows he's stuck, he keeps playing along in what amounts to torture as he not only has to be beaten sensless every time he loses the game, he also has to live in fear of losing every time since Forrest makes sure to drag it out. After reducing the man to a bloody, quivering mass of goo Forrest is pompous enough to ask the zen-like question “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” Rather than crying in pain or whimpering for mercy, the man rises to his feet and humbly responds “I- I need...time”. Yes, that's it. Give in to the will of your overlord.

The appalling nature of this scene cannot be fully captured in words. While the message that we all need to change and we all need to grant each other the time to do so is a good one, the fact that you literally see a man being beaten into submission to this is disgusting and reprehensible. It's as if Seagal is promoting brute force and sheer physical torture as good, righteous ways to change somone's attitude. Because lord knows you wouldn't want to change the world through teaching and opening hearts and minds. Oh no, you just need to let everyone know they either accept your worldview or suffer and die. Pick your poison, motherfucker. What a despicable waste of celluloid this scene is.

Thankfully, the movie washes it down with a cup of awesome as we cut to Jennings filming a PSA to counteract the negative publicity the oil rig accident has brought down on him. Michael Caine is so spectacular as he delivers this disingenuous speech about loving the environment and the animals and whatnot with a huge shit-eating grin as America the Beautiful plays softly in the background. And, of course, immediately after the director calls cut he breaks character and starts screaming about how the animals smell like shit and how stupid the speech was. The comedy of this scene cannot be understated. A+ gold is what it is. Too bad Caine keeps hamming it up when things are supposed to turn serious, as Jennings hears that construction on Aegis One, the newest rig, is facing an unacceptable delay. Hearing that the rig will be eight days behind schedule, Jennings flips out and screams and hollers just like he did about the smelly animals. Problem is this is an actual important plot point. Actually it is the plot. The overacting totally belittles this fact, though.

And speaking of that plot, let's flesh it out, shall we? Aegis One is being built to drill and refine oil on Eskimo land. Aegis secured the rights to that oil years ago, but didn't bother building until recently when they realized the rights were soon to expire, and the contract stipulates that if a rig is not operational on the site by a certain date thirteen days from now, the oil falls back into the control of the Eskimos. Aegis have been working around the clock to get the rig finished but still fell behind. To try and speed things up, they used the cheapest, most readily-available parts they could find. These parts, of course, are faulty and the EPA is getting wind of it. Especially the faulty preventers – the same equipment that started the oil rig fire at the beginning of the film.

Jennings deduces that it must be Hugh who's telling the EPA about the bad parts, and turns to his HIRED ASSASSIN, MacGruder, and demands Hugh be killed. Oh yeah, because all corporations have hired contract killers who also happen to be cast members from [SCRUBS].

At Aegis One, Forrest randomly decides to take Hugh's word for it and snoops in a computer to find out if the parts are faulty. And the long list of the word “FAIL” over and over would seem to suggest they are. Jennings and his assasin pal MacGruder catch on thanks to that pesky computer spying technology and decide to “take care” of Forrest. But the old coot comes first, God dammit! At his log cabin retreat, Hugh downloads some secret files to a floppy disc just before MacGruder shows up to claim those files. Of course, he can't find them, so he's reduced to torturing Hugh for information and boy...that's really lame. I'm sorry, but John C. McGinley is not a convincing badass. He's just funny, whether he means it or not. The way he spells the word “TEAM” to show how there really is no I in Team; the way his voice cracks like a pubescent boy as he shouts; the fact that HE'S THE EVIL DOCTOR FROM SCRUBS. All these things, and more, contribute to MacGruder being a very laughable villain. Even when Hugh is presumably murdered with a pipe cutter, it's just goofy.

What's also goofy is the next scene, where Jennings and his PR people make an obviously bullshit speech about how the pollution from the oil rig disaster will be gone in three months time, and then a local Eskimo man of some sort gets all up in Jennings' face to make an angry speech about women having abnormal babies or something. Apparently someone in the Eskimo tribe has a gestation period of, oh, 48 hours seeing as the spill JUST HAPPENED. And then Joan Chen shows up and throws a cup of oil on Jennings in protest. A few moments later, Jennings and Forrest have a talk in the hall about the substandard preventers Forrest found out about, but Jennings has no time to talk because, wouldn't you know it, another rig is in crisis. Good grief, you'd think the government would step in at some point. I can understand the Aegis One rig having crappy parts for expediency's sake, but if all your rigs have faulty equipment, there's no way you turn a profit with all the money you dump into repairs. This is just ludicrous. Jennings asks Forrest to help him out because Forrest is the only one with the expertise to fix the problem. Expertise in what, pushing a big red button and blowing shit up?

Well, as it turns out, the whole “we need your expertise” thing is just a load of bunk as the supposed disaster is actually a plot to take Forrest out. As Forrest investigates the abandoned rig and stumbles upon Hugh's mangled body, Jennings and MacGruder whip out a detonator and blow it all to hell. And then they fly home and call a press conference to blame the explosions on supposed sabotage by Hugh and Forrest. Not that a single reporter buys into it. Seriously, wouldn't someone have started investigating this Jennings ass by now? No one trusts him! And this is why we can thank our lucky stars that Forrest survived the attempt on his life. Apparently the explosions blew him several miles into the distance, where a polar bear helps some Eskimos find Forrest's body so they can take him home and nurse him to health. Not only is this scene stupid because we're supposed to believe a man could survive being blown up and launched an incredible distance, it's also stupid because the only injury Forrest suffered at all is three pieces of shrapnel in his back! Fuck you, Steve. I may believe in suspension of disbelief, but this is suspension of all brain function you're asking for. That wouldn't happen! Not in a million years! I'm not dumb enough to buy this pap.

But now's when this movie hits absolute rock-bottom stupidity. Joan Chen's dad, the apparent eskimo elder, performs some hokey mystical ritual (lots of stuff about animal spirits and creation myths), and apparently this hypnotizes Forrest who falls into a bizarre fantasy. There's naked eskimo women breathing hard for no reason, there's an eagle flying around, there's Forrest fighting a bear, there's Forrest being swept away by a river...all edited in an ADD-fashion that renders it even more perplexing than it would have been already. And then, just to show us all what a self-centered egotistical piece of shit Steven Seagal really is, Forrest meets an old Eskimo woman who tells him that HE IS THE SAVIOR. Yes, Forrest is the one who will save the Earth from the follies of mankind.What to even say, really? This speaks for itself.

MacGruder and his goons invade the Eskimo hut village to search for Forrest and, when they can't find him, to randomly shoot the elder, which infuriates Joan Chen who promises to see MacGruder die. Forrest comes home just in time for the old man to hand him a magic amulet and then promptly keel over dead. God I love the timely fashion in which people die in movies. Here's the secret I need to tell you/the object I need to give you. Got it? Okay! Ack! So cheesy. The death of her father gives Joan Chen reason to reveal that her tribe keeps a snowmobile around for emergencies, meaning she and Forrest can get back to civilization for some revenge. Good timing, darling. Wouldn't have wanted to use it to get ol' pops to the hospital or anything! Our doofy twosome head to Hugh's house where they quickly and easily find the floppy disk that MacGruder couldn't even though he tore the entire place apart at the seams. What a fucking idiot he must be. I mean, Forrest wasn't even looking for it, he just found it by accident! How did MacGruder miss it?

After getting into some more comfortable clothes, Forrest and JC (seriously, can we give this character a name already? And why did Hugh have women's clothing?) find the house surrounded by Aegis thugs. There's a pretty neat bit here where Forrest is able to pinpoint two thugs' locations by sound alone and then bursts into the room and shoots them both without having to look, but on the whole the ensuing gun fight is pretty boring and the same goes for the hand-to-hand combat that follows when the bullets run out. It all feels so old by now, and the inappropriate music on the soundtrack doesn't help. You would think Seagal would have picked something up about making action scenes work, but it's pretty obvious he can't direct one to save his life. In fact, the movie thus far has proven he can't direct any kind of scene to save his life.

Forrest and his nameless allegedly-Eskimo-but-obviously-Chinese friend head to...a friend's house...to use the computer there to read the floppy. Literally instantaneously, Forrest determines that Aegis One will blow up the second it's turned on. How did he read all that data so fast? Not only that, he finds out that Aegis has been filling tapped wells with left-over deadly chemicals and then selling the property to unsuspecting rival companies! You wanna guess his solution to all this? Go on, three guesses. THAT'S RIGHT! He's going to blow up Aegis One! Masu (I guess that's her name?) says this is a really stupid idea, but Forrest gives her a big speech about how her spirit world hocus pocus won't stop cars from using gasoline, oil from spilling into the ocean, or the government from suppressing fuel-efficient technologies. Okayyyyyyyyy... She was talking about not killing people. He was just waiting for an excuse to make that speech, realized one would never come, and just randomly made it anyway. After that preachy interlude, Forrest goes into a secret room full of guns (?) and arms himself to the teeth.

He then heads into the mountains to his retreat inside the world's worst matte painting. Seriously, look at this shit smear and tell me you can't find at least ten things wrong with it.

This is the laziest, most offensively inept special effects work I've seen in a long time. The lighting doesn't match up, the rocks and the trees are on two different planes, there's an obvious line around the edges of the matte, the forest is sticking out through the painting on the right because they aren't layered properly, the angles are all askew, the background is soft and fuzzy while the rocks are razor sharp, the cliff face they're standing on is literally attached to nothing and simply floating in space, I can't tell if they're miles up or only twenty feet off the ground, and the painting isn't even finished and just tapers off into nothing in the middle distance. This is inexcusably bad. How the fuck did this get past anyone? The fucking coffee guy should have spoken up about how terrible this shot looks. I'm embarrassed to even be watching it. Anyway, this lame special effect is housing a stockpile of explosives large enough to declare a one-man war on a small country, much to the wide-eyed shock and dismay of Masu. Forrest packs up a good chunk of the explosives, and then sets up a bomb to blow MacGruder and his goons up just as they swoop their helicopter in for the kill. Oh, I'm sorry, it was a different helicopter that was never established and apparently contained some other goons, as the very next shot features MacGruder and his posse riding on horseback. This movie has no sense of continuity at all. The helicopter that just blew up is identical to the one Mac and his thugs have been flying around in the entire movie including mere seconds before the other one blew up! That's just stupid.

The pleasant horseback ride comes to a tragic sidetrack when the idiots stumble into a Rambo-like trap Forrest has set using a single grenade and some sharp sticks to kill two goons. Two cavern-jumps and one more IED later, Forrest and Masu reach Aegis One.

What was I saying about terrible matte paintings?

Forrest sneaks his way inside, using a soda bottle as a silencer (?) and sets about tinkering with the generator while the FBI anti-terrorism task force gets in place to keep him out (too late). After loading the place up with enough C4 to take out a city, Forrest warns the rig workers to get out, and he and Masu follow suit. And then Forrest blows things up real good as explosions rock the facility, but not enough to actually shut it down. That surpasses epic fail and lands right in facepalm territory. What's even lamer is how MacGruder and Jennings' bitch lawyer more or less kill themselves (Mac falls into a helicopter roter and get his head chopped off and the lawyer drives her car right into an above-ground gas line and blows up) while Forrest just sorta watches. I mean, yeah, he had his hands on Mac when he died, but really Mac just struggled too much and tripped. Suddenly, Forrest is the most ineffectual man on Earth.

Meanwhile, Jennings is pretty much left alone and has to get the rig operational on his own. But in the midst of his button pushing, handle cranking, and wheel-turning, he finds himself at the business end of Forrest's gun and winds up being dropped right into the oil where I guess he drowns. Or something. Maybe oil is deadly on contact. Forrest and Masu do the typical action movie bit of running dramatically as shit blows up behind them when the final explosives go off and turn Aegis One into a big, smoldering wreck that's filling the atmosphere with all kinds of smoke and pollutants, seemingly defeating the purpose of shutting it down in such a fashion. But what do I know? Obviously doing whatever it takes to make a movie about saving the environment is a good thing, even if you have to destroy the environment in the process.

And just to really kick us in the nuts, Seagal ends the movie on a long-winded prattle about how the government and the oil companies are suppressing all the maigcal technologies that could save the earth. This speech of his goes on for over four minutes and while I'm sure it has some merit, it's so preachy and delivered with such false anger that it comes off as fake and, frankly, pretty boring. When On Deadly Ground debuted at Cannes (yes) this scene was more than ELEVEN minutes long and it was so boring that the audience literally fled the theater. I wanted to flee my computer watching this shortened version, so I can't begin to fathom the agony of the director's cut. He ran out of things to say two minutes in and started repeating himself, for cripes sake. And this really is the only reason the movie exists; this one scene is why we had to suffer through this miserable film. We're supposed to believe that all oil companies are as nefarious as Aegis and that we are all their mind slaves and need to be woken up. I'm no fan of oil cartels, but get bent Seagal. Your movie is a cartoon and your message is ridiculous because of it.

I don't even know where to begin summing up my feelings about this movie. Well, alright:

FUCK.

That's where I begin. But where to go from there? This movie is a stupid, pompous, paranoid piece of hammily-acted, ineptly directed, barely-written crap made by an egomaniacal madman who thinks of himself as Christ and wants us all to bow down and suck the almighty cock. This movie isn't about saving the environment, it's about praising Steven Seagal for how much he says he wants to save the environment. Not that you'd guess he'd want to, what with all the gigantic explosions he set off in the making of this movie, unleashing untold amounts of toxins into the air in the process, not to mention all the smoke and debris. And let's not forget that movie shoots have sizable carbon footprints as well. I'm sure Seagal would say that he can get away with polluting because he does it in the name of stopping pollution, but that's hypocritcal bullshit. Print up some fliers on hemp paper if you want to spread an honest-to-God Save the Earth message. Don't fly your private jets all over the world to shoot your self-aggrandizing movies about how much you claim to love the planet you help destroy you two-faced twat!

But when you look past the disingenuous message of On Deadly Ground, you still see nothing but garbage. This is a flat-out bad movie. It's as amateurish and lame as you'd expect from a first-time director with no film education who has ulterior motives. It's incomprehensible tripe served up with no shame and no remorse. This movie earned it's place in the Razzie Hall of Shame, no doubt. It also rightly bombed at the box office and made Seagal look like an ass. Way to fuck up your first movie Mr. Director man.

The result of On Deadly Ground's failure was Seagal's career hitting the downward spiral. Though he had a few more theatrical releases left in him, none of them were able to save his reputation. A sequel to Under Siege (hey, it worked once, why not try again?) failed to impress and disappointed at the box office. Executive Decision reduced Seagal to a supporting role that ended in his character's death before the movie was even halfway over. And he died like an idiot, too, getting himself sucked out of an airlock on a plane for no good reason. There's Hollywood's way of telling you you suck: they kill you off in a way that makes you look stupid. The Glimmer Man was an attempt to get edgier, with a hard-boiled serial killer story as it's plot, but it was seen for what it was: a really bad rip-off of Se7en that was too gruesome and downbeat for it's own good. The use of a Wayans brother as the buddy cop didn't help either. Finally, Seagal got behind the camera for, believe it or not, another environmental thriller, Fire Down Below. I suspect that I'll review this turd some day (hopefully long off) but the gist of it is more evil corporations dumping more toxic waste. Toxic waste that looks like bright green Nickelodeon Gak.

Now I know what you're all thinking: Seagal's career goes on from there, you fool! Sure, it does. But I dare you to name another movie he was in after that. Try. You probably don't even remember that he was in Half Past Dead or Exit Wounds, do you? Of course not. You remember Ja Rule and DMX, not the white fatass slowing them down. And how about all those direct-to-video movies Seagal has been reduced to? Name one of them. You can't. No one can, because no one watches them. No one watched Steven Seagal movies any more after On Deadly Ground. Why?

Because it showed us all what an asshole Steven Seagal is! He had the chance to serve up a personalized platter of ass-kicking awesomeness to his loving fans and instead he spent ninety minutes telling us all to blow him. And we all told him to go fuck himself instead.

Quick Thoughts: Dragonball Evolution

2009-04-13T05:57:00.009-04:00

Here is yet another reason why I should stop going to the movies and picking a random flick to watch. I remember when you could do that and usually wind up enjoying what you picked, but these days you more often than not wind up in the new worst movie of the year. The last time I set foot in a theater was when I saw the abominable The Spirit. Dragonball Evolution was not that bad only because it was too boring to induce the rage I still feel towards Frank Miller's epic fail. But it was still one of the most terrible movie-going experiences I have ever had.

As someone who has little knowledge of Dragonball mythology, I went into this hoping I'd get a decent introduction. Oh no. There's an introduction, but it goes like this:

"Two thousand years ago, the evil Lord Piccollo and his weird dog thing came to Earth and killed everyone. Some sages locked him up in a box forever. Then he got out and now he has to be stopped again."

There are more words in my paraphrasing than there were in the real intro. This movie sets itself up to be geared solely towards people who are already engrossed in DB mythos and know why Piccollo is evil, what his dog thing is, how the Earth survived, how Piccollo freed himself, and why any of this matters. But then it goes and tears said mythos asunder to the point that no fan would recognize a single remnant of their beloved series in this turd of a movie.

The casting is deplorably inept. Goku is played by some emo kid instead of, ya know, a burly muscleman (even I know what the character should look like). An emo kid who cannot act, knows it, and figures that's good enough. Emmy Rossum plays scientist/adventurer Bulma in a polarizing performance. Polarizing because, on the one hand, she's fucking hot but on the other hand she's fucking annoying thanks to this weird, froggy voice she affects to make herself sound like a three AM Denny's waitress. I couldn't decide if I wanted to ram my cock up her ass or ram my fist through her face. Wise Master Roshi is Chow yun-fat, trying really hard to undo all the good will he built up with those John Woo movies and succeeding with flying colors. While his command of English is fine, his school of acting appears to be "act like a fucking asshole". He annoyed the shit out of me.

Easy on the eyes. Torturous on the ears.

The writing is not even pedestrian. It's not even writing. This movie is a series of random events cobbled together with tape and glue like one of those shapeless tongue depressor sculptures kids make in summer camp arts and crafts class. The story, if you can claim there is one, just jumps around without establishing anything. We don't even know why Piccollo is such a threat and since all we see him do in the entire movie is stand on the deck of an airship staring sternly at the clouds, we never get an answer. And that's all he does until the very end when he attempts one attack and gets foiled and killed like a total pussy. Combine that with his ridiculous appearance (his makeup is eerily reminiscent of Vincent Price's Adam West Batman villain Egghead, only even more obviously fake. Seriously, worst makeup in decades) and you have the lamest, nothing-happening villain in years. His sole henchwoman, who is never named or in any way explained, is just a random Asian with moderate fighting skill who randomly develops shape-shifting abilities for one scene and one scene only, and she never speaks. Again, completely pointless and completely undefined.

Lord Piccolo: Be afraid. Try to be afraid.

But if you really want to know what this story is about, I'll sum it up: there's seven balls and if you catch'em all, you get a wish. That's it. Once Goku, Bulma, and Roshi team up every scene begins with Bulma saying "I've got a reading" on her Dragonball tracker, and ends with them finding the ball. Lather, rinse, repeat. There's a non-attempt at a subplot involving Goku's crush on classmate ChiChi (who turns out to be a fighter for no reason other than for her to...just be a fighter for no reason), but it never gets going. She hangs around and has limited interaction and in the end they kiss and it makes no sense. All of this plays out in front of a series of backdrops comprised of matte paintings, foam rubber boulders and the worst CGI scenery since A Sound of Thunder which, for those blissfully unfamiliar with that film, is like saying you've seen the worst disaster since 9/11. The movie has a credit for an art director, but it's an outright lie. There is no direction whatsoever, and this isn't art. The rampant scratches, burns and even missing and jumpy frames in the print (rather shocking for a brand-new movie on opening day) only add to the cheap look of this pathetically designed film.

But I give the movie credit for at least keeping itself lean, as with only six balls to find (Goku has one from the get-go), there aren't that many scenes to be had even with ChiChi and with Piccollo giving the sky the Mike Tenay stare. In fact, this movie barely seems to qualify as feature-length. IMDb claims it's 84 minutes long, but the credits simply must make up ten to fifteen minutes of that. The actual film itself is, at best, around an hour or so and given how bad it is, that's a blessing. Simply put, I couldn't be bothered to pay attention much longer than that. Some people could only stand half of it and walked out. Good for them, and too bad for me I live for such terrible, irredeemable cinema. Honestly, I wanted to walk out right from the first scene. No joke. The instant this scrawny, loser Goku wannabe appeared before my eyes I told myself I should just leave, and I very nearly did. No movie has ever had that effect on me. Not one. When your movie is so bad that the first shot just oozes with bad mojo to the point that I - the man who sat through The Spirit, eXpelled, A Sound of Thunder, The Cave, and countless other cinematic atrocities that somehow found their way to the silver screen instead of DTV - want to leave and not even bother asking for my now-tainted money back, you have failed.

Fuck you.

As I walked out of the theater after seventy mind-numbing minutes, all I could do was loudly shout "God Dammit", to the welcoming laughs of fellow patrons. That defines the experience of Dragoball Evolution. Everyone wants to send it right to Hell and forget it ever happened. I suspect the latter will happen, but as for the former, we'll have to settle for sending it deep into the studio vaults, which is exactly where it's heading.

Steven Seagal Month, Week Five: Under Siege

2009-04-12T06:22:00.003-04:00

Where we've been: Steven Seagal hit the scene in 1988 with Above the Law, a surprise hit that made him an instant star and even a bit of a critical darling. He was a lean, mean fighting machine who kicked ass, took names, and earned $20 million at the box office. Two years later he came back with Hard to Kill, another hit that, while receiving almost none of the critical praise of Above the Law, was able to double it's box office returns. Seagal was a star and Hollywood knew it, so that same year they rushed out Marked for Death, which again made huge numbers at the box office, nearly doubling Hard to Kill's earnings. But then, in 1991, Seagal's fourth film, Out for Justice, hit theaters. While it was arguably the best film Seagal had yet been in, it failed to live up to the legacy of it's predecessors and only took in about the same as Hard to Kill, IE: a drop-off from Marked.

Why did this happen? Well, it certainly didn't help that Marked for Death had been a terrible film that surely drove some fans off, but it also didn't help that Seagal had been growing less and less impressive with each passing film. Simply put: he was pudgier. His waistline was moving noticeably outward and no amount of “hip” baggy clothing that his characters might wear was hiding that fact. No longer was he the lean, mean machine of Above the Law. Instead, he was starting to look like your friend's dad who used to work out. He hadn't yet hit the levels of puffiness that mark his most recent efforts (or the hilarious Will Sasso impersonation from MADTV), but he definitely wasn't as intimidating anymore. How a professional martial artist and big time health nut let himself go is beyond me, but it was happening. Can you imagine taking a fat action hero seriously? Of course not, unless you're Roger Ebert and you think Kevin James is a viable candidate for the next James Bond (yes).

Regardless of the cause, Seagal's sudden drop-off in drawing power made Hollywood upset and they weren't going to wait for even one more film to disappoint. When Seagal returned to the big screen in 1992 with Under Siege, he had back up in the form of Above the Law director Andrew Davis, A-list star Tommy Lee Jones and beloved quirky character actor Gary Busey. With Davis at the helm, producers could expect another praise-worthy performance to be pulled out of their star, and with Jones and Busey in the mix they had a safety net in the case that Seagal's drawing power really was gone. If you didn't want to go see a movie with the puffball from Out for Justice, you might still go to see the co-star of JFK, or the star of The Buddy Holly Story and Predator 2. And, at the very least, maybe some of Jones and Busey's talent would rub-off on Seagal and help him rise above the angry squint school of thespianism. Finally, the story itself was more epic than anything Seagal had yet done. Instead of just another cop drama, Under Siege was, for all intents and purposes, Die Hard on a Navy Battleship with Seagal playing the one man army saving the day from terrorism. Put it all together and you sure look to have a recipe for success.

The result? Let's take a look.

The opening credits are unremarkable, playing out over aerial footage of Navy battleship the USS Missouri cruising through the ocean while some generic “epic” orchestra music plays (reminds me of the score to The Last Castle for some reason). Our hero, Casey Ryback, is introduced as the lone man on board not wearing the traditional whites (he's chosen an all-black affair instead). Whereas any mere mortal would be punished for violating protocols so, Casey gets away with it because he's Seagal, which is equivalent to God. This scene is notable for the moment where Seagal turns his head and reveals that he has cut off his trademark ponytail for the first time. That's what I call method acting. Casey visits the captain – the only man bold enough to scold Casey for his manner of dress – and is told that he'll be meeting the President! Commander Krill (Gary Busey) – clearly a bad guy from the shifty sideways glances he gives – says this would be a poor idea and Casey agrees. You see, he has 50 gallons of bouillabaisse to prepare.

Oh yeah, did I mention Casey is a cook? Not an Admiral or a Commander or a Chief. A cook. Whatever.

Just to further cement his prickishness, Krill starts complaining about how Casey shouldn't be tolerated. The Captain, who suddenly seems to at least partially fear Casey, shakily asks Krill to leave the man alone. “You don't know...”. As a narrator on a TV news report explains the Missouri's history (she's set to be part of a Pearl Harbor ceremony or something that's being heavily publicized) we get a glimpse of Steven Seagal in a chef's hat, which is just the tits.

Must...resist...Swedish Chef jokes.

During the approach to Pearl Harbor, the crew of the Missouri prepare a surprise birthday party for the Captain (complete with a birthday cake containing a Playboy bunny!), while that rotten jerk Krill tells a subordinate to pull men off of nuclear warhead watch duty to attend said party. The officer protests this absurdly unsafe decision, but can do nothing to stop it. The evil doesn't stop there, though, as Casey's joyous cooking session in the galley is interrupted by uptight Ensign Taylor, who hands down the news that the birthday dinner is being flown in and Casey and his crew are to shut down the kitchen. Dun dun dun? Casey is appalled because he and the captain hate surprises but, despite having rank and authority over Taylor (?), can not do anything to stop this. Wow, you can just slice the drama with a knife. Not dinner!

In the captain's quarters, Krill is rather red-faced when the Captain finds out about the surprise party when he hears of Krill authorizing a helicopter landing (something he isn't supposed to be able to do). But once the misunderstanding is cleared up, Captain agrees to play along with the surprise act. He also orders that all watches go on as usual during the party, which Krill pretends to agree to even though we know he's already canceled the warhead watch. What a jerk. And get this: after leaving the Captain's quarters, Krill heads down to the galley, boots everyone but Casey out, and then spits in the bouillabaisse! What a dastardly man! And I mean like Dick Dastardly, as in a cartoon villain. Casey cleans his clock and is swiftly arrested. However, since only the Captain can authorize usage of the brig, Krill has Casey locked up in the meat locker instead. Krill tells his guards – all of them new to the ship – that Casey is an Anti-American, officer-hating psycho who must be kept locked up at all costs.

On deck, a helicopter full of entertainers (including a very-obviously incognito baddie Tommy Lee Jones) lands. And while Tommy Lee Jones is the real important part of this scene, I cannot help but mention the presence of Colm Meaney from Star Trek: The Next Generation. For some reason it always weirds me out to see him doing anything not related to the transporter room. Anyway, down below in the galley, Casey tries to talk his way out of the meat locker because heaven forbid his pies should burn (an actual argument he makes for his freedom), while elsewhere Playboy bunny Erica Eleniak (!) dresses for her confectionery role in the celebration. I find it strange that she needs to change, though, considering she showed up in a boobalicious tank top and the tightest pants on Earth. She's ready to go if you ask me. Unless she's just going to go all-out nude, in which case I'm shutting up. Out in the mess hall, Tommy Lee Jones is fronting a blues band (!!!!) to entertain the boys and holy Jesus is that great. It gets even better when he introduces “Miss July”, which turns out to be Krill in drag!!!!!!

Things take a turn for the dramatic (finally) when Tommy asks the highest ranking officer in the room to step forward – and then promptly shoots the man in the head! The waiters all pull Uzis on the officers and the coup is on~! And Krill and Colm Meaney take out the Captain, too! Shit, meet the fan. While all this is going down, Casey is still trying to talk his way out of the meat locker but fails, even when the guard hears the gunfire and is too much of a maroon to believe it's really gunfire. As our takeover montage carries on, we learn Krill's reasons for taking part in this: the Captain gave him a bad review and recommended psychological evaluation. Krill treats this as laughable, even though he's in drag and looks like a psycho. Oh the hilarity. Way to disrupt the drama, guys. Finally, Casey convinces the guard to call in to the bridge, which reminds Krill that they forgot to seal that area off, meaning Casey and the guard have full access to the ship even though everyone else has been sealed off in the forecastle. Wow, what a dramatically convenient weakness in their plan.

Krill tries to fix his mistake by sending thugs down to execute Casey and the guard, and while they succeed on the latter count they, of course, fail on the former as Casey dispatches of them and finally gets out so he can do something. And that something is combining common household ingredients to make a Brillo pad and whiskey cocktail which he throws in the microwave. Why? Dunno.

On the bridge, another weakness arises in the terrorist plot as the military has sent out an F-18 to find the missing helicopter which the terrorists forgot to send back. You idiots. Thinking they can fix the problem, they blow the plane out of the sky with the ship's artillery. Well now the military will send an entire fleet to indiscriminately bomb you, you fools! Oh wait, it's actually worse than that: it seems they're sending in Hulk Hogan, going by the sudden appearance of Jimi Hendrix's “Voodoo Child” on the soundtrack. Whatcha gonna do, Gary Busey? Whatcha gonna do when the 24 inch pythons run wild on you!?

Wow, I just wrote a way better movie than the one I'm watching.

The military establishes radio contact with the terrorists to find out why they're doing this. Tommy Lee Jones (or Bill, now) says he's bitter about the military apparently trying to assassinate him to protect some classified info after his latest assignment got canceled. “They tried to cancel me, too!”. After a big, long rant about how bad he misses the sixties (oh fuck that decade) Bill cuts off the radio and launches a Tomahawk into the military satellite HQ to prevent any further tracking of the ship. Except it won't since Pearl Harbor can track the ship, too. Wah wah waaaaaahhhhhhhh. I don't know if Bill and Krill are supposed to be random psychopaths or random morons at this point.

Casey (remember him?) wanders into the mess hall and kicks over the cake. Erica Eleniak pops out and starts dancing as if unaware of the hail of bullets and the passage of several hours. What the fuck? There's a lot of crying and whining as she realizes the situation and yadda yadda yadda SHUDDUP!. Back at military HQ, where the plot is hiding out, there is much discussion of how Bill's private terrorist army is government-funded so they could use him for top-secret missions such as, for example, sinking Korean atomic subs. But no sooner than Bill's Commander assures the Admiral that the sub was sunk do we see said sub coming along to meet up with the battleship as part of the coup! That Bill is real hit and miss; sometimes he totally epic fails and sometimes he's just so darn crafty. And you'd have to be Goddamn crafty to hide a KOREAN ATOMIC SUBMARINE for six months! How in the fuck...?

While Bill et al go down to the galley to check on those thugs they sent, Casey briefs the Playboy girl because she's his new partner. It's Steven Seagal and some chick with nice tits against an army of madmen in...UNDER SIEGE. Now that would have been good marketing. Finally, we see what that Brillo cocktail was all about as the microwave explodes as Bill and Krill argue. How did Casey know how long it would take for them to go to the galley? Well, as it turns out when Bill and Krill access his file, Casey is an ex-SEAL who's a demigod of all trades. The man is Christ. Super Mecha Death Christ.

Contacting the Admiral with some hi-tech super duper phone, Casey imparts the information that Bill and Krill are planning to offload and sell the Tomahawk missiles for untold amounts of money. That's your revenge for your near-death and your psychological issues? You make some money? Woo hoo. I guess they're banking on money being able to buy happiness. And then, in his most daring stunt yet, Casey blows up the helicopter using nothing more than paint thinner and an improvised detonator. Would two gallons of ignited paint thinner really do that? An angered Bill and Krill set off the sprinkler system to flood the forecastle because they think Casey will drown trying to save the men inside, but then again they welded the doors shut, so how would he get in? And wouldn't the weight of all that water concentrated in that one area throw the ship's buoyancy all out of whack? The Titanic was dragged down by similar flooding. It's confirmed: they're random morons.

Casey and the Bunny (now there's a sitcom) stumble upon a room of trapped men (not the one that's flooding) and since there is a convenient pile of welding equipment right there, Casey cuts right through the door to unleash some help. Miraculously, this room also contains the circuit breaker for the bridge, so Casey can shut down the radars and weapons systems. Only morons would lock officers in the fucking circuit room, although the trapped men were idiots for not thinking of doing this themselves. Anyway, after Bill and Krill play footage of the drowning men on the ship's CCTV system, Casey and his ragtag crew arm up and set out for the epic showdown. With some improvised bombs and a lot of bullets, our heroes manage to save the crew by taking control of and shutting down the water system. From there, they keep plugging away at random thugs as they head for the bridge, were Bill and Krill realize they have lost control of the weapons just as a team of SEALs is flying in. Lucky for them Bill's submarine comes up just in time to send men on top to launch shoulder-mounted rockets to take the chopper down. This prompts the Admiral to do what he should have done a long time ago: order full-on carpet bombing of the battleship.

Somewhere in the bowels of the ship, Casey dismantles a shell to use it's parts for some improvised explosives, such as the bomb he plants on the sub deck during a little scuba diving to distract the crew while he sneaks on board. Not enough of a distraction, as Colm Meaney spots him, but no worries: the Bunny shoots that Irish bastard dead. Meeting up with the rest of the team, Casey heads for the artillery room where they can control the ship's guns and blow the submarine to Davey Jones' Locker. And that they do, and Krill goes down with it. Bill responds by launching nukes at Honolulu. While military command freaks out, Casey makes it to the bridge where he was his final showdown with Bill, a knife fight that ends with Casey burying his blade in the top of Bill's skull and then ramming him through a radar screen for good measure. Ow.

An F-18 shoots down one of Bill's missiles while it's up to Casey to use some computer doohickey to manually override the controls of the other, which he does just seconds before the missile would have hit the island. Casey and the whole crew celebrate on deck as the ship floats into harbor. And then, the somber closing moment as we move ahead to the Captain's funeral, where Casey finally dons his uniform.

This movie kinda sucks. It's definitely a mess, the plot diving headlong into nonsense on more than one occasion. The acting is fairly strong; even Gary Busey's typical “act like a raving loon” schtick works pretty well here, and more importantly, Seagal does a fine job and for once doesn't try some ridiculous accent he can barely feign. The action is more generic than other Seagal movies. The hand-to-hand combat is replaced with explosions and gun fights, and while those things are kinda neat the first few times you see them, they've become tired cliches by now and really don't make this movie any more exciting. And that's what Under Siege lacks the most: excitement. The plot is, like I said, Die Hard on a boat (they even used that exact line in the advertising!) and, well, if you've seen Die Hard watching Under Siege is like seeing the same movie over again only boring because you went in expecting something different. That's what made Seagal movies successful in the first place: they were different. They had realistic, bone-crunching martial arts instead of the same old gun fights and they had really wonky partner characters instead of the obligatory fellow cop. Unfortunately, Under Siege ditches the fighting and pushes the unlikely partner scenario to an absurd level with the use of a Playboy bunny as Casey's back-up. Way to kill the concept, guys.

But my complaints really don't matter because Under Siege was a massive hit, taking in $156,563,139 worldwide. That's the biggest hit Seagal has ever had, even to this day. Hell, the critics even liked it, All was forgiven for Out for Justice's failure and suddenly Seagal was the shit bigger than ever. And ironically, this lead directly to his biggest disaster. With his renewed fame and box office super power, Seagal finally had the leverage to do what he and every other actor has ever wanted to: direct, without anyone checking his power. The result was a film so self-indulgent, so ineptly made, so far up it's own ass and so pathetically preachy that it sent Seagal's superstar career on the downward spiral to direct-to-video hell.

So join me on Earth Day, April 22, when we venture into Steven Seagal's biggest dream and worst nightmare as I review the notorious and nefarious environmental thriller On Deadly Ground.

Steven Seagal Month, Week Four: Out for Justice

2009-03-29T05:07:00.005-04:00

Month one of Steven Seagal Month is finally drawing to a close. That makes sense to me, anyway. Today, we see the last film of Seagal's rise to fame, Out for Justice. Following the successes of Above the Law, Hard to Kill and...ugh...Marked for Death, Seagal was primed for another hit. But did he find it? Let's take a look at Out for Justice and find out.

This time around Seagal is Brooklyn cop Gino Felino. Don't worry, I'll wait while you get the giggles out of your system. I know Seagal likes to have weird names in his movies, but what the hell is that? Gino Felino? That's begging to be laughed at. If I was him, I might pull a Fellini and just drop the first name altogether. As our movie opens, Gino is staking out a multi-million dollar drug deal with his partner Bobby, but things go to shit when Gino spots a pimp beating a woman nearby and just can't let it go long enough to finish the sting. Gino's fellow officers pour down from the rooftops to help him make the bust, thus blowing ALL THEIR COVERS. You could stand to lose one cop, why lose all of them? For one pimp! Even when the bastard is covered in cops, Gino still feels the need to challenge the pimp to a fight, which lasts about ten seconds, with Gino ultimately slamming his foe through a windshield, resulting in one badass opening credit, as Seagal is framed in the shattered glass for a freeze frame with his name on screen. Very nice.

Shortly thereafter, as with many a Seagal film, it's time to ditch that partner, as Bobby is gunned down in broad daylight on a crowded street by today's villain, crack addict Richie Madano (William Forsythe, from The Rock and The Devil's Rejects), who leaves a mysterious Polaroid on Bobby's body. Richie's crew is freaked out, knowing they're doomed to be caught, but all Richie can say is that things are going to get hotter before the night's over. And he ain't kidding either. Having caused a traffic jam by parking his car in the middle of the street to take a hit off his pipe, Richie draws the ire of another driver. He responds by walking right up to her and putting a bullet through her head! And then he calmly walks away, his spooked crew following him lest they face the same fate. I gotta say, this is the most effective creation of a villain a Seagal movie has yet had. There's no elaborate plot, there's no fucking voodoo. There's just a fucked-up crackhead acting without a conscience and being fucking scary as he does it. This is, frankly, awesome, and Forsythe is playing it perfectly so far.

Gino gets the inevitable call from the precinct and rather than the immediate “It's time for revenge” reaction we normally see in a Seagal flick, Gino's reaction is instead a combination of shock and also reluctance. He's a divorced dad in the middle of his once-a-month weekend with his son, Tony, and doesn't want to miss out on it. But duty calls and Gino is forced to send Tony back home to mom (Jo Champa, from...nothing, really). Gino arrives on the scene – where the Polaroid has gone missing - and doesn't wait very long before telling Captain Donzinger (Jerry Orbach from Law & Order!!!!) that all he'll need is an unmarked cruiser and a shotgun to bring Richie in. Donzinger agrees and the hunt is on.

Elsewhere, the stars of a community theater knock-off of The Godfather get a call informing them of what Richie has done. They want him brought to them, alive and before the cops get him. Gino meets up with his mob contact, Frankie, and Frankie's boss Don Vittorio to discuss what should be done with Richie. Vittorio makes a good case when he says that the justice system can only give Frankie seven to ten years, but the mafia can...well, you know. If it's real vengeance you want, you go with the Don. Gino promises to do even worse if he gets to Richie first.

But, hey, it's time for an out of character aside with Steven Seagal. Driving down the road, Gino spots a car dropping a trash bag out the window into traffic. Gino stops and opens the bag to find a puppy inside, and Gino begs God to let him run into that asshole someday. Ah, the first twinges of animal rights activism in a Seagal movie. Remember this, oh, a month from now, alright? Trust me.

And another weird moment when a hooker offers Gino her services and he cackles like it's the most absurd thing he's ever heard. What, are you gay? What's so hilarious about a hooker asking you if you want sex? He even stops other people on the street and tells them like it's a joke or something. Weird.

Anyway, Gino eventually runs into Richie trying to set up some deal and it's time for the first car chase of the night, ending in a grocery where Richie tells his goons to take care of Gino while he goes off to settle some scores. In true Seagal fashion, Gino takes out six or seven guys in less than a minute, turning their own weapons against them and, as always, using the mystical powers of Aikido to send thugs a-flyin' without ever having to move from one spot in the middle of the room. God I love how action movie baddies always line up and run at the good guy one at a time, taking turns getting killed. They never learn.

That night, Gino visits Richie's parents, who he's known since he was a kid as he and Richie were childhood friends. Ma and Pa Madano want Gino to go easy on Richie and let him live, but Gino says that unless Richie turns himself in, he will have to die. Since Ma and Pa have no info to impart about Richie's whereabouts, Gino pays a visit to Richie's brother Vinnie at his bar. Vinnie and his patrons all refuse to talk and generally act like huge dicks, so Gino has a fine time pushing people around and wrecking the place until finally the goombas can take no more and it's a-fightin' time, with a big shot putting a five thousand dollar bounty on Gino's badge. The best part of this fight is when Gino goes at it with a guy called Sticks, the two of them using broken pool cues like nunchucks. It's so absurd it's awesome. After dispatching of everyone dumb enough to fight Steven Seagal, Gino tells Vinnie to tell Richie “I'm gonna cut off his head and piss down his throat!”. He may live up to this promise, too. He had the first part down pat in Marked for Death.

And now it's Montage Time~! as we see intercut sequences of Gino hitting the streets for tips, Richie kinda just wandering around, and some police busting a strip club (?) all set to some awful “rap” song that sounds like the Nickelodeon GUTS theme with a lot of extra drum machine added. Once that's out of the way, it's time for a scene both good and weird. After a brief meeting with Don Vittorio, Gino and Frankie go for a walk and reminisce about the good old days. Gino speaks of his Uncle Pino and a warm memory of Pino catching a thief and punishing him by locking him up in the trunk of the car while Pino and young Gino drove around town, finally letting the thief go when Gino got worried about his well-being. It's a sweetly sentimental story that seems to establish Pino as the origins of Gino's moral compass. But then Gino mentions that Pino was in the mafia, and that he's surprised he didn't follow Pino's footsteps and wound up a cop instead. Uh...the mafia is admirable? I mean, sure, they have their good side too, but sheesh they're still the mafia at the end of the day. Don Corleone might not have ever sold drugs and he may have been a good father, but he did assassinate people too. Kind of a mixed signals situation that seems like iffy moral territory to me.

And then there's an all-too-brief cutaway to Richie dropping in on a friend's chop shop to hang out for a while. I'm noticing that we're spending less and less time with Richie now and I don't like that. He's a really good character and his scenes at the beginning of the movie were intense, shocking, and downright brutal. And William Forsythe is so charismatic and so good at evoking complete insanity that he's flat-out captivating. This is a great performance that is suddenly being squandered like it's secondary when it's actually supposed to be the centerpiece of the damn movie! I can see how the filmmakers might have worried that a string of random acts of violence throughout the duration of two acts of the film could get monotonous - and that would almost certainly be true in most circumstances - but with a performance this brilliant, I severely doubt it would get boring at all. If anything, the idea that the random destruction of human life is wide-spread and not slowing down and is being caused all by one soulless man would add to the terror and suspense and create probably the best villain Seagal has yet faced! Why waste this gem by shortening his scenes? It's senseless.

But hey, I guess we need more investigation, so Gino goes to a club to visit Richie's sister Patty (Gina Gershon) who, like everyone else, has no clue where Richie is. While I fully accept that she could be lying, I don't exactly appreciate the way Seagal gets mad and pushes her around and then throws a bouncer over a friggin' balcony when the guy tries to, ya know, do the gentlemanly thing and tell the big, imposing martial artist to lay off the lady. Not exactly a good way to make yourself the good guy, Steven, but then again I guess this could be shades of grey like he's not too good to be bad. And it goes on when they go to Patty's office and Gino starts tearing the place up for no good reason. Like what, she's going to have printed, notarized documents marked “Where Richie is going to hang out on the night he decides to commit suicide by cop”? What does ripping through her files accomplish other than making her angry? During this completely warrant-free search, Gino stumbles upon a gun he assumes is not licensed and arrests Patty. Of course, the real reason for the arrest is to draw Richie out of hiding, so it's a sham from the get-go, but it still sounds like something that might, oh, violate the law a little bit. Not to mention the whole assault thing.

And the movie teases us with another too-short scene of Richie harassing the chop shop workers and cruelly mocking their boss' paraplegia. Another fine display of evilness, but cut off after like a minute so we can see Patty getting booked instead. After tossing the poor girl in a cell, Gino questions Patty about “Roxanne” a name he found written on a note one of the club's waitresses had passed to him. Back at the chop shop, things finally start heating up for Richie again as the cops bust in (not before Richie kills the paraplegic without cause (Thank you)). And I mean they bust in, ramming a van right through the wall and running a man over, an act they show no remorse for. They don't even acknowledge it. Yowza. While Richie and his crew make a rooftop escape, Gino peruses Bobby's desk. Yeah, we needed to cut away to that at this moment, didn't we? Shouldn't this have happened like thirty minutes ago? Gino finds a bag of cocaine, a stack of money, and some compromising photos of Bobby and a woman who sure don't look like his wife. Shouldn't the precinct have found all this when they cleaned out the desk? They do clean out the desk after an officer dies, you know. They don't just leave it alone like some kind of memorial. They need somewhere for the replacement to sit...Never mind.

Gino hits the streets again and gets a call on the radio asking him to swing by his apartment to see his wife for something or other. And then, like some weird comedy relief, the puppy pops up out of the passenger seat and Gino chuckles and says “Almost forgot about you!”. Yeah, so did we. You didn't think to drop the poor thing off at home like ten hours ago? You found it in the morning and now it's night! Poor dog. When Gino gets home, the big issue that required a radio bulletin is...Wifey wants to know if he's hungry. No. Shit. You know full well Gino's out there hunting down the bastard who killed his partner – your friend, by the way – and you call him off the case to offer him a snack and an Espresso? And since Gino is in the mood to tell a story, he accepts. He regales us with the tragedy of his father, a traveling knife sharpener (?) who died of a broken heart after disposable knives were invented and rendered his service obsolete. Really? Traveling knife sharpener? Driving a little cart down the streets of Brooklyn ringing a bell and calling out “Bring out yer knives!”? Was this in the 1800's in Sicily or something? Well, we have no time to ponder this as just as the story ends, some baddies break in and it's up to Gino to mechanically gun them down. Yawn. Since we can recognize the last gunman, we know this to be Richie's crew, but Richie doesn't seem too angry when he hears the news of their demise on his police scanner. Never mind that he's down to one last goon (his driver).

Having secured the wife and son, Gino head back to Patty's club (which, shockingly, lets him in) to ask the waitress, Terry, what her note means. Turns out Roxanne is the name of Richie's girlfriend, and she's the woman in the photo with Bobby. Finding Roxanne's name and address in Patty's Rolodex, Gino heads off and takes Terry in tow. And while they're in transit, Richie drops in on his brother Vinnie, who is still in the bar despite having a broken nose with profuse bleeding. A man who was shown losing most of his teeth is also still there. You have no one to go to for medical treatment? Richie pushes Vinnie around for not having the guts to shoot Gino. And when Frankie's boys show up, Vinnie's refusal to help Richie take them out results in Richie essentially deciding he has no brother and banishing Vinnie once and for all. Good, that guy was starting to get whiny and annoying. Lucky for Richie that the bar patrons are willing to join a random posse and help him wipe out the mafia crew right quick.

Gino arrives at Roxanne's place only to find her good and dead. Oh well, I guess. Gino then heads off to see Bobby's widow, Laurie, and immediately starts rifling through her purse (right in front of her!) only to find the Polaroid from Bobby's death scene, another shot of him with Roxanne. Turns out Laurie had found the photos and, in jealousy, sent one to Richie, never expecting he'd kill Bobby for revenge. Gino intuits that Bobby was a crooked cop who wanted to become someone like Richie, with lots of money and women. Well, suddenly I don't feel as bad as I used to about Bobby getting popped. Gino gets a call on the radio telling him that one of his street contacts spotted Richie at an old girlfriend's house. Gino knows the place and sneaks in, only to wind up in a gun battle. As you'd expect, he's on the winning side of things as he and his trusty shotgun blow a whole lot of bad guys to pieces. Eventually, the only one left is Richie and this is when both Gino and Richie run out of bullets. I cannot fathom portly William Forsythe doing hand-to-hand combat, but that's what it looks like we're heading for. And, yeah, it looks real goofy when Forsythe comes a-running and a-jiggling towards Seagal only to get thrown into a wall and bounce because he's so fat. I'm reminded of Chris Farley doing the inspirational speaker on SNL and running around the room. The fight is one-sided in Gino's favor. He doesn't even need any of that Aikido shit because Richie is such a big fat klutz that most children could fend off his attacks. It's really not fair. After whooping Richie senseless, Gino finally just buries a corkscrew an inch deep into his brain just as Frankie and his boys show up. Even though they wanted Richie alive, they decide to help Gino out (he took a bullet during the gun battle).

Epilogue: Flash forward a few days to Gino spending a day with his wife on the boardwalk when who should Gino spot but the asshole who threw the dog out of the car. Gino gives him a literal swift kick in the sack and the puppy pisses on him for good measure. Aw, happy ending!

My feelings are mixed on Out for Justice. It starts out fantastic, with a great villain and a great situation, but it deteriorates into tepidness. By the end, Richie isn't nearly the rampaging evil bastard he was to start off and the pace has slowed to a crawl. It's like a great movie and a so-so movie got rolled into one and there was more so-so than great. It's not terrible, but it's not all that good. It's just average. I'm just disappointed in how they squandered the potential. Overall, it's the best of these four Seagal movies I've reviewed this month, but that ain't saying so much. Above the Law was lame, Hard to Kill was decent, and Marked for Death was Godawful. “Alright” wins out over that field.

The real sad part is that Out for Justice didn't do so well at the box office. Domestically, it fell short of Marked for Death, taking in only $40 million compared to Marked's $57 million. For the first time, a Seagal movie had failed to top it's predecessor in receipts (when the predecessor sucks so hard, is it that much of a surprise?). An issue? You betcha. That's a big disappointment in the Hollywood machine when they expect you to keep bringing in exponentially higher receipts with every subsequent film. What to do to fix the problem? How about pairing Seagal off with a couple of A-listers who can give him some shine and revitalize his drawing power? That's what Hollywood had in mind and we'll see exactly how big it paid off in two weeks when I review Seagal's biggest hit, Under Siege.

Steven Seagal Month, Week Three : Marked for Death

2009-03-23T05:10:00.005-04:00

The rise of Steven Seagal continues this week with Marked for Death. After doubling the box office of Above the Law with Hard to Kill, could Captain Squinty keep the trend going with a third hit? Let's find out.

Well, the movie sure wastes no time as we open with our hero, John Hatcher, chasing Danny Trejo (!!!!) through some South American marketplace. Anything with Danny Trejo is instant win, so this is easily the best opening Seagal has yet had. Seagal plays it rough, too, as upon capturing the man he violently interrogates him and then gags him and throws him in the trunk of a car. Wow, it's like the Samoa Joe school of being a babyface or something. After an impromptu strip club stopoff, Hatcher and his partner, Chico (!), head off to a big drug meeting of some sort to, well...buy drugs. Too bad they've gone to Danny Trejo's outfit, who are none too pleased with the way their compadre has been treated. How Danny got out of the trunk and told them what happened and who did it is just unexplained. The drug runners pull guns and in a moment I can't figure out, one of them shoots one of his own pals (!?) and then starts threatening Hatcher. Why'd you shoot your own man? It's so random and it happens so fast that it makes less than no sense. But we don't have time to linger on that as Hatcher quickly nabs a machete from one of the goons and choppy choppies the gunmens' hands off so he and Chico can make an exit stage left.

Along the way out of the compound, they senselessly decide to sweep every room (yeah, slow that getaway down to a halt) and at one point Chico wanders in on a naked woman. Being an idiot, Chico turns to leave and she gives him a few bullets to the chest for his stupidity. And then Hatcher kills her with a few of his own. So we've had the partner mortally wounded and avenged all in the opening ten minutes. Well, there goes that plot point. What is it with Seagal screwing up the dead partner/out for revenge thing? Anyway, after a jarring jump all the way to Chicago (as a title card informs us), Hatcher finds himself in church confessing his sins and admitting that in trying to bring down the bad guys, he became one of the bad guys himself. Ultimately, he decides he just has to give it all up and retire. Following the priest's advice, Hatcher goes home to see his family on what coincidentally happens to be family reunion day so the gang's all here.

Things get insanely dull as Hatcher looks around his childhood bedroom (inexplicably containing a wall-mounted gun collection) and then sets about cleaning said guns all while a tune that sounds like a soundtrack cue from from The Land Before Time plays in the background. You know that one scene when Little Foot mistakes his big shadow for his mother? Yeah, that song. And, hey, speaking of childhood memories, let's go visit the old Alma mater and see the high school football team in action. Hatcher reminisces a little with the coach (Keith David, from Dead Presidents) and then the two decide to head off to catch up. As they leave, they spot some scary black men (with the worst Jamaican accents) selling dope to kids behind the school, but Hatcher actually prevents coach from intervening. Why? Dunno. The movie doesn't have time to explain that as it's quickly off to that night when said scary black men arrange a meeting between their “mon” and some...I dunno, Afrikaners? I can't figure these guys out. They look Italian at first glance, but in close ups their leader's eye shape suggests something Asian, but he has a weird African accent. What the fuck is this man? Anyway, the man with no country meets the Jamaican drug lord known as Screwface. Gee, could that be a lame Scarface rip-off I sense? This Screwface looks like a cross between Milli Vanilli and a reject from Battlefield Earth with his unruly dreads and weird green eyes.

Terl you know it's true...

I would tell you what these men talk about but I can't decipher their fucking accents. The scene ends on a spooky note, I guess, when Screwface tells the other man that he can do bad things (I think that's what he said), and a shadowy clone of Screwface wanders through a nearby doorway cackling. Dun dun dun! Our ethnically-ambiguous friend later visits a psychic or witch or something who divines that Screwface is “muy malo” (no shit!?), and that some sort of spell ought to help. Said spell involves random nudity, a rooster, regurgitation, cigar smoking, and finally the death of the rooster. Voodoo is strange. But I guess it works, as Screwface is suddenly awakened from his slumber with a look of...fear...consternation...confusion...something on his face.

Hatcher and coach talk about how things have changed, how you used to only have to worry about your quarterback knocking some girl up, but now you have to worry about him OD'ing on cocaine. And then they go to a bar to PAR-TAY~! Appropriate response to the subject matter, for sure. Trouble sure has a way of finding Hatcher, though, as our ethnically ambiguous friend sends in some goons to take him out. Before the inevitable fight scene, though, we get some exposition from coach, who spots the Jamaicans again and goes on a ramble about his thirteen year old nephew dying in a crack house and yadda yadda. Hatcher just tells him to leave it alone again.

Oooh, twist! The goons start scoping the place out to make their move, only to be gunned down by some Jamaicans who bust in. Honestly didn't see that coming. I'd be tempted to suggest we have a “race war” plot going on, but then again they may all be the same race. Seriously what is that guy, A Jamasian or something? The Jamaicans flee after taking a few guys out, but the dealer that coach keeps spotting is left behind to finish off the last of them. Hatcher steps in to stop it, of course, and receives what I assume are threats for his trouble. The Jamaican dude said something like “Wally bonker dahhhhh. Did mik warking”. I think that last part was supposed to be “dead man walking”. Hatcher pistol whips him.

As the cops and EMTs clean up the bar, the movie takes the chance to have some Connie Chung knock off do a live news report explaining how Jamaican gangs “or posses” operate. In a word: Violently. Very violently. Still takes her two or three minutes to spit this out. Some feds arrive on the scene, including Hatcher's old pal Rosselli. Explaining what went down, Hatcher finally pins down our ethnically ambiguous friend as a Colombian (really?). Elsewhere, it seems Screwface's spidey-sense is strong, as he has located the voodoo priestess who cast the spell on him, and he promptly chops her head off.

Aw, Jeez. We now get a scene with nothing but Jamaicans in it as our recurring dealer (name please? Christ, Steven what is your problem with names?) addresses a group and I have no idea what is being said, what they are doing or what they are planning. It's just a lot of “Ooha Ooha. Wally didlle bee boo bah! Ahny jumbo ly! Povidah monkey now” and all that other indecipherable shit. I wonder if the closed captions on a TV broadcast would just say “[Jamaican bullshit]” every time these guys talk. And look, I'm not just saying this about their accents because I'm a racist bastard. That is part of it, but I also legitimately have no clue what these people are saying. None. They may be speaking in Swahili for all I know. What's really annoying is that Screwface shows up and I just know they're saying stuff that's important to the plot, but I can't make out a word of it. That's bad.

The following day, tragedy strikes when Hatcher visits his sister, only to have the house shot up by that same fucking Jamaican dealer. Are there only two Jamaicans with significant roles in this movie or what? It's either this guy or Screwface. Monotony, thy name is Marked for Death. Hatcher's little niece gets shot, and we get this really weird cut from Hatcher getting angry and jumping to his feet like he's going to rush outside and avenge her, to Hatcher calmly standing in the hospital awaiting the doctor's report. What happened in the meantime, there? Did he angrily drive the car to the hospital? Did he angrily call 911 and demand a “fucking ambulance”? Did he just have the taco shits? What was that face all about? And he got really calm. He's politely whispering to the doctor so as not to disturb other patients. It's the most jarring cut I've seen in a long time. Anyway, the little girl is in serious and unstable condition, and Hatcher demands she be treated “like the President of the United States”. What exactly gives him stroke over the doctor, I don't know, but ol doc whatshisname complies. And then we get out first Oscar clip of the night as Hatcher's sister breaks down and blames her daughter's near-death on him. HOW DARE YOU VISIT YOUR FAMILY UNAWARE OF ANGRY NEGROES TAILING YOU! I know distraught people say illogical things, but seriously, this is way up there. All Hatcher's done so far in the movie is retire, go drinking, and drop by to see his sister.

Suddenly, Hatcher gets angry again and marches right out of the hospital, with Coach inexplicably at his side. It's so random: one moment, Hatcher is walking alone and then Coach pops up and starts walking alongside him. Like they're partner cops or something, you know? Why? Is Coach going to get a gun and join Hatcher's quest for revenge? At least Hatcher is a cop. And then, just to add to the confusion, the movie immediately cuts to Hatcher busting in on a crook named Jimmy Fingers, and Coach is nowhere to be seen. Where'd he go? Did he just walk Hatcher to the exit? This scene is notable for finally naming our Jamaican friend. His name is Monkey. No, really. They had the balls to name a black guy Monkey. This could only be more racist if they named him Remus and gave him a nephew. Jimmy Fingers is a gun runner who apparently bailed Monkey out of prison and sold him the machine guns that wounded Hatcher's niece, and now Hatcher wants to know where that damn monkey..er, Monkey is. Jimmy pulls a gun and howls “I'm Jimmy Fucking Fingers, and I'm a made man!”. Hatcher puts a bullet through his brain and mutters “God made men”. OK, apparently Steven Seagal doesn't know what a “made man” is. Jimmy's Jamaican pal #1 on the left pops in to get his ass whipped into submission, but when Hatcher asks for Screwface's location, the thug throws himself out a window and kills himself rather than suffer the “fousan def” Screwface gives to squealers. I knew what he said that time, we're improving!

Screwface, hearing of Jimmy's death, finally learns to enunciate as he demands that Hatcher and his family be executed. Of course, I have no idea why he was so attached to Jimmy Fingers that he would want such revenge, but I'll just take the ability to understand what Screwface is saying and not look the gift horse in the mouth. Hatcher returns to his sister's house only to find it tagged with a crucifix with screw threads and the Idiogram, some wacky voodoo symbol that is supposed to be Screwface's calling card. He heads off to visit Leslie (Joanna Pacula, from Warlock: the Armageddon and Dinocroc!!!), a cop lady of some sort who was at the bar and first identified the Idiogram which I guess makes her our expert symbologist. Leslie explains that the markings on the house mean that the family has been MARKED FOR DEATH. Hatcher excuses himself to call his sister, WHO IS IN THE MARKED HOUSE and ask if the guards are still there. Turns out they aren't and then the phone goes dead. Dun dun dun! A Jamaican thug busts in and the struggle is on! Too bad for sis, she winds up in the clutches of Screwface himself, who inexplicably tells her to “stop the blood clot crying”. Yes, that is what he actually said. Okayyyy... Turns out Screwie has the living room set up for some voodoo ritual that likely involves human sacrifice. Hatcher hauls ass over there, and bursts in only to find that Screwface and crew have fled and left his sister alive for now.

Like any concerned brother would, Hatcher spends the next day ignoring his family and hanging with Coach, looking for Jamaican pushers to bust. They find one, but wind up in a car chase that is actually kinda boring until they crash into Tiffany's and Co and send the Holly Golightlys of the world running for cover. I love seeing rich white folk being terrorized. Once the bullets run out (and it takes a while), we finally get to see Seagal doing that Aikido martial arts shit of his as he sends thugs a-flyin' about the store. All told, Hatcher and Coach take out seemingly two dozen Jamaicans (what, were they driving a clown car? Where'd all those guys come from?), but accomplish nothing when you really think about it. This had nothing to do with the plot, unless we're supposed to assume that every Jamaican is affiliated with Screwface. And I guess they are, as Hatcher finds himself ambushed on the road, where a truck and a backhoe pin his car and crush it so as to trap him so that Screwface can toss in a molotov cocktail. Really? No voodoo this time? Lame. Hatcher gets out (duh) and takes Coach to meet Charles, a Jamaican cop who's been working with Rosselli. Sadly, Charles hasn't yet learned to enunciate. He (sorta) says that Screwface has returned to Jamaica and, after a weapons-collecting montage, our heroes are off to Jamaica. How they snuck all those guns through customs I know not. They just did. And we're talking machine guns and Uzis and shit.

In Jamaica, Coach and Charles get a lead on Screwface's girlfriend who apparently likes to hang out at a club. This club, by the way, is hosting a Jimmy Cliff concert. Jimmy Cliff being, of course, a legendary reggae musician and the badass star of The Harder They Come. Jimmy is, in all seriousness, singing the ballad of Screwface who's “time has come, you gonna ded tonight”. Screwface's girl is happy to dance to this tune. Hatcher probes the girl for some info but all she has to say is that Screwface has two heads and four eyes, which is the secret to his magic. Magic doesn't seem to do him much good, though, as Hatcher and friends manage to crash Screwface's party, sniping the guards from afar and then stealthily moving in to detonate a bomb and wipe out the posse in the chaos. While Coach and Charles gun down a seemingly endless barrage of goons outside, Hatcher sneaks into the building to go one on one with Screwface, but no such luck as guards take Hatcher down and set him up for one of Scewface's voodoo rituals. Hatcher gets loose, of course, and takes on the guards in only the second hand-to-hand battle of the film, which provides us the obligatory Neck Crank of Death for the evening. With that out of the way, Hatcher faces Screwface man to man in an exceedingly brief fight that ends in ten seconds when Hatcher steals Screwface's sword and lops his head off.

What, that's it? There's thirteen minutes left in the movie and we just killed the villain? The fuck? Hatcher and crew go back to Chicago...I think...and tell the other Jamaicans that Screwface is dead and they better leave, or else they'll be dead too. Charles even holds up Screwface's head!

How do you get that past customs!?

Things get really weird as the heroes back out of the room, only for Charles to be stabbed in the back by...SCREWFACE. Whaaaaaaatttttttt?! Maybe there's something to this voodoo shit after all! Hatcher chases Screwface upstairs (taking out some generic thugs along the way, of course) while Coach stays behind to hold off the other Jamaicans downstairs. Finally, Hatcher catches up to Screwface who admits that he was really a pair of identical twin brothers all along. Well fuck that voodoo crap all over. Hatcher and Screwface number two have a big ol' sword fight which, shockingly, Hatcher is largely on the losing side of until he PUTS HIS THUMBS THROUGH SCREWFACE'S EYES, throws him through a wall, snaps his spine over his knee, and tosses him down an elevator shaft. Jesus Christ, you killed him four different ways before he hit the floor! That's just sadistic. And that's all she wrote, folks.

This movie sucks. The voodoo conceit is stupid, half the cast is indecipherable, and worst of all it's boring. There's a lot of nothing in the first half, and the second half is so loaded with gun fights and so lacking in hand-to-hand combat that there's really no tension at all. Seagal and his pals have uzis and the bad guys have hand guns, it's a no-contest from the start! Who cares, then? I mean, yeah, I know Seagal never loses the hand-to-hand fights either, but at least those offer him the chance to kill guys in innovative ways. But even that doesn't happen here, as the limited amount of time devoted to said fights only allows Seagal enough time to do the same shit he always does: the Neck Crank of Death, bending a guy's arm backwards, and tossing a bunch of guys over tables. That's supposed to lead up to the innovative kills, but here it's all we get! That's lame! And the acting is terrible! Seagal does this awful accent – what accent it's supposed to be I don't know – that totally distracts in every scene. And the guy playing Screwface is so over the top absurdly evil it's hilarious. It's like he's parodying himself. And then there's the utter cruelty of the final fight. Yeah, I get it that Screwface is a bad mother and all, but he was basically tortured to death in a most cruel fashion. The only thing that saves his death from being unwatchably awful is the fact that Seagal is rather obviously mangling a crash test dummy in dreads and not an actual actor. This is the one time bad special effects work actually made a scene watchable.

This movie is AWFUL. Awful, awful, awful.

All told, it was a success though, taking in $57 million worldwide at the box office and $20 million more in rentals. But that doesn't mean it wasn't shit!

Ugh. Tune in next week for Out For Justice, which had damn well better be good!

Steven Seagal Month, Week Two: Hard to Kill

2009-03-15T04:47:00.005-04:00

So when we last left our hero, he had killed Henry Silva, saved the Senator, done a lot of nonsensical things in the process, and made himself a tidy profit at the box office while also garnering critical praise. Steven Seagal had arrived. Now he was set to be America's next big action hero, and in 1990 he made his return to the silver screen with his second adventure, Hard to Kill. Was it as goofy as Above the Law? Were there more Billy Jack references? Would are next low-rent villain be another Hal Needham cast-off? Most importantly: Would it be a hit? Let's find out!

Our film opens in the seediest of seedy locations: a damp back-alley just outside a smoke and sparks factory on a dark and stormy night. This is the kind of cliché place where the final battles usually happen in this kind of movie. Two cars arrive for what is surely some kind of underhanded deal, but no worries: Seagal is on the scene to scope it out. For no reason, he begs the bad guys to get on with it so he doesn't have to miss the Oscars. Whatever. He recognizes one of the mooks involved, but can't quite place the others despite his mega-zoom spy camera. What, are you blind? And you've got a fucking microphone, are you deaf too? Ruh Roh! The talk turns to getting a corrupt, criminal-friendly politician into office. There's also talk of some sort of plane-related terrorism (“We want it to take off. We don't want it to land.”), but then Seagal totally botches it up by making a noise and giving himself away. The villainous politician steps into the light and it's...

Bill Sadler? Really? The Grim Reaper from Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey is the bad guy here? Wow, this movie got lame in the first three minutes. Seagal takes out a baddie and then runs for his life. Where the fuck did his backbone go? He would've taken all these guys out single-handed in the last movie! Anyway, at the precinct police chief I Wish I Was Danny Glover – who is watching the Oscars - gets a call from our hero, Mason Storm as he is improbably named, who reports his findings from the meeting. Thanks for recapping what we just saw!

To the convenience store, where Mason asks A) where the keep the champagne and B) why the clerk isn't watching the Oscars. The clerk says he hates the Oscars. As is inevitable with action movie convenience stores, a bunch of punks waltz in. Before they've even done anything, Mason tells the clerk to call the cops and then he goes into Steven Seagal's patented “Angry Squint” mode. Oh, they have shotguns. Way to make that clear in the establishing shot, Mr. Director. So they hold the place up, shoot the clerk and then promptly get their asses kicked by Mason who makes sure the destroy the whole store with their bodies. The best is the last baddie, who Mason willingly gives the advantage to by getting down on his knees. But even with this edge, the dork still winds up face down on the ground with Mason TWISTING HIS FOOT OFF AT THE ANKLE. Holy shit that's the greatest thing I've ever seen. Suddenly, this movie rules!

Afterward, when the cops have arrived, a fellow officer jovially says “Looks like you won the Oscar tonight, Storm!”, to which Mason chuckles and winks in a most un-Seagal like manner. A triumphant Mason rides way into the night as “Feels so Good” by Chuck Mangione (if you can believe it), blares from his car radio. That's the most inappropriate song I can think of for this movie. Mason shares the sentiment and quickly ejects that tape from the radio and replaces it with the recording of the shady meeting. Finally, he arrives at home where he is greeted by his lovely wife. They head off to bed for a little fun, which is not the least bit interesting. What is interesting is how when they turn the lights off, the stairwell is suddenly bathed in a red glow. Where is that coming from? Along the way, they stop off at their son (the creatively-named Sonny)'s room where Mason gives him a stuffed monkey and then they say their prayers together. Aww. Always the family man, that Seagal. While Mason and his wife say their “I Love You”s, some gun-wielding hoods are sneaking into the house. They bust in and, in a first, they actually manage to shoot Mason a few times. Not that he slows down at all as he kills them one by one. At least, that is, until he suddenly freezes up as the last hood shoots the shit out of wifey. Elsewhere, Not Danny Glover also gets a visit from some hoods who blast him to pieces. Back at the Storm residence, the hoods plant drugs around the room, and little Sonny wanders down the hall to see what all the noise was. The hoods try to shoot him, but Sonny escapes out a SECOND STORY WINDOW. Geez, damned if you, damned if you don't. The kid's like five, for crying out loud.

At the hospital, Bill Sadler (we'll call him Trent. The movie hasn't bothered to name him yet, but that's what IMDb says his name is), is holding a tearful press conference about the apparent demise of Mason, who he says he worked closely with. Either he's full of it, or Mason is an idiot for not recognizing his voice. Trent is so obviously full of shit – he wanders about crying aloud about “What has society come to” and “Won't anyone think of the children” and all that kind of crap. He's a terrible actor, but everyone buys it. After that passes, some asshole cop says Mason was a coke-fiend (gee, ya think he's in on it?), and another cop (names, please?) threatens him with death for saying such a thing. For the record, the asshole is homicide and the second cop is Internal Affairs. Homicide wants IA to fuck off, but IA says the commissioner has put him on the case because of the money and the drugs found around the crime scene.

A doctor wanders into the scene to inform them that Mason is officially dead. Homicide is humbled by the news and walks off hanging his head in shame. And then another doctor approaches IA (Lt. O'Malley, they call him) and says he has “a live cop!”. Yes, Mason has survived if just barely, but O'Malley wants the hospital crew to keep it quiet so Mason can be disappeared for his own safety.

Well, part one of the vague nefarious plot was a success, as the plane sure didn't land, and it took a Senator down with it. This is good for Trent, the local assemblyman, as he is, as planned, named the new Senator. And then it's briefly montage time as Mason goes through a long coma and Trent rises through the ranks to become Vice President!!!

And I mean a long coma. Don't hospitals usually keep coma patients neatly trimmed and shaved? Or did they think “You know...I think the Mongolian look would work well for this guy.”? Things get even worse when we meet Nurse Creepy McStalksalot (Kelly Le Brock!!!!!!!!!), the woman who has way, way too much affection for Mason's lifeless form. She flips out when she hears he moved his head, she talks too him like a lover, and she even bought him a pet cat. He's fucking comatose! Back off! She even lifts up the blanket to admire his schlong and then begs him to wake up!!! FIRE HER. Her weird brand of loving seems to work, though, as Mason wakes up amidst a torrent of memories of the night his family died. While the doctors rush Mason off for treatment, Nurse Creepy follows her shadowy instructions to inform now-Captain O'Malley of Mason's awakening. Too bad O'Malley is no longer with the precinct, meaning they'll have to defer the call to his replacement. In the meantime, Nurse Creepy checks in on Mason, who says they need to get out of town soon or else they'll both be dead within the hour. What, do the hoods have an insider in the medical community? Would Trent even still have them around?

Well, I guess he's right, as a mystery man in a doctor's coat walks into the hospital, heralded by a creepy synth chord. Even though no one has seen him before, they still let him have access to the patients list for the coma unit, and then they let him go in. I'm having flashbacks to Tom Cruise using “I'm a doctor” to get his way in everything in Eyes Wide Shut. Evil doc finds that Mason is gone from the ward and just to be a dick, he shoots a security guard. And then, as Mason is being wheeled back to the ward, evil doc kills the orderly too. Improbably, Mason, who's practically paralyzed after seven years without movement, manages to pull his gurney along the wall and through a door to hide or something. And then he makes it onto an elevator. What, is it going to be a gunman vs. man in a bed chase? I can't wait to see Mason speeding down the highway in his hospital bed. Well, actually, Mason is dumb enough to send the elevator up instead of down (cornering yourself on the top floor is such a great idea right now), but then he fixes the problem by going all the way down to the basement. ONE. PRESS THE ONE! GO TO THE FIRST FLOOR AND LEAVE. Lucky for the dumbshit, the elevator stops on the coma floor along the way and Nurse Creepy hops on. She rushes him out the door and into her car for a speedy getaway.

Later, the inept gunman reports to Trent about the epic fail of an assassination attempt, and Trent's great idea is to blame the mayhem and death at the hospital on Mason. Are you fucking stupid? Who's going to believe that a man awoke from a seven year coma and immediately went on a killing spree? He's practically a quadriplegic from the muscle atrophy! Oh, and Trent is being referred to as Senator so that whole VP thing was a red herring I guess. At an improbably palatial country estate, Mason recuperates and even takes in a little TV. The Geraldo show is on. What a cruel new world Mason has awoken into. Desperate, Mason rolls out of bed and crawls on hand and knee to escape the horror. He then spots a local news report making him out as some kind of crook and calls the station to let them know they can have the scoop on proof that he's innocent. When the news of the alleged proof hits the air, Trent has his men put a tail on the reporter in hopes that he'll meet Mason in person somewhere.

And now it's time for a tender moment as Mason and the nurse (fuck it, I'll just call her Kelly Le Brock) chuckle at how hokey Mason's beard looks. Yes, I'm serious, the movie just called out it's own makeup department for doing a shitty job. And then it's time for the Steven Seagal semi-autobiographical backstory of the night. Mason tells Kelly to go to Chinatown with a grocery list, which he has written in “Chinese”. That's not a language...it's either Mandarin or Cantonese, guys. Anyway, this sparks Mason to discuss his history with the Chinese: he was raised in the orient, where his father was a missionary. Being the only whitey around, Mason learned to fight for protection. His sensai, however, taught him that it is more important to heal than to hurt. Aww.

The next day, Mason has lost the shitty beard and cut his hair and Kelly Le Brock has found some archival newspapers from the aftermath of the murders. An angry Mason does what any Steven Seagal hero would, and studies some Eastern mystical bullshit and lifts a bunch of weights. What a weird training montage. He's alternating between some kinda acupuncture (with flaming needles!) and doing weight training and punching a piece of wood. After that bit of strangeness, Mason finds a phone number in his hospital records. It turns out to be some kind of retirement village or something, and somehow Kelly Le Brock has reasoned that O'Malley must be there (he's not that old!). The lady running the place says he isn't, but Kelly finds a badge in the office and scribbles something down.

After a rather pointless love scene, Kelly heads over to her friend Martha's place, which happens to be being staked out by the inept gunman and crew. A neighbor informs Kelly that Martha is dead and that she was found in, wouldn't ya know it, Kelly Le Brock's house. While the baddies tail Kelly, Mason arrives home to find O'Malley waiting for him with the good news that Sonny survived, but was vanished by the cops to keep him safe. He's grown up to be a prime athlete. O'Malley also reveals that he spent years analyzing the audio tape of the meeting on the dock and found nothing. Fucking Trent is all over TV and no one can recognize his voice? Christ. He continues on to say that he doggedly investigated Mason's seeming demise but found nothing and was repeatedly told to back off, though he refused to do so until his mother was run off the road and paralyzed. Mason vows revenge. Later on, whilst thinking, Mason connects the audio tape and Trent when he remembers hearing Trent say “you can take that to the bank!”, which wound up becoming his campaign slogan. Dun dun dun!

“I'm gonna take you to the bank, Senator Trent. To the BLOOD BANK!” I can't believe Steven Seagal actually said that. That's something Loren Avadon would say in King of the Kickboxers. Kelly arrives home and Mason decides it's time to hightail it. But while they're packing, the baddies rush in armed to the teeth, which means of course that they are quickly and easily disposed of by Mason. After hopping into a jeep, Mason and Kelly are confronted by more baddies who, luckily, are straight out of an A-Team episode and have an easier time shooting the dirt than their target.

Driving into the city, Mason stops when he sees a group of Latinos and offers to trade them his shot-up jeep for their low rider. And they accept. Why?! Later, in an inexplicable moment, Kelly and Mason pose as real estate agents to get into Mason's old house so he can look around. And, oh yeah, retrieve the footage of the meeting from his hidey spot. They head off to a hotel to meet the reporter, but O'Malley hasn't shown up with the audio yet. The baddies have tailed him to where Sonny is being hidden. Whilst O'Malley is busy rushing Sonny off, some crooked cops (including homicide from the hospital) have followed some leads right to the hotel where they find Mason and Kelly. The chase is on as Mason and Kelly steal a car from the valet.

Elsewhere, O'Malley and Sonny are at the train station and soon find themselves cornered by baddies. O'Malley valiantly gives his life to allow Sonny time to run. Luckily, Mason and Kelly show up just as the baddies are going after Sonny. After a long foot chase, Mason stops the baddies in Chinatown and totally wrecks an obligatory Chinese restaurant in the process of whipping ass. After delivering the Neck Crank of Death, Mason takes Sonny and runs. After dumping the brat in Kelly's lap, Mason heads off to Trent's mansion. He quickly stumbles upon a room of henchmen and rather than just shooting them, he puts the gun away and engages in hand to hand combat. Why? Because he's Steven Seagal, dammit. The fight is short and ends with inept gunman getting a pool cue through the neck. “That's for my wife! Fuck you and DIE!”. Now THAT's a Steven Seagal line. Finally, Mason finds Trent hiding in a closet and SHOVES A SHOTGUN DOWN HIS THROAT. But rather than simply killing him, Mason leads Trent around like a dog on a leash and vows to put Trent behind bars. “A nice petite white boy like you won't remain anal retentive for very long!” THAT IS A STEVEN SEAGAL LINE!!!! SWAT shows up to arrest Mason, but then the chief walks in and says he saw the film and knows Mason was set up and all is OK and Trent is under arrest. Sonny and Kelly show up for a tearful celebration as the footage plays on the news.The End. The anti-climactic end.

Well, Hard to Kill is better than Above the Law. But that's like saying a TNT original movie is better than a Sci-Fi channel original movie. It's silly and total nonsense, but it's also got a darker edge to it and Seagal has some sweet catchphrases and some way more bad ass moves, and that's what it's all about, really. Hard to Kill is perfectly acceptable as brainless time filler. I'd even go so far as to say that I actually kinda liked it. Yeah, I'll pick at the really stupid parts, but I'd watch it again to fill a Saturday afternoon. Good job, Seagal, you improved, as did your revenues as Hard to Kill brought in $47 million, more than twice what Above the Law earned. Now Seagal has two films and two hits under his belt. Will this trend continue? Find out next week with Marked for Death!

Oh, by the way, do you think Seagal wanted an Oscar? I got this funny feeling...

Steven Seagal Month, Week One: Above the Law

2009-03-08T05:13:00.022-04:00

Ah, Steven Seagal. For years one of the bigger names in action movie-dom thanks to his imposing figure, martial arts fighting style, and ruthlessly violent fight scenes, he has brought in more than $850 million at the box office worldwide. People love seeing a big badass whoop the ever loving shit out of the bad guys (the more generic the baddies, the better), and that was all Seagal provided, and audiences ate it up. Beginning in 1988 with his debut, Above the Law, Seagal had a meteoric rise to fame and success, which came to a crashing halt only 6 years later. Why? Well, we're here to find out. All March long I'll be chronicling Seagal's rise with his first four movies, and next month we'll not only see his pinnacle of box office success, we'll also find out where it all went horribly, horribly wrong. So let's get started, shall we?

This week's film: Seagal's debut in Above the Law.

So the movie begins by essentially giving us Seagal's own life story, with some tweaks to fit it to his character here: born in Italy, raised in America, super-patriotic but nonetheless itching to get out and travel the world, he wound up in Asia and studied the martial arts. And then we see Seagal teaching a martial arts class by just beating everyone up real good. That's the best way to teach anyone anything, beating them so severely they'll forget what you told them. Seriously, there's a clothesline in there like it's pro-wrestling. Steve's voice over continues, now entirely fictional, as he tells us of being invited to an American Embassy party where he was recruited into CIA. Why? I dunno. He just says he was. And then he says his eyes were opened, a statement which is followed by some lovely Vietnam War footage.

Is this Above the Law or Billy Jack?

So it's 1973, and Steve and some fellow soldiers are trolling along the Vietnam-Cambodia border, where they meet up with a helicopter delivering some men to perform what one of Steve's buds calls “chemical interrogation”. I hope that's like the naked LSD trip they made the guy take in The Good Shepherd. That was sweet. Steve asks if these guys are with the Agency, but his friend says they're “from a page that ain't even in the book”.

Cut to that night, where it pretty much is the naked LSD trip, but the interrogation leader, Zagon (played by MEGAFORCE's gay cowboy villain Henry Silva), has given their hostage a massive dose, and the man can't even speak except for groans. Zagon, who is sooooooo clearly our villain (he has his own signature musical sting and everything), calls the man a pussy and abuses him a in a manner that screams “HATE ME! I'M DYING AT THE END OF THE MOVIE, SO HATE ME!” The victim even dies in the end. Zagon is doomed. It gets better. Zagon attacks another detainee and tells him “never fuck with my opium!”

He killed a man with an overdose and didn't care, he's a drug runner, and he's PLAYED BY HENRY SILVA. Zagon is the most obvious bad guy of all time. The only way this movie can possibly redeem this is if Zagon turns out to be a good guy.

That's strange...I just got the feeling I'm gonna kill this guy some day.

And they just keep piling it on, folks. Seagal asks Zagon what the fuck any of this has to do with, ya know, military intelligence, and Zagon gets all appalled at the sound of those words. “Who da fuck is dis cherry?!” Seagal, who finally gets the name Nico, is offended by Zagon's tactics, but Zagon warns that he can make people disappear. Nico won't back off, though, and when Zagon tries to dismember his hostage, Nico busts out some KUNG FU FIGHTIN'~! With a fist of doom to Zagon's temple and a...wacky thing...to a sidekick before his fellow officers force Nico out of the room. Nico has to flee the country back to the US, a trip which, according to the time stamp on screen, took fifteen years. Nico and his wife, Sharon Stone, are having their baby baptized. And this baby is horrifying, because it looks like a mini-me of Seagal, right down to the gigantic dark eyes and pronounced brow.

At the after-party (?) Seagal's new partner, Pam Grier, is inexplicably the center of everyone's attention. But why linger on character development when Nico's...um...mama...aunt...neighbor...friend?...is crying over her daughter running off with that boy the family doesn't like. Nico basically brushes the issue off, half-heartedly promising to take care of it after work (you didn't take the day off for the baptism?). And so we go to work, Nico and Pam driving around, Pam joking over he walkie with other cops about how it's her last week on the streets.

DEAD.

Nico pulls over to take a piss (yes) in a dusty bar (yes) full of drunks who don't like him (yes). He starts asking about the missing girl, prompting mockery and insults from the drunks (yes), and then one guy jokes about fucking the girl (yes!) and then Nico beats him up (yes!!), leading to a bar brawl (YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!). Nico quickly disposes of several men and then forces the asshole barkeep (who gives the drunks commands like he's Jimmy Hart leading the Hart Foundation or something) to take him to the girl. She's upstairs doing all kinds of drugs with her man, who knows better than to try anything and says “this is exactly what it looks like”. Nico teaches him a lesson by repeatedly slamming the man's head into the mirror they were doing coke lines off of, and then throwing him around the room like RoboCop arresting Kurtwood Smith. The ass-whipping spills out into the hall, the girl alternately insulting Nico and begging his mercy all the time, until the dude offers up some dope on a shipment of, well, dope coming in.

And now it's what I like to call the Snoopy Scene of the movie: a dark and stormy night! Nico plants a bug to stake out the lawyer orchestrating the coke deal. After picking up the info, Nico and Pam follow the coke lawyer to a club. Pam, who irrationally hates clubs for no reason other than “the element”, whatever that means, doesn't want to go in but Nico promises a party~! YAY~! Party~! They head inside, they spot the lawyer and his client, and then they dance. And that's it. That was pointless.

Oh, and Pam has to give us the “I'm too old for this shit” rigmarole to reenforce the fact that she's DEAD MEAT.

Flash forward to the drug deal going down. Nico, Pam, and a bunch of other cops are disguised as meat packers (?) at a random seedy location, where coke lawyer, now named Chichi, and his client arrive to pick up their shipment. But then feds swarm in and blow Nico's sting all to shit. There's a gunfight here that's actually pretty good, except for one improbable truck flip (why would there be a mountain of meat shaped perfectly as a jump ramp for this vehicle to “accidentally” drive over and flip off of?). And then we get the requisite impossible car chase as Nico rides on top of ChiChi's getaway car, trying to find a way to stop it. Reaching in through the passenger window and strangling Chichi's client does the trick nicely. Inspecting the shipment, the coppers find an engine block filled with military explosives instead of the expected drugs.

Chichi and his client, apparently having made bail, spend the night with their lawyers working out what to do about that crazy cop. Client, who looks like Fausto from Ghosts Can't Do It and talks like Santino Marella from WWE (“what-a are you-a going to do-a?”) wants Nico in prison. Not dead? Leaving the office, Chichi and the now-named Salvano run into (dun dunn DUN) Zagon, who warns that he wants no more problems from these morons.

At the precinct, the coppers explain that Salvano is wanted by the feds for involvement in some shadowy stuff the feds won't divulge, and that the cops need to stand down. Nico, of course, refuses to do so. Pam says he'll need her, and so she comes along to stake out Salvano. They wind up in a church where literally nothing happens except Salvano saying a prayer and then leaving. Nico and Pam, now finally named as Dolores, try to follow but the priest pops up and recognizes Nico and slows them down, letting Salvano get away. Priest takes them down to the basement and shows how some room was broken into. A room full of Mexican illegals who have sought sanctuary, it seems. I suppose now Nico has to protect the beleaguered minority? This is Billy Jack, isn't it? Come on, throw a school into the mix, I dare you. Father asks Nico to start attending church again and the next day, Nico obliges. It's sermon time~! Father talks about the government doing wrong and whatnot.

OK, it's official. I AM watching Billy Jack again. Anyway, Nico spots a woman walking out of the church but leaving her bag behind which can only mean one thing

BOMB

This small bomb sends everyone – everyone except Nico, anyway – flying for yards, smashing into walls and stained glass windows, and fills the room with smoke and fire and ballyhoo. Yep, that;s C-4 alright, the same thing they confiscated from Salvano earlier. I love how Nico doesn't flinch, doesn't move, and doesn't even get any soot on him. What, is Steven Seagal God all of a sudden? The priest dies, Nico's mama loses an eye, and Nico gets pissed. Or constipated.

He spots a superior officer in the hospital hallway and corners him to get some answers about why Salvano was let go, but Commander whatshisname is all indignant and just starts mocking “all that chop-suey crap” Nico does. Why? I dunno. Nico promises to find out the name of the fed who signed for the explosives, and Commander Pricky McDouchebag just shuts up. And now it's montage time, as Nico and Dolores seperately investigate Salvano and the bombing. A car full of stereotypical spics pulls up to Nico and take him at gun, knife, machete, and baseball bat-point. Nico, though, easily wrestles the machete away and begins HACKING MEN TO DEATH (no blood though. I guess squibs were too fancy for this movie?) until only the obnoxious leader of the group is left. Leader runs for his life, but Nico is right on his heels as they cover seemingly half the city on foot, including at one point running through what I surmise was a Sound Effects factory, as leader ran in to a chorus of “shattering glass”, “glistening blade” and “fender bender” noises that have no logical origin. Nico finally catches the man, gets the scoop that the attack was indeed ordered by Salvano, and then gives the guy a KO knee to the face for good measure. Conveniently, this last part happened mere feet from a guy who is the lead spic's friend, which means we're immediately in another fight. A brutally one-sided one, as Nico levels the man with a heart punch.

Sharon Stone finally gets to say and/or do something (halfway into the damn movie) as she and Nico lie in bed later that day listening to news reports about the chuch bombing (yes, it's still the same day), and she asks what the fuck they were doing in a church anyway. Nico has no good answer and just says some vague shit about “I want answers and I need time”. What? The phone rings, bringing an ominous warning from a CIA agent, telling Nico that some heavy shit is going down and Nico and his family need to run for their lives. Sharon wants to know why the CIA is calling at 2 AM, but judging from the broad daylight out the window...they aren't. Later that night (that's when the sun goes away, just so you know) the police show up to arrest Nico on orders from the feds. At the precinct, they reveal that they've followed his whole investigation since the stand down order, and are pretty much booking him for being too dedicated a cop, I guess. OK, so it's illegal to wire tap and set up stings without authorization, but really, this guy's a one-man army, wouldn't you let him have a bit of free reign when he's clearly getting somewhere with this Salvano shit? Nico winds up having his badge revoked.

Nico meets up with Dolores to hear what she's found out, namely that high-ranking intelligence agencies are involved in drug trafficking. Nico, of course, is intent on using this info to take some suckers down. After a pointless visit to the church for a conversation with Sister Vague Accent (she's either Irish, British, German, Swedish, or Guatemalan. I'm not sure which, but she does phase through all of them), Nico gets pwned by Dolores, who vows she can handle the investigation by herself and tells him to go home. Stopping at a school crossing along the way, Nico is attacked by a squad of goons wielding machine guns who shoot his car to pieces. No worries, though, he magically phased through the seats so he can pop out from underneath the trunk right when the goons are reloading. One of the goons, a rotund man, steps forward and says “you can't drop us all FATASS” in a moment of great irony. Nico responds by putting a bullet through the man's heart.

Nico corrals the goons into an Indian convenience store, which just screams fight scene. And indeed, Nico finds himself taking on the four remaining goons singlehandedly, destroying the shop in the process. Including the obligatory store front window.

Jumping ahead, Nico's mama, wife, and baby are snuck off for their escape to wherever. Nico stays behind to nab Pricky McDouchebag, or Special Agent Neely as he is now known (why does it take so long for people to get names in this movie?) after the agent has, he says, solicited a child prostitute. Nico forces the agent to use his authority to get them into the evidence locker to get the C-4, but it turns out to have been taken away by CIA days ago, specifically the agent who told Nico to get his family out of town. Enraged, Nico takes Neely out to a lake and forces him to strip to his undies and go for a swim. Why? I dunno.

Off to a tech convention to meet some random Asian woman who apparently has some kind of hacking capabilities. She gets Nico into a CIA dossier database. Turns out CIA has sent five agents, all of them trained assassins, to town all in the same week. Ruh-roh Raggy~! This is probably where I should mention Padre Tomasino, a priest who was the target of the church bombing but lived. Nico has vaguely referenced him on occasion throughout the second half of the film, but this is the first time they actually establish that he's a target of the government. Apparently harboring illegals is riskier business than we even thought. Sheesh. Nico sets out to find Tomasino, who is in hiding, and protect him.

Elsewhere, Sister Vague Accent is ambushed by, I presume, the CIA assassins. They find Tomasino in her house. The assassins subject Tomasino to the nefarious chemical interrogation and (dun dun dun) Zagon is leading it all. He wants to know if Tomasino has divulged “our plans to kill the senator”. Um...what? What are you talking about? Dolores, Nico and Bobby Heenan (seriously, this guy could pass for The Brain), arrive outside. Nico tells Dolores she has to stay in the car while the menfolk take care of business. Is she going to die or not? What else is she there for? Too old for this shit; she's retiring; she's a woman; and she's the hero's partner. KILL HER so her death must be avenged! That's her purpose, you idiots. Anyway, the chemicals don't work and Zagon decides to move onto phase two, which is good ol' fashioned dismemberment. Right then, Nico and Bobby bust in and start a-killing. Bobby gets hit in the shoulder and he and Nico are forced to retreat to the hall, where Dolores is waiting to back them up. Oh good, someone kill her! There's only 24 minutes left, but we can make it work still!

Thank you.

The firefight spills onto an elevated train which is full of the sounds of screaming pedestrians, even though everyone is sitting still and not moving their lips. The magic of dubbing. Nico hops onto another train and lives another day. Nico visits Dolores' house for a weepy moment.

DAMMIT, SHE'S NOT DEAD! You got shot in the fucking chest with a shotgun and you lived? FUCK YOU AND YOUR BULLETPROOF VEST! The next day, Nico visits his...whoever, who tells him that Dolores will be fine. Nico celebrates and, well, doesn't that kinda ruin the whole movie? Everything's fine~! Hooray~! Who cares about fucking Henry Silva now? What, we still have to go all Billy Jack and save the migrants? They're in a church, they're fine. Anywho, Sharon Stone begs Nico to back off and leave this whole thing alone, the assassins having sent photographic proof of how close they are to the family and that they can kill them at any time if he keeps bothering them.

He, of course, ignores her and goes to scout Zagon's hideout. Nico's buddy Nelson (the one from the ominous phone call) is there to bust him, though. Here's our chance for improbable exposition as the two discuss the corruption of CIA, with their trafficking and their assassination schemes. After that crap, Nelson takes Nico at gunpoint and – oh, there's more exposition. Now Nico is complaining about CIA destroying cultures by inciting and prolonging wars. Alright, I get it. Government sucks. Mercifully, Zagon and his thugs, including the barkeep and Salvano (???) show up. Time for another firefight. Nelson bites it quickly, and Nico takes his gun and car to make a getaway. Salvano winds up on the back of the car, and Nico backs it right out a wall of the inexplicably sky-scraper tall parking garage to send Salvano plummeting to his death. The car doesn't fall because Steven Seagal is magical. Despite a valiant effort, Nico winds up being cornered and kidnapped at the end of it all.

And now it's off to kill that Senator no one cares about. Zagon and crew have Nico tied up in the kitchen, where Zagon uses the old WCW Coal Miner's Glove gimmick to give him a thorough walloping. And then, of course, it's time for a massive shot of the magic drug. Nico plays dead so he can bust out a surprise attack. Why the drug doesn't affect him, I don't know. The thugs all bite it, Nico breaks a few of Zagon's bones before the obligatory Neck Crank of Death, and well...movie over (and yes, this fight scene was just that brief. So anti-climactic)? All the baddies are dead, but there's still like six minutes left. Nico stumbles into the lobby just in time to collapse from the drug. Luckily Dolores and Heenan are there to take care of him. The next day, the senator visits Nico's house for a personal thank you, including the promise to bring the baddies to justice.

THEY'RE DEAD, YOU BOOB.

Nico gives a deposition to some judge lady and basically starts telling the movie's story over from the beginning. That's your ending? It should have ended with a triumphant pose over the bad guy's corpse, or perhaps a nifty catchphrase. But a deposition? That's lame!

Above the Law is stupid, nonsensical, predictable (except in the one instance when it should be!), and downright goofy at times. At best, it's the kind of thing you might watch on TNT on a really, really bored Saturday afternoon. It's the kind of thing you can mildly enjoy if you don't think at all, but if you even start to apply logic to it it turns into frustration. It was a decent hit, though, bringing in $20 million at the box office, and it even won some critical praise (Roger Ebert gave it three stars!). Certainly, it's not worth paying theatrical admission price for, not even whatever that would have been back in the 80's. And, oh yeah, it's a Billy Jack remake in more ways than one, and that's a miserable legacy to attach yourself too.

Steven Seagal's rise to fame continues next week with Hard to Kill!

Masochism: It's Steven Seagal Month~!

2009-03-03T06:07:00.006-05:00

He's Above the Law. He's Hard to Kill. He's Marked for Death. He's Out for Justice.

Four weeks, four reviews.... Steven Seagal's first four movies! Witness (with profound horror) the rise of one of America's doofiest action heroes in the films that made his name - and made utter pap like On Deadly Ground possible - beginning this weekend.

Self-Promotion at it's Finest

2009-02-23T04:31:00.002-05:00

Totally tipping off the Cheap-Arse critic, I made myself a facebook page. Be my fan today~! All two of you!

My Beliefs Confirmed

2009-02-18T07:02:00.004-05:00

So I tried to get rid of my copy of Johnny Mnemonic by selling it off at the local FYE with their buy back program. It rang up as having a value of exactly $0.01. One shiny penny. And they were not willing to give me that penny. It was not worth it to them. I left with that film still in my possession.

FUCK YOU, KEANU.

Love is in the Air. And it Reeks: Ghosts Can't Do It Review

2009-02-16T04:35:00.011-05:00

This was supposed to be ready for Valentine's Day, but I suck so it's late. Oh well. In honor of the supposed day of love I thought I'd take a look at a movie about love which I myself love, made by a pair of talentless morons who's love for each other was topped only by their love for themselves. In short:

I'M REVIEWING A DEREK MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YEAH~!!!!!!!!!

I LOVE the Dereks. That would be World's Worst Actress Bo and her late husband, World's Worst Screenwriter and Director John. Perhaps the most narcissistic couple in showbiz ever, and without doubt the most hilariously inept filmmaking duo ever, the Dereks specialized in making softcore porn home movies celebrating the physical beauty and mental nonexistence of young Bo, and the sub-Ed Wood directing, writing, and producing anti-talents of John that were so softcore they made the Snuggle bear look hardcore. And yet somehow they kept getting them into theaters nationwide. Because, ya know, everybody cares what Bo does. And if they don't THEY SHOULD. Why? Because Bo Knows, and we all need an education.

Together they produced what has been called a Trilogy of Terrors; possibly the worst – and least sexy – so-called “erotic” movies of all time. Quite famous were the first and second entries: 1981's Tarzan, the Ape Man (a retelling of the old legend from Jane/Bo's perspective as she just gets nekkid in the river a lot and Tarzan wanders through the background) and 1984's Bolero, the one where Bo repaired a man's severed penis just by being Bo. Because apparently human males can regrow their genitals like starfish regenerate appendages so long as you just turn them on a little first. Lesser known, but unquestionably the Worst (and thus Best) of the trilogy, one of the most insane, absurd, perplexing, bizarre, and Godawful-ly funny movies of all times, was 1990's Ghosts Can't Do It.

Now I know what you're thinking. They can't possibly mean what you think they mean by “Do It”. They just can't. That would be stupid. Well that is what they mean, and it's far more stupid than you think. It's also one of the greatest laugh-riots of the 1990's, a well-deserved multiple-Razzie “Winner”, including Worst Picture, Worst Actress, and Worst Director. A veritable orgy of stilted dialogue, lifeless delivery, confusing smash-cut editing, and bewildering chapeaus, all in the service of a ridiculous plot, Ghosts Can't Do It can hardly be called a lazy last-gasp from aging filmmaker John, presenting here his valedictory work. Oh no. He worked really, really hard to make something this epically bad.

Call it an err before dying, maybe.

But if the general ineptitude and otherwise baffling existence of Ghosts Can't Do It can be explained by the Dereks being complete twits with their heads up their own asses, what I can't for the life of me explain is how Anthony Quinn wound up in this movie. Yes, you read that correctly. THE Anthony Quinn. Zorba the Greek. Zampano the Strongman from Fellini's La Strada. Double Oscar Winner. In a Derek movie. Granted, he may just have enjoyed the idea of being around Bo, who you have to admit is easy on the eyes (if hard on the ears and the brain). Or maybe he said “Hey, free vacation to Wyoming!”. I dunno. All I know is I'm always kinda sad to see him in this until he starts hamming it up like a total moron. Then I just laugh, because so is he. He knew he was in a turd and just had fun as he collected his paycheck.

But enough BS: TO THE MOVIE~!

I love how the opening credits feature pictures of Bo and Anthony apparently screaming in horror, like they knew their careers were soon to die in a fiery crash.

Anyway, the film opens with Kate (Bo) and Scott (Anthony) wrangling horses on their Wyoming ranch. Scott falls from his steed and insists he is having a heart attack. Kate refuses to believe: “Oh Great One, this isn't the real thing!” A ranch hand says a shot will help, but it has to go in the belly, which makes Scott ornery. He has his own alternative cure: his and Kate's signature kiss, which involves Kate sticking her bottom lip out in a fashion that makes her resembles a monkey, followed by Scott biting said lip as hard as he can. They find this tremendously sexy. I find it rather silly and wonder how it's not, you know, painful for poor Kate.

Scott takes the shot anyway, inspiring a discussion of how “awesome” rabies shots are. I don't know if “awesome” was redefined to mean “excruciatingly painful” recently...Scott asks Kate to remember the “rules” she must follow in the case that he dies: No crying, no wearing black, and live life to it's fullest. Actually, those are pretty decent things to ask for. What's not so decent is Scott asking Kate to top herself so they can pass on together. Live life to it's fullest... but not for too long, I guess. At the hospital, the doctor (clad in his finest Gold's gym t-shirt and Zubaz pants, like all great physicians in the heart ward would be), says Scott's days of “playing King Kong” are over. Methinks the idea of Anthony Quinn scaling the Empire State Building holds great potential.

Scott turns away a kiss from Bo, leading to a bewildering smash cut to a man screaming “SHUT THE HELL UP!” At first you'd think it's the doctor or maybe a neighboring patient, but in actuality we've suddenly jumped ahead in time. Scott is at home having a rather hostile conversation with his...um...friend...acquaintance...angry neighbor...person he may or may not know? I don't know who this is. “I don't wanna listen. You're saying a lot of shit!”, Scott says. His...person agrees: “Unfortunately, it is shit”. Well then stop talking about it! Pick a more pleasant subject! Hey, ain't Bo a cutie? Expound on that! Anyway, I guess it is the doctor, or a doctor, as he informs Scott that he needs a heart transplant, but cant have one because he's too old for the procedure. Are there really age limits on that kind of thing? It seems unfair and slightly nonsensical. Doc chalks it up to “common sense”. How so? Wouldn't the elderly be most likely to require that procedure? Scott asks if Kate knows the score. Doc says she ain't no dummy, which is ironic because at the same time, we see a shot of Kate standing outside looking like a big frickin' dummy, staring vacantly and smiling mindlessly. AKA Bo Derek's natural state of being. And then a dog barks and she points at it like “Ooh, doggy! Look, a doggy!”

Later on, doc says he hates seeing Scott “like this” which makes no sense because he seems fine. He's even putting up a fight against the nurse on hand and kicking shit around the room. He seems perfectly strong and healthy. And then he gets another monkey kiss from Kate and this, of all things, prompts him to suddenly feel weak. THE POWER OF BO DEREK'S SEX APPEAL.

Moving right along, Bo goes on a fancifu-

Good God, she's wearing an entire Fox skin, head included, on her head. And it appears to be the real deal. That poor creature, reduced to keeping the most empty head on Earth warm. Anyway, as I was saying, Kate goes on a fanciful wintry horse ride through the woods as Scott follows in his truck using his car phone (ASTOUNDING 1989 TECHNOLOGY!) to handle some businessy-sounding crap. Scott asks Kate to take a lap and then ditches her when she's not looking. Such love in this relationship. Finding a car of her own, Kate catches up with Scott on a bridge somewhere in their national park-sized estate and they have a rather silly conversation (all set to melodrama strings, mind you) that only establishes that they're going to take a walk.

Said walk (cross-country skiing, actually) comes to a rather abrupt end when they come to...I dunno, a crevasse or something else that Scott can't make it over. He randomly asks Kate to remember all the good times. She respon-

Is that some weird Dutch pottery on her head? What is it? She responds by saying every second is a good time. Aww. Jump cut to bed, where Scott can't get it up. Boy, I bet this doesn't make the “Good Times” list. They both agree that it's no big deal, but later that night Scott draws up a suicide note and the next morning he promptly blows his head off with a shotgun. Lovely. THE POWER OF BO DEREK'S SEX APPEAL! Reading the note pinned to the door, Kate overacts magnificently while Scott's ghostly voice reads the note aloud for us, comparing Kate to a cake of all things and insisting his death was necessary. Meanwhile, Scott finds himself in what must be Hell, as he is greeted by World's Most Annoying Person, Julie Newmar, AKA the worst version of Catwoman to ever disgrace any Batman TV show or movie, AKA the blueprint for drag queens everywhere, AKA the titular character of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, a film in which she barely even makes a cameo because we needed more time for Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo in drag discovering the meaning of life by getting stranded in a hicktown. In other words, the cinematic scum of the Earth.

No wonder so many people fear death, if that's what's waiting on the other side. It's actually limbo, where Angel of Death Julie will let Scott stay for a few days so he can watch his wife's grief and suffering, a thought that makes her all giggly and bubbly. Lovely. Then again, grief and suffering are two things I've always associated with Julie Newmar. And she makes me wish for death. So this is actually a case of excellent casting. Good work, John Derek!

Down on Earth, Kate breaks the rules by both crying and wearing black at the funeral. She also wears the skin of an entire Black Bear on her head.

Scott appears to her in that old movie way that allows only her to see and hear him, so everyone thinks she's crazy and talking to thin air. Scott's ghostly manifestation appears to have been achieved by filming Anthony Quinn in front of a black backdrop while someone shook a pantyhose in front of the camera. You really have to see it in motion to grasp how hokey and cheap it is. And so our star-crossed lovers have a conversation establishing nothing except that Scott's back (No shit!?). And then he disappears again to take care of some heavenly business, but he promises to come back again.

And so we just cut to when he comes back a day later to tell Kate to go on the vacation they had been planning. And so it's off to some tropical locale where Kate takes in some scuba diving and then starts talking out loud to Scott while some locals look on confused. Kate wanders onto the beach and randomly strips naked, which would be delightful except for the fact that she immediately lies down on the beach and then stands back up to show us how all her lovely bits are now coated in sand. Uh...yuck. She insists that life without Scott “SUCKS!!!” (think of the loudest, shrillest scream imaginable. Now imagine something a million times worse. You are not yet anywhere near the level of of this scream she just let out.). And then we get the moment in the film where Ken Jennings would politely clap, as Kate works the film's title into conversation when she reminds Scott that Ghosts Can't Do It. Because why should they be satisfied to be together at all if they can't fuck? Love is just an excuse for sex anyway, I guess. Scott suggests he could try possessing another body so they can boink again, but Kate's not so sure. “That's kinky stuff!” No, that's necrophilia, technically, which isn't kinky – it's just gross. The locals ride by on a boat and ask if everything is okay.

“I wah juht twying to remembuh a po-hum” Kate insists, suddenly sounding like she has Down syndrome or some other such impairment. Seriously, I can't figure out Bo's bizarre line delivery here. It's just so...weird. Did she have food in her mouth? Was Anthony Quinn sticking his invisible ghost penis down her throat? What? Scott takes the kindness of strangers poorly and howls “Fuck off, kid!”. Of course, only Kate hears him, so why he would bother is beyond me. Later, in town, Kate wanders into an outdoor cafe talking to Scott and somehow not garnering stares from the other people all around. The mayor or judge or something else that gets him the title “Your Honor” wanders over to offer condolences for Scott's death. The way he tells it, everyone on the island practically wept blood with sadness and Scott says he likes that. Egotistical much? You really need an island of Sri Lankans gnashing their teeth at the Gods because you topped yourself? The guy from the boat, the deliciously improbably named Fausto Garibaldi, walks up. Scott thinks his would be a lovely body to inhabit. Unfortunately, Fausto is a womanizing prick who knows nothing in the way of subtlety and just flat out demands Kate go to bed with him. Kate slaps the taste out of his mouth, while the once-seemingly gentlemanly judge/mayor does nothing to even try to defend this woman's honor. Not even an annoyed “Hey!”. What a fella.

At the vacation house, Kate and Scott drool over their priceless pearl collection for no other reason than Fausto is at the window listening and we've now given him an excuse to keep trying to seduce Kate. But he'll have to work fast because Kate has arranged for some folks to come in and bid on the whole collection. Flash forward Christ knows how long to Scott informing Kate that she is suddenly the chairman of the board of his entire corporation, which is worth Two Billion dollars. Twooooo....BEELYUN! The combination of Anthony Quinn's accent and Anthony Quinn's hammy acting is magical sometimes, and his insistence on saying Two Bill-un every which way he can with varying emphasis is one of those moments. It's like he either forgot how we say that in English or he wasn't sure Bo would get the point and had to drive it into her head. Anyway, how'd she become chairman? Dunno. Why? Dunno. Kate asks why Scott hasn't gotten a body yet. He says he doesn't want to leave Kate alone with that Fausto prick around while he goes corpse shopping. Like anyone would, she asks why he doesn't just take Fausto's body. That night, Scott watches Fausto skinny dipping and somewhat homoerotically extols the virtues of his, um, assets. “The question is...how do I kick him out?”

Literally one second later...

“Ha! I've got it!”

John Derek had no use for dramatic tension. God bless bad filmmakers and their insistence on instant gratification. Scott's plan is to...possess him. THAT EXPLAINS NOTHING. Then he says “we need to...ZAP HIM!” Kate asked you to do exactly that a minute ago. What, exactly, have you gotten? Fausto swims up to Kate's bizarre floating house in the middle of the sea. Kate explains how she's talking to the ghost of her husband, and how he wants to steal Fausto's body. Fausto reacts with obvious disbelief, yet doesn't go off to find the men with the butterfly nets to haul this woman off. Scott makes a quip about how he'd like to have a full head of hair like Fausto...which he actually does. Anthony Quinn does not appear the least bit bald. Gray, sure, but not bald. Kate suddenly flips and tells Fausto off for no apparent reason. And then she starts telling Fausto he has to die. Again, he doesn't consider this insane, just amusingly off-beat and quirky. Fausto would fit in well in a Wes Anderson movie. He handles Kate the same way Mrs. Cross handles Max in Rushmore, if that gives you any idea.

Scott and Kate's old pal Winston magically appears and Kate rudely tells Fausto off so she can go for a boat ride with Winston. Win (as everyone calls him) says Kate has to step up as chairman and save Scott's empire from being gobbled up by rivals. Off to Hong Kong for a meeting with...

The Donald. Donald also has some random Japs with him, who are aggressive and annoying overacting little bastards. Kate simply parrots everything Scott says to her, which leads to that old comedy standby of parroting something you weren't supposed to when Scott gets pissed at the Japs and says “Who the fuck are you!?” Oh ho ho. Kate refuses to yield to the mighty power of the Donald, saying he's just “too pretty to be bad” anyway. If this were a print publication, you'd see little brown spots on this page because the thought of anyone finding The Donald cute caused me to vomit a little bit. And then the thought of Bo Derek boinking The Donald caused me to vomit a lot. Like that one Family Guy gag when everyone drank a bottle of ipecac. In fact, come to think of it, I think you can apply all the things they say in that segment to how I felt about Bo Derek and The Donald copulating.

That night, Kate and Win have a rather cold “romantic” dinner on a boat which gets awkward when Win decides he wants to Tango. Kate says she can't dance because Scott hates dancing, but Win convinces her to try. Scott mimics the dance, so I guess he changed his mind. Also, now he not only has a pantyhose wiggling in front of him, there's also a bright red gel just to obscure him even more. The tango ends in ha ha-larity when Win slips and falls and drags Kate down with him. And then, randomly, he tells Kate she'll have to move on someday. Kate responds with “Let's go swimming!”. Win doesn't want to, so Kate goes alone. Some thug watches on from the...well I would say the shadows but he's in broad light. And he's rather befuddled by Kate talking to the invisible man.

And so now some nefarious plot is in action as Win's room is invaded by gun-toting suits and the thug corners Kate in the shower. It takes her a while to realize he's not in there by accident. She assumes he's a rapist, but in actuality he wants her to take some sleeping pills so she'll miss the next meeting, allowing the Donald and his slanty-eyed pals to cut Scott's empire up or something like that. There's an incredibly amateurish moment where Kate is in the pool begging off and Bo clearly forgets her line for several moments, but instead of cutting John just shifts the zoom in and out a few times. Home movies are shot better than this scene. Anywho, Scott comes back, having heard Kate scream, and thug is confused again by Kate talking to thin air. Scott actually has to explain to Kate how to fake taking a pill, which he does with great overacting gusto. Of course, Kate repeats it all out loud so thug knows she's faking it. But then she screws up faking it and the thug says she has to swallow or “I'll give it to ya like a suppository!”

Suppository it was, I take it. And so it's the next morning and Kate is out like a light. Scott is begging her to get up and escape the room. She'll have to climb out through a vent. Kate says she can't. Scott says that's bullshit and it's really simple. I guess it was too, as there's suddenly a smash cut to Scott chuckling over not only a successful escape, but a successful meeting. We skipped everything we just spent ten minutes building up to. Unfuckingbelievable. Win congratulates Kate and takes the chance to say he's always loved her, “You know that!”. Ugh. Let's get that cliché in there too. Scott wants Win to back off, but Kate thinks he's sweet and decides to be nice and let him come back to the island with her.

OH GOD, EVERYBODY OUT! THE IDIOT IS AT THE CONTROLS!!!

Win looks on ever more befuddled as Kate tries to calm Scott down about the whole love thing. Flash forward the island where Win and Kate have another romantic evening at a restaurant. Let's dance again~! Kate is reluctant again, but Scott is all into it and ANTHONY QUINN CUTS A MOTHERFUCKING RUG. Well, as much as a man in his sixties can. Kate is so inspired that she does a big sexy dance routine, bringing on a random Michael Jackson reference from Scott (?). An onlooking priest is downright disturbed by Kate's dance and even says she must be possessed by the Satan. Kate stops dancing long enough to placate the douche, who manages to cop a feel when he “takes the devil away” with one of those faith healer touchy-feely things. Wow, the one realistic thing in the movie: a perverted priest. The Mayor/Judge/whatever takes on the part of Sam to Kate's Rick when he gets on the piano to play a slow dance for her and Scott. And then the movie defies it's own rules to send Kate off to limbo so she can actually share the screen with Scott for this dance. How that works, I know not. I don't think the director cared, anyway.

LOOK OUT, IT'S THE PLOT! Scott tells Kate that rat poison is the easiest way to kill a man, so get the fuck to it! Just to confuse us, the movie introduces two random women on a train discussing Kate's black pearl, which I guess makes them the people coming in to bid on the pearl collection? Kate greets the train astride an elephant. Why? I dunno. Hey, stickball! This is ADD: the Movie. Kate and one of the train women, Sabine, are taking part in a stickball game with the islanders. Sabine notices Kate talking to the ghost and says she knows there's a ghost because she's a WHITE WITCH. Now forget she ever said that because it never, ever comes up again. Sabine imparts the trivia tidbit that possession can only occur at the exact instant of death. She asks how exactly Fausto is going to die to facilitate this, and when Kate says “rat poison”, Sabine just smiles and says “OK!” rather than, you know, questioning the morality of murder for personal gain. At home, Kate is all torn up about killing Fausto (well at least someone is!), which offends Scott. Kate goes over the complicated process of pouring rat poison into a drink. This is difficult stuff for someone like Bo, folks. Too bad Fausto walks in on her SAYING THIS STUFF OUT LOUD. Plot foiled.

Like a total idiot, Fausto ignores Kate's warning not to step within the security perimeter around the black pearl, setting off alarms that draw Sabine and Win's attention. So while those two rush over from the other side of the Earth, seemingly, Kate and Fausto have an epic standoff. Kate gets a gun, but doesn't have the guts to fire it. Fausto just casually takes it away. Kate breaks out some wacky karate shit when she jumps over a table with a wacky kick. Elsewhere, Win and Sabine toddle along on a moped that travels at half the speed of smell. They could walk faster than this thing and they have to when it runs out of gas. Kate has Fausto pinned down and clubs him, but ultimately can't bring herself to pour the poison down his throat. Scott is so upset that he finally just gives up and leaves Kate. Everyone arrives at the house and the Mayor/Judge proclaims that Fausto is under arrest.

In Limbo, Scott begs Julie Newmar for permission to speak to God but the rotten bitch denies him. And then she tells him he's on his way to Hell if he keeps inciting violence. And then she mocks the whole possession thing like a total fucking whore. I know it's wrong to say you'd beat a woman, but if I ever meet Julie Newmar she will know my wrath. She's the most annoying person EVER.

The next day, Scott comes back. Newmar tells him he has to at least give Kate a choice in the whole murder thing, and of course she's ecstatic now. She hops on a boat to visit the mystical floating prison in the middle of nowhere. Seriously, did it get it's own island? So she makes the epic trip...and Fausto isn't there because that two-timing mayorly judge snuck him out. Kate immediately goes back to the island via plane (?) to confront the mayor (as they finally confirm, with ten fucking minutes left). He denies it at first, but the appearance of a girl screaming about the pearl beds clues Kate in that Fausto must be diving for pearls in some kind of vague scam. Kate heads out there with Win in tow, and finds that Fausto has gotten tangled down below and drowned. Obviously, it's too late, but Kate does CPR and brings Fausto back to life...with Scott inside! Moment of death, moment of life, what's the difference, really? This is where things get really creepy, as Fausto's body speaks with Scott's voice and Christ it's a terrifying thing. Especially when they go for a literal roll in the hay at the ranch and Kate says she'll die if she takes anymore cock, and Scott/Fausto says “PREPARE TO DIE!” in a most diabolical fashion. And doesn't anyone notice Fausto's sudden vocal change? To wrap everything up, Kate and Scott go for another horseback ride and he falls off again, but now it's just because Fausto's body is a total clutz. Ho ho ho.

Well, that was...bizarre. Confusing. Repulsive. Inept. And undeniably Dereckian. If you ever get the chance to snatch up a copy of this movie, take it. Even if it is only available on a scuzzy ancient VHS (or if you're really lucky, a nearly impossible to find laserdisc), it's just glorious. Ghosts Can't Do It is what terrible movies are all about: capturing the stupid dreams of stupid people on celluloid so future generations can look back and say “Boy, that sure was stupid” and laugh heartily. And it is. And I did. Thank you, John and Bo. Your love of each other and, most of all, yourselves will live on forever in infamy.

Doctor Woah: Johnny Mnemonic Review

2009-02-01T07:48:00.006-05:00

I fucking hate Keanu Reeves. This is all the intro I can muster. Let's just get on with it.

Here's the opening text. I would have just taken a screencap, but it's made to be as unreadable as possible thanks to a really bad “glow/shiny” effect. Two seconds in and miserable already.

“SECOND DECADE OF THE 21ST CENTURY” [What, was it to much to ask for a specific year?]

“CORPORATIONS RULE” [WOOOO Corporations! Yeah! You RAWK!?]

“THE WORLD IS THREATENED BY A NEW PLAGUE: NAS” [Oh come on, “One Mic” wasn't that terrible]

“NERVE ATTENUTATION SYNDROME” [Oh, it's a stupid made up disease. Almost kinda like Nas anyway, but go on]

“FATAL, EPIDEMIC, IT'S CAUSE AND CURE UNKNOWN.” [Apparently it goes right for the good punctuation and grammar genes]

“THE CORPORATIONS ARE OPPOSED BY THE LoTeks,” [NAS? What NAS? We've got Enron to deal with!]

“A RESISTANCE MOVEMENT RISEN FROM THE STREETS:

HACKERS, DATA-PIRATES, GUERILLA-FIGHTERS

IN THE INFRO-WARS.” [Again, grammar? And what's with the line breaks here? And what's an “Infro-War”?]

“THE CORPORATIONS DEFEND THEMSELVES.” [The dirty bastards!]

“THEY HIRE THE YAKUZA,

THE MOST POWERFUL OF ALL CRIME SYNDICATES.” [Really, still? They were reduced to throwing film directors off of rooftops for the crime of making comedies back in the nineties, I don't see them being all that big of a threat by 2025 or whatever.]

“THEY SHEATH THEIR DATA IN BLACK ICE, LETHAL VIRUSES

WAITING TO BURN THE BRAINS OF INTRUDERS.” [But let's just move on to more nonsensical babble instead of explaining the yakuza thing. Yeah~!]

“BUT THE LoTeks WAIT IN THEIR STRONGHOLDS,

IN THE OLD CITY CORES,

LIKE RATS IN THE WALLS

OF THE WORLD.” [Spacing, again. Also, comparing someone to rats pretty much makes them sound useless.]

“THE MOST VALUABLE INFORMATION

MUST SOMETIMES BE TRUSTED TO MNEMONIC COURIERS,

ELITE AGENTS

WHO SMUGGLE DATA

IN WET-WIRED BRAIN IMPLANTS.” [Did the wheezy wheelchair kid from Malcolm in the Middle dictate this or what? Who formatted this like this?! And “wet-wired brain implant” doesn't explain anything, it's only more confusing.]

So:

-Corporations control the world...just like today

-All the real diseases are apparently gone, so let's just make up new ones

-There's some generic, unestablished resistance to the corporations who I'll bet we're supposed to care about despite knowing jack shit about them and being told they are rat-like.

-Yakuza: still lame.

-When all else fails, just confuse the audience with techno-babble.

A sparkling beginning to any film. Also, if your opening text scrawl stretches to two paragraphs and is so poorly punctuated, chances are you just took the rough draft of the screenplay and ran with it. There's no hope.

Oh you have got to be shitting me. They actually show the INTERNET as a Virtual Reality city. What is this, fucking ReBoot? God I hate techno movies from the early nineties. So after that embarrassing moment of naivete, we find Doctor Woah! himself in bed at the “New Darwin Inn” (oh for God's sake), where a beautiful women is dressing next to Johnny, but he's too busy watching cartoons on TV to notice her obviously grasping for his attention. Gives new depth to My Own Private Idaho. They have a vague conversation about “home” and how they don't know where it is and then the girl leaves claiming to go get ice. Johnny notices they already have ice. Burn!

Like anyone in this situation would, Johnny dials up Udo Kier on the videophone. Good ol' Udo. They have a vague conversation about removing an implant and how much it will cost. Udo says he can have it removed on the cheap, so long as Johnny doesn't expect all of his memories back (I guess “I don't know where home is” was supposed to establish amnesia), but if he wants to regain his past, it'll cost him. One more job ought to do it.

And so we cut ahead to Johnny wandering into Central Beijing, where an inexplicable riot is happening in the streets. All the protest signs are about NAS. Could you imagine a riot against, oh, Cancer? People flooding the streets demanding the end of that disease? Of course not, it would accomplish nothing. It's like protesting the sunrise. Anyway, Johnny heads into a building and while riding the elevator he connects some doohickey to his brain implant and doubles his brain capacity (can you really double zero?). Arriving at his destination, Johnny is greeted by the Asian equivalent of the Lone Gunmen from the X-Files...

...who insist he is late. He says they don't look like his usual patrons. They deliver some pointlessly expository dialogue and then get on to the job. They have a 320 GB load for him to carry, which is double the 160 he just set aside, and since his doohickey ominously warned against exceeding capacity, I'm gonna guess we have an issue, but Johnny says he has more than enough room. More exposition, this time regarding the deadly consequences of exceeding your memory capacity, which you would think Johnny would already know about and not need explained to him. Then we get to the loading process. Johnny explains that the Asian geeks need to pick three random images off the TV to be the “download code”, the key necessary to unlock the data. They'll send a hardcopy to their man on the other end of the delivery so he and only he can access the data. Meanwhile, Yakuza are riding up in the elevator. Uh-oh.

And now the upload, which involves a lot of grimacing and a lot of horrible CGI. I'm having VR5 flashbacks and I don't like it.

So Johnny survives the massive upload and...immediately takes a piss. Huh. Or at least he tries to, but random flashes of CGI send him sprawling to the floor. I guess even Keanu had some brains left to fry. And he has a nosebleed. Lovely.

And then he Vogues.

Rita Hayworth...We, like, totally love you.

Believe it or not, imitating Madonna actually calms his nerves. The Yakuza bust in and obliterate their fellow Asians. Well golly gee-whiz, I sure hope they sent the download code before that happened. Well of course they didn't, and Johnny is dumb enough to draw attention to the hardcopy so the Yakuza can destroy it. But hey, at least he escapes to live another...two or three days according to the laws of memory capacity.

And now it's off to “FREE CITY OF NEWARK”. Because everyone knows there's no use in taking over New Jersey. After a scan by airport security, Johnny learns he has 24 hours to live with his current level of “synaptic seepage” and takes the news surprisingly well. I guess animals on the intellectual level of Keanu Reeves aren't aware of their own mortality anyway. Elsewhere in Newark, apparent Yakuza capital of future Earth (why not), the leader of the strike reports to his boss, Takeshi Kitano (no, seriously) about the failure to capture Johnny, who has the last copy of the data they're after stuck inside his head.

And speaking of which, Johnny and Udo are having another videophone chat (what, could they not afford to pay Udo Kier to go on location?) regarding Johnny's memory capacity. Udo says something about someone who might be able to extract the data and that he'll tell the cab to take Johnny there straight away. And then we finally do see Udo up close and personal in a bizarre 21^st Century nightclub of the traditional lame variety. Some guy and some woman talk about...something and then the woman says she has to be twice as quick as Udo's bodyguards and who cares?! Who are these people!? Woman goes over and beats up one of Udo's guards to prove her worth... only to be smacked down when he simply asks her to hold her arm out and she can't because she has the shakes. She's fast, but weak. Udo's guards suggest she try out for a job as a sexbot. Well, the transvestite alternatives here make her look perfect for the job, though normally I'd call her a tad too mannish.

Johnny arrives at his destination where...Oh for God's sake...where ICE-T spies on him from afar. Johnny goes inside a building where he is ambushed by some Yakuza folk who want to take his head, but of course since we're only 22 minutes in, Johnny escapes. Good thing he randomly thought to plant a concussion bomb outside the door just in case he needed a distraction. Outside, Ice-T's stupid buddy draws the Yakuza's attention and is promptly killed. Ice-T, knowing his friend was a dipshit, takes this in stride. Johnny saves Ice from certain death, and together Neo and Detective Tutuola take out a castoff from Silverado who is somehow a Yakuza member as well.

Or, more accurately, Ice just nonchalantly lobs a throwing weapon at the guy and kills him instantly. Ice finally reveals his identity: J-Bone, leader of the LoTeks. And then he magically vanishes.

Finally, the moment we've all been waiting for: the Keanu Reeves-Udo Kier My Own Private Idaho reunion.

Johnny wants off with Udo's head for the set-up, but one of the guards knocks Johnny out, much to the dismay of Udo who insists the boy shouldn't be hit on the head. Whatsherface woman notices Udo and his guards lugging Johnny's body out of the club and follows them. The last Yakuza from the original strike teams up with Udo et al for a little game of Operation: Special Decapitation Edition, which our nameless woman of course interrupts. Udo ponders “Vaht ze vack ees goink onk?”, an apt question for the whole movie so far. Udo finally gives woman a name, Jane, as he tries to buy her off. Johnny outbids and earns himself Jane's services as a bodyguard. There's a tremendous WTF moment when Johnny and Jane escape and the Yakuza randomly slices Udo to bits with some techno-whip thingy. Yeah, kill your last remaining ally in a crisis situation.

His decision becomes only worse when his chase of Johnny and Jane is stopped by an army of LoTeks, who far outnumber the four or five completely random asians who magically appear from nowhere to back up Yakuza guy.

And now it's time for the Chat-fest portion where we establish some character background. Here's the quick and dirty:

-Takeshi is fucked because his as-far inept errand boy is somehow or another going to usurp him.

-Johnny gave up his childhood memories to make room for his data-carrying implant.

-Jane hung out with the LoTeks as a kid.

-Johnny NEEDS.

-A COMPUTER.

And with that Shatner-esque dramatic pause-laden statement...they randomly find one! Hooray! Movie's over! Woooooooo! Using the worst VR effect since The Lawnmower Man, Johnny finds out that the idiot Asians sent the download code to a copyshop in Newark. But the code didn't come through. GOD DAMMIT. The Yakuza have remotely spotted Johnny and send him a virus. DOUBLE DAMN. The movie must continue. Johnny and Jane flee, leaving behind a grenade to wipe out more random Asians, much to the dismay of the inept Yakuza moron, who finally – 43 fucking minutes in – is given the name Shinji.

Takeshi finally takes matters into his own hands and hires the services of The Street Preacher, a demented, jacked-up hitman posing as a man of the Lord. The job is simple: retrieve Johnny's head within 24 hours (shouldn't it be like 12-15 by now?). Elsewhere, Johnny hacks into the computers of PharmaKom, the company that is supposed to receive his load, and arranges a meeting to finally get rid of the shit in his head. As our Doofy Twosome head for their meeting, Jane mentions a friend named Spider who might be able to fix Johnny's implant...and then she promptly convulses and collapses. Oh yeah, that NAS whateverthefuck. And here I thought she was just practicing for a re-enactment of the “Like a Prayer” music video, the way she was shakin' it.

Anyway, through the blissfully short attention span of terrible movies, we just cut right to Spider's house. Spider, by the way, is Henry Rollins. What the fuck, dude? And he's saddled with a pathetic speech about how all that dastardly technology caused NAS. Of course, he offers no explanation of how computers created a neurological disorder...but who cares, Keanu wouldn't be able to follow anyway.

Back in Takeshi's office we get some insight into a character I haven't discussed yet: the internet lady. There's this weird disembodied woman living inside the internet who pops up to talk about basically nothing. Takeshi's...employee of some sort explains that she's a famous scientist who died, but had her brain converted to Artificial Intelligence so she could live on in some weird state of being. And that's it.

At the Club, Street Preacher tortures an employee for info on where Jane and Johnny went. This torture involves dipping the man's robotic arm in liquid nitrogen, which really shouldn't hurt if his arm is robotic, should it? Why would you put nerves in a robotic implant? The flaw in transhumanism is revealed.

Over at Spider's, a brain scan reveals some pretty bad damage to Johnny's implant, which we basically already knew about. Johnny mentions the name of the delivery recipient, whom Spider happens to know (how convenient), and our intrepid trio is off. Only to immediately run into (literally) the Street Preacher. Luckily he's an entirely synthetic being and easily survives being run over by a car. Our heroes arrive at the hospital, a run down and pathetic place that gives Keanu his Oscar clip as he reacts in horror to what medicine has become in this terrible, technology-laden future. And then to add to the problems, the Doctor Allcome Spider claims to know is actually just a code word among the doctors that means “All come”. *rim shot*

So, in other words, that big data load was intended for a random group of underground doctors in a shithole hospital. Whatever happened to PharmaKom? Fuck it. Spider reveals that Johnny is carrying the cure for NAS (dun dun dun). Right on cue, Street Preacher wanders in. Johnny and Jane make it out, but Spider gets an old fashioned crucifying for his troubles. Johnny contacts PharmaKom again, but this time the movie reveals that the PK rep is actually a CGI puppet controlled by Takeshi (dun dun dun?). Internet lady shows up to berate Takeshi, but he just shuts the computer off. What a useful character internet lady is.

There's a really bizarre scene where Johnny tries to get into LoTek HQ...but they drop a flaming, exploding car on him? Why!? Oh, it's an excuse for another Keanu Oscar clip as he makes a melodramatic speech about saving the world and blah blah in such a fashion that brings to mind Shatner singing/shouting “Hey Mr. Tambourine Man”.

“I WANT ROOM SERVICE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Yeah.

Anyway, after entering LoTek HQ and suffering another random act of CGI, Johnny has a glimpse of his childhood and decides he's in love with Jane. Why save that big kiss for the ending, anyway? Who needs drama? J-Bone introduces Johnny to LoTek master codebreaker Jones. Jones is a dolphin. Why? BECAUSE.

And so they hook Johnny up so Jones can crack the code. Meanwhile Takeshi and his men begin sneaking in to LoTek HQ. Again with that exploding car thing...

Takeshi corners Johnny, but internet lady magically appears looking like Master Control Program from TRON to stop him.

You know, I just realized who's playing internet lady. Fucking Barbara Sukowa, notable for starring in the movie Europa, which is a brilliant fucking masterpiece. How do you go from Lars von Trier movies to Johnny Mnemonic? Jesus Christ. Anyway...Takeshi just snaps a cable and shuts down her feed. Seriously, what a useless character. Shinji shows up and shoots Takeshi all to hell...sonuvabitch, they were right. Well, for a minute anyway. Shinji and Johnny have a big battle that ends with the two of them hanging off a ledge. Johnny uses that weird whip thing to take Shinji's head off...and then there's another exploding car. What the hell? Was decapitation not enough? Was there a three-exploding-car minimum on this production? Why? Luckily, Street Preacher shows up to kill time in the last section of the film.

With his dying breath, Takeshi gives Johnny the second image of the download code, but right now Johnny has to save his lady from a crucifiction (one note act that Street Preacher). Forget what I said about him killing time...Jones just zaps him with a weird death ray thing. Anti-climactic to say the least. Johnny hooks up to Jones for the download, but first internet lady shows up to give a dim speech about stopping the evil PharmaKom she helped create, blah blah. And then she dies, I guess (her image goes up in purple flames, whatever that means). Johnny searches his own memory for the last download code image, It's internet lady, of course (this is where the hankies come out). The download goes through (with CGI that makes Lawnmower Man look stunning by comparison) and the whole world gets to see the cure. And, of course, Johnny gets his childhood back.

And, DUH, internet lady was his mom. Even though she's like German or something and he's Keanu Reeves. J-Bone gazes on the horizon to see that PharmaKom HQ has blown up for literally no reason. THE END.

Good God what a stupid fucking movie. And what a stupid fucking leading man. You almost have to see this movie to understand how horrible Keanu was here...but I don't recommend it.

"What the Fuck Was the Title of That Movie"

2009-01-23T10:14:00.010-05:00

Uwe Boll speaking on his numerous Razzie Nominations this year:

“that I’m this time also nominated as best supporting actor against stars like BEN KINGSLEY and PIERCE BROSNAN shows that my genius comes more and more into his peak stadium! all my three movies are nominated in different categories: IN THE NAME OF THE KING (what an epic masterpiece with tons of stars like jason statham), TUNNELRATS (against Tunnelrats Clint Eastwoods bullshit Letters of Imovio ..or what the fuck was the title of that movie …is an amateurclip of brainwashed patriots) and of course POSTAL (where Dave Foley dick is in a very nice shot –i created in inspiration of Jean Luc Gordards work in the sixties…you remember: the black and white stuff with jean paul belmondo…and Verne Troyer gets raped by 1000 monkeys (this was inspired by the later work of Gus van Sant .especially the work he is doing in his trailers…).!
I never won a razzie …but this year I’m sure that there is no way around Uwe Boll so that finally I get the award I deserve!”

I guarantee you he wasn't saying that to be funny, either. And if you're wondering, I am almost 100% certain this is real because I've actually been in contact with the man and received replies like this.

Boll is up for a lot of Razzies this year including Worst Picture (In the Name of the King: a Dungeon Siege Tale), Worst Supporting Actor (as himself in Postal) and the Special Award for Worst Career Achievement, but my favorite is Worst Screen Couple ("Uwe Boll and any actor, camera and screenplay").

The Best and Worst Movies of 2008

2009-01-04T09:27:00.006-05:00

Ah, the end of the year Best and Worst lists. Though I hardly dare to consider myself worthy of the title "film critic", I can't resist the urge to get in on this annual practice that the Eberts and...everyone elses of the film criticism world have. Why? Because I dare to think people give a crap what I think. I'm going with three for each category, mainly because I didn't seen enough new movies to do ten of each, but also because damn would twenty entries be a lot to read through.

The Best:

3. Bolt - an unexpected surprise, this Disney CG flick that was sold as the story of a superpowered pup turned out to be an intelligent, funny, and emotional quasi-Truman Show for kids. Bolt, the canine star of a superhero TV show, led all his life to believe that the show is real, is distressed to find he doesn't really have powers when he winds up in the outside world for the first time. Lost and ill-equipped for the real world, he teams up with an abandoned cat and a hyperactive runaway hamster for an adventure that's strongly reminiscent of Homeward Bound, but still feels fresh thanks to some excellent writing that not only brings the laughs but also carefully deals with issues like pet abandonment, the value of telling the truth and the worth of even the most mundane life. With some excellent voice acting, lovely animation, and a nice soundtrack (including a fun country ditty by the great Jenny Lewis, one of my personal favorite musicians), Bolt was a great time to be had. Good to know Disney is back on the right track with digital animation.

2. Cloverfield - when a movie wants to remind you you could die tomorrow, it usually does so with some disease of the week. Kudos to JJ Abrahms and Matt Reeves for being creative enough to do it with a giant monster instead. On one level, Cloverfield was a rip-roaring horror thrill ride that absolutely scared the piss out of me and everyone else in the theater. On another, it's a subtle metaphor for the fragility of all our lives. An inventive twist on the "found footage" gimmick, the film includes video hiccups that give us brief flashbacks to earlier home videos on the camera, in which our main characters are seen having a lovely time at Coney Island. When the action cuts back to present time and we see the hell that has been unleashed upon them and the whole city, the message couldn't be any clearer, and the emotional punch couldn't be any stronger. A devestating and masterfully made film, Cloverfield deserves to be recognized this awards season, but probably won't thanks to an unfortunate early-January release. Here's to hoping, though, that it can pull a Year-Later miracle like The Silence of the Lambs did nearly twenty years ago.

1. W. - Like he did with Nixon back in 1995, Oliver Stone again reaches out to a reviled figure and tries simply to understand them. Though he may never agree with George W. Bush on anything, Stone is not afraid to accept that Bush isn't just some soulless monster, and the film W. shows that. Fascinating and fascinated, W. is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the people and events that made our outgoing president into the wacky man we all know and barely comprehend today. Never mocking or attacking, the film instead scrutinizes and analyzes and offers answers we might not always like, but which are as close to the God's honest truth as we may ever get. The eccentric ensemble cast has great performances all around, notably James Cromwell as the Senior Bush and Josh Brolin as Dubya himself, both of whom deserve Oscar nods, and the writing is just superb. This may be Stone's best film since Nixon, and when it came to picking the best film of 2008, the choice was clear. W. is a masterclass in biographical filmmaking.

The Worst:

3. Funny Games: Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke offers up an American remake of his own crushingly boring film, managing somehow to make it even more crushingly boring in the process. Pitting a family of brainless WASPs against a pair of nefarious home-invading Abercrombie and Fitch models armed with a golf club and half a dozen broken eggs in a battle of the wits with no end in sight (seeing as how nobody in this movie actually has any wits), Funny Games is two horrible hours of talking, talking, talking. Talking about eggs, how to properly trasnport them, how to cook them. Talking about the best golf clubs. Talking about whether it hurts more to be stabbed or shot. But nothing ever actually happens. This tedious bore would put audiences to sleep if only Haneke's sense of self-importance didn't just ooze out of the screen to piss you right the fuck off. This is arthouse pretentiousness at it's rock-bottom worst. Congratulations, Mike. You singlehandedly killed the horror genre.

2. The Spirit - or: how Frank Miller went batshit insane and convinced a major studio to give him money to make it into a movie. Illogical, incoherent, unfunny, ugly, stupid..the only thing The Spirit isn't (aside from "good") is boring: something this unspeakably bad demands your attention. Killing the careers of director Miller and stars Gabriel Macht and Samuel L. Jackson in one fell swoop, this epic disaster is a massive flop and deservedly so. It is so bad as to be unspeakable because words do not exist which could aptly describe it's terribleness. All you need to know is that the central conflict revolves around, and I quote, "the shiny thing to end all shiny things". It's as empty as it sounds.

And the number one worst movie of 2008? What was bad enough to top those two? Well, you'll find out by clicking right here to go to the newest Redunbeck Review~!