Bullshit Movies

She Wolves of the Wasteland (1988)

2010-09-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

Director: Robert Hayes

Apocalyptic movies warn us of how the future might turn out if humankind doesn’t change their self-destructive ways. Take She-Wolves Of The Wasteland, which suggests if we let Armageddon happen, the world will turn into a matriarchy run by stacked extras from a Motley Crue music video with action figure names like “Chainsaw” and “Neon” and “Rattail.” A chilling vision is thus presented with sub-par Playboy Playmates going all Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, scouring the desert plains with plastic machine guns that only fire one round at a time, tattered threads that titillate, and new wave hairdos that suggest plenty of crimping irons are still available despite civilisation collapsing.

Yes, men have died out and women are at war, or so the hastily cobbled together narration explains. A cloaked crone sits in a chair hooked up to a machine experiencing psychic visions and wearing the worst make-up since the guy in the Nightmare video board-game. She needs the mind power of a chosen one, a male boy, to become powerful again or something. It’s all very Willow, but with an upswing on the jiggle factor – hallelujah! One of the women from Breeding Control has escaped, Keela (Peggy Sanders), and is being hunted by Cobalt (Persis Khambatta) the evil warrior princess witch woman. Thankfully the wandering nomadic hero, Phoenix (Kathleen Kimont) steps into the picture, saving Keela from two henchwomen by throwing an apple in the air and drawing down on them, capping them off with her machinegun and fucking catching the apple that's been suspended up in the air for 45 seconds, all of which is a very Clint Eastwood move (but with more arse-cheek exposed). Keela explains the situation as they run through the desert: “I have male seed. I’m with child. A male child!” Hope for humanity lies in the resumption of a male heir: did I mention this is a very feminist movie? As one Amazonian warrior decries, “Men! They screwed up the world once! They’ll screw it up again!” Sing it, sister!

Speaking of feminism, Phoenix and Keela stumble across a secret colony of boobs, by which I mean a clan of friendly women showering bare-breasted under waterfalls. Before people cry foul, “This is exploitative!”, hey, this is what would actually happen if the apocalypse occurred and women formed into sexy cliques: in certain scenes this movie was very similar to Koyaanisqatsi (but with less Philip Glass and more 1980s-synthisers from composer Dan Radlauer). They also perform bare-breasted dancing for the birthing ritual Keela undergoes. Yes, that’s right, she’s suddenly giving birth even though there has been little sign of a baby bump beforehand! The movie works like an edited highlight reel of a 22 episode action TV show called Warrior Woman or something as after the next action sequence, which has scantily clad babes experiencing delayed reaction shots to their blood-packs going off (a trademark of an Action International Pictures production), the child has already grown up into a five-year-old Mowgli type! Meanwhile, another classic line of dialogue from Phoenix: “God, I hate being hunted!” Amen.

So, they’re still running around the desert until they find a deserted shack, which strangely has a skin-mag (the whole movie is a skin-mag, for chrissakes!). The masked owner returns and what do you know? It’s a man! And what a man? A balding, moustached sub-par Bill Paxton-type douchebag who cares more about his dune buggy than making the sign of the one horned beast with any of these babes (well, initially). He, and his name is Guy by the way, is knocked out by Phoenix who grabs at his crotch and decries that it’s not working: “The last man on Earth and I broke him!” Ah, he’s not that broken: eventually he makes the beast with two backs with Keela after some pleading and they snuggle up in a sack by a night-time fire. The next day in the dune-buggy, Phoenix gets wind of what went on with Guy nearly falling asleep at the wheel: “Why are you so exhausted?” Ha ha, they boned! Priceless bit of comedy. Enough of the battle between the sexes, how about more battles between the same sex, which you receive when Phoenix is captured and forced to fight in a Female Gladiator bit, clashing against punkish babes who wear nothing but electrical tape for upper body support.

What else does this great polemic on the Time of Women provide for viewers?

Heels are apparently in fashion when you’re a She Wolf wearing nothing but underwear. Apparently they’re the best type of footwear to sport when clomping around the desert.
Nothing enlivens up a movie like girl-on-girl grappling! And you can set your watch to how many times the film relies on a cat-fight to pique the viewer’s interest.
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior reference where a dumb-head hench-woman plays with a wind-up music box in Guy’s abandoned shack and he sets off a very slow moving fuse that eventually turns her into an explosion.
A mysterious race of nuclear damaged people called Razhuls who are misshapen zombies that worship the spectre of television in the film’s most biting piece of “satire.” Chaining Phoenix and Keela to flimsy crosses and reading from their bible, the TV Guide: “At the hour of the prime-time, we will cancel them!”
A night-time raid on the evildoers’ fortress, which is basically a caravan and two shanty town shacks. A face-off between Phoenix and Cobalt that ends explosively, providing a useful piece of fashion advice for women in the wasteland: don’t wear grenades on your belt.
Keela saving the day by escaping the psychic power of the evil witch woman by basically cutting HER CHORD, yes, to what – her psychic box? – and rescuing her son. Concluded by a symbol of hope and purity with Phoenix on a white horse riding along a beach front.

She Wolves of the Wastleland (also known as Phoenix The Warrior) is another triumph from the Action International Pictures assembly line, the motion picture equivalent of a outdated calendar of Red Sonja-styled babes hanging on the wall of a mechanic’s change-room. Mankind, yes, you men of the world... you are thus warned: prepared to be enslaved by sexy babes in tacky fashions!

Paparazzi (2004)

2010-06-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

Celebrity is both a blessing and a curse. Sure, you get millions of dollars and attend glamorous parties and live in mansions etc. But the price you have to pay is all that unwanted attention from the media. One line of argument states that movie stars should expect such invasion of their private lives since they’re working in the public spotlight. Hey, sure, a guy used a telephoto lens to take a picture of you being naked inside your own house, but those are the breaks, kiddo. The other side of the argument runs that we are to blame with the public love for trashy gossip rags and celebrity gossip, thus funding the destruction of people’s dignity. And then you have the film, Paparazzi, which adds to the whole debate over the existence of the paparazzi by basically arguing that movie stars should have the right to kill them if warranted.

A good thriller relies on our ability to relate to the protagonist. Thus we have Bo Laramie (Cole Hauser, the intense Tom Berenger Jnr type who starred in Dazed & Confused and Higher Learning), an ordinary guy and loving family man, who just happens to be a movie star and attends the premieres of blockbusters like Adrenaline Force. Walking down the red carpet, he finds himself surrounded by people yelling for his attention and snapped by the bright lights of cameras on either side of him, which as the editing points out is a DIZZYING experience. Then we hear some voice-over narration where Laramie trots out the old reliable “ancient cultures believe that you lose a piece of your soul every time your photo is taken” line (Oh brother, I think the writer took an anthropology class once! That or saw Crocodile Dundee.). While Laramie can handle providing autographs for the fans, he can’t abide the inclusion of his family within this public attention, particularly when he discovers the cover of a tabloid rag simply called Paparazzi, which has a photo of him and his wife naked on the beach. His chipper son asks, “Why is daddy in a magazine with a black thing covering his pee-pee?” Ah, family humour providing solace from the onslaught of noxious parasites! Obsessed with Laramie is leading photographer scumbag paparazzi, Rex Harper, who we know is a scumbag because he’s played by the very convincing scumbag talents of Tom Sizemore. Laramie first meets Harper at his son’s soccer match where he tries to ask nicely for Harper to stop taking photos, handling the media attention in a very George Clooney fashion. “Sure thing, famous guy,” Harper wisecracks. Harper relents but then he’s back taking more photos of Laramie’s family so Laramie loses it, handling the media attention now in a very Alec Baldwin fashion. He punches Harper in the face, knocking him against Harper’s van, which slides open to reveal Harper’s paparazzi cronies taking photos galore. “Oh, you gonna pay!” cackles Harper. The plot takes a sharp turn when Harper and his gang hound Laramie and his family one night, causing the movie star to crash in a very Princess Di fashion. As Laramie and his family are knocked out unconscious in the wreckage, Sizemore and his boys stand there for a moment before running back to their cars and bringing out the cameras to record the scene with the fascination of a... car crash. The camera judges them silently, urging us to feel sick to our stomach: “Look at these parasites, they are even lowering his wife’s dress to get some cleavage in the shot, I HATE HUMANITY NOW!”

Now I am under no illusions about the paparazzi: anyone who is happy to crawl in the gutter to take an up-skirt special is indeed repugnant, sure. I mean anytime I watch TMZ, I want to take a flamethrower to their self-delusion that they’re reporters doing this for the Public Interest. However, I’d rather watch a good documentary following such douchebags on their rounds than what Paparazzi does, which is shoehorn paparazzi shenanigans into a hackneyed Death Wish plot. In order for us the audience to be cheering on the demise of these shutterbugs, we have to believe them to be the most heinous people ever. So you have Sizemore, all but foaming at the mouth in his performance, staring at photos of Laramie and cackling, “Laramie, I’m gonna destroy your life and eat your soul!” (Apparently a piece of Sizemore improv). Then you have Sizemore blackmailing a blonde bar-hopper he picked up, who also witnessed the car crash, by revealing that he taped them having sex and would happily send the tape to the internet and to her senator daddy if she ever told the cops. Then he and his cronies (who include Kevin Gage, Tom Hollander and Daniel Baldwin who summarises the philosophy of the paparazzi with the line, “We’re the last hunters!”) break into Laramie’s house and set up spy-cams like they’re the goddamn CIA. With his son in a coma and his wife’s spleen removed thanks to the car crash, Laramie sets out to take revenge, at first, letting Kevin Gage the biker ‘Rolex Rider’ paparazzi fall to his death from the face of a cliff after a motorcycle accident. Then Laramie sets up pint-sized British paparazzi Tom Hollander by dropping a false report to the cops about Hollander firing a gun at people. Hollander is cornered by the LAPD and reaches into his jacket for his ID, but no, there’s a prop gun planted in his jacket that gets him cut to pieces by trigger-happy cops. All the while Dennis Farina plays a cop (surprise, surprise) who is Columbo-ing the investigation and figuring out that these deaths are not “accidents.” In the end, Laramie breaks into Daniel Baldwin’s home (after Daniel Baldwin broke into his home and threatened his wife) and beats him to death with a baseball bat (the actual murder was cut from the movie because it made the audience feel unsympathetic towards Laramie). Cut to a scene of the cops taking photos of Baldwin the paparazzi’s dead body (“DO YOU SEE THE IRONY?” is what the movie screams). The climactic face-off between Laramie and Harper a.k.a. Sizemore has Sizemore breaking into the mansion then being beaten in the face by the movie star who has framed Sizemore for the death of Daniel Baldwin’s character. Sizemore is carted out by the cops into a swarm of photographers taking his picture for the papers (“DOUBLE IRONY!” The movie yells again). Movie ends with Farina letting his suspicions go unchecked with a rueful smile, basically condoning a movie-star’s numerous plotted murders of sleazy press photographers and Laramie the movie star walking down the red carpet for Adrenaline Force 2, but now knowing how to handle the paparazzi with a wink and a smile. All it took was a couple of murders!

Thank producer Mel Gibson for this nonsense, who I know is one of three producers for this movie but the only one who could possibly relate to the protagonist’s dilemma of being plagued by the paparazzi. Gibson also provides a momentary cameo alongside guest appearances by Vince Vaughan, Chris Rock and Matthew McCougnahey, all of whom I’m sure were nodding along when Gibson outlined the plot of this film: “Ha, wouldn’t that be great if we could do that in real life?” Paparazzi consequently stands as a revenge movie only a jaded movie star could love.

Punisher War Zone (2009)

2010-06-22T08:14:00.001-07:00

Director: Lexi Alexander

When I was thirteen, I read Marvel Comics regularly. The three titles I consistently collected were Spiderman, Captain America and The Punisher. I think The Punisher appealed since the comic was not about a superhero, just some dude with a lot of guns and a skull on his chest, taking revenge on his dead family (killed by mobsters) by wasting every criminal he could get his hands on. Basically it was a Joel Silver produced action movie in comic-book form. However, there’s a pretty twisted morality going on with its zero tolerance capital punishment attitude towards evil doers, which never really went into any grey areas in the issues I remember reading. There was one scene I always recall where he busts a female flight attendant for smuggling drugs and decides not to kill her. Why? In the voice-over caption, he remarks, “I couldn’t... she was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister.” How very noble of you, Mr John Wayne. Too bad about all the sons and the brothers you wasted; they had it coming because this is a man’s world, blah blah blah. For such a simple concept, film adaptations have found mixed success from the 1980s Dolph Lundgren version (which I’ve never seen) to the really lame Thomas Jane version that featured old cheese-head himself, John Travolta as a really lacklustre villain. We turn to Hollywood’s new favourite word of recent years – the “reboot” – for a quasi-sequel/remake of The Punisher franchise with Punisher War Zone.

Whilst Jane really looked like he was trying hard to be tough (and failing), producer Gale Anne Hurd has recast Frank Castle a.k.a The Punisher with Ray Stevenson, a British actor best known for the HBO series, Rome, as well as playing grizzled subordinates in things like The Book of Eli. Stevenson is a good choice because he looks like the comic book character, projecting an unbreakable hardness and stone-cold resolve. However, after awhile, there’s not much else and he becomes a bit of a blank slate afterwhile, lacking any apparent charisma. We are first introduced to him at some big mafia get together birthday dinner where he cuts the power and appears on the table with a lit flare in his hand, cast in reddish light like Freddy Krueger, then slitting an old mafia boss’s throat open with his knife and then snapping the neck of a middle aged mafia moll when she goes for her gun. "Woah," I guess we’re supposed to think, "this isn’t your grandfather’s Punisher." This is followed closely by what I consider to be the lamest action cliché ever, which is that The Punisher attaches his feet to an overhead chandelier so he can twirl around upside down firing twin sub-machine guns and massacring mafia goombahs left and right. Why do producers and directors think this is so cool? You don’t have to be a special forces expert to know it’s just plain retarded. Indeed my favourite example of this was when Ice T did it in 3000 Miles To Graceland and then was eventually shot to pieces because he was dangling upside down like a fish on a hook. But back to The Punisher being aggressively cool. Man, this guy is so tough that he uses a pencil to snap back his broken nose, which made me laugh in its attempt to solicit our admiration for this tough son-of-a-bitch. Yes, the violence is particularly grisly with CGI head-shot explosions and CGI throat-stabbings galore. My favourite moment had to be when The Punisher surprises one gangster by punching him in the face and when I say punching him in the face I mean that they built a fleshy-head-rig so that The Punisher’s fist caves in the guy's face like a black hole. So yeah, The Punisher is not a technically superhero but he has superhero abilities such as fists of fucking iron! Incredible.

The story? Oh, right, The Punisher busts up another operation where he does two things that set the plot in motion. First, he throws a pretty-boy mobster Billy The Beaut (Dominic West) into a glass compactor, which tears his face up and leaves him as The Joker. Oh wait, not The Joker: “Billy’s dead... from now on, call me Jigsaw!” Yes, the film even has a scene that apes the Tim Burton Batman where West rips bandages from his ugly new face, a patchwork of flesh that doesn’t reach the heights of Gary Oldman’s plastic-flesh-face in Hannibal. Now if you had any respect for Dominic West as an actor after playing one of the coolest characters in television history, Jimmy McNulty in The Wire, please stay away from this film because he really swings for the fences here, hamming it up like nobody’s business. Similarly if you had any respect for Doug Hutchinson as an actor after playing one of the scariest characters in television history, Eugene Tombs the liver-eating cannibal in The X Files, please also stay away from this film because he also really swings for the fences here, playing Jigsaw’s younger liver-eating psycho-brother. West and Hutchinson really compete for worst Italian accent in their villainous brother act: "Who the fuck are these fahnooks?" Back to The Punisher who during this first act set-up also accidentally kills an undercover FBI agent mistaking him for a mobster, which you might think could add some shading to this basic vigilante story, but if you’re looking for complexity than I give you the scene where the Fed’s widow (Julie Benz) pulls a gun on him and shouts, “Who punishes you?” Step aside, Alan Moore, I think comics and comic adaptations just got owned by this film's brilliant writing. Oh, The Punisher also has a tough black cop chasing him, Colin Salmon (who played the tough black commander in Resident Evil) who wants to bring the vigilante to justice and faces dismissive treatment from the NYPD who are all Punisher fanboys. This led to my favourite scene where Salmon is facing static from the department and sneers, “With all due respect, Captain... this is BULLSHIT!”

Anyway, The Punisher is having a crisis in consciousness, almost retiring his whole skull-shirt act to the disappointment of his only friend, a slimmed down Newman (Wayne Knight) playing surprise surprise a gun dealing nerd who utters another priceless bit of dialogue: “We are fighting a war against the assholes who slip through the raindrops.” Not to worry, complexity is simplified when The Punisher has to rescue the Fed widow and her kid from the evil Jigsaw, which ends in a hostage situation in an abandoned hotel where a hundred different gangbangers are conscripted to be easily killed by The Punisher. The climax, just to spoil it for you, is a lot of muzzle flashes in dark corridors and CGI squibs galore, which made me reflect on how there was no real “art” to all of this mayhem (all I could think of was the awesome corridor hammer action sequence from Oldboy). Anyway, Jigsaw forces The Punisher to choose between the death of the Fed widow and her kid or the death of his nerd friend (Newman), which really made me think hard about whether The Punisher would let a kid die to save the hacker who brought down Jurassic Park so it was really suspenseful for a second there. Let me just say that evil is punished and there’s a happy ending when the widow reveals to The Punisher that her dead husband talked a lot about The Punisher when he was alive: “He said you were one of the good guys.” Oh, it’s all okay then! Good thing he was killed by his hero!

The Making of Punisher War Zone revealed that the director Lexi Alexander was female, a former martial arts champ who helmed the Elijah Wood football hooligan film, Green Street Hooligans. I don’t know why I was surprised really. Wake up already, dude, Kathryn Bigelow won an Academy Award. I’m sorry, gender equal studies. So yeah, great job, Lexi Alexander – women can make repugnant bullshit action films too!

Torque (2004)

2010-06-20T02:34:00.000-07:00

Director: Joseph Kahn

I’m a big fan of the TV show Party Down. I was reading the Adam Scott AV Club interview, which was very self-effacing and funny about the work he’d done prior to the show. I never realised Scott was in Torque, a motorcycle action movie I barely remember being released, which he described thusly:

I think Torque’s hilarious. It’s great if you’re stoned. It’s really weird if you’re stoned, like in a good way, but also in a, “What the fuck, who made this?” way. I think it’s this weird confluence of the studio wanting to make a Fast And The Furious movie and a director who wanted to make fun of Fast And The Furious movies, and those things kind of colliding.

This is how I came to rent out Torque. What’s most apparent is this “weird confluence” where Torque basically makes fun of The Fast & The Furious while being nothing more than a trashy fast-food shitty action movie. First off, there’s the pre-credits opening sequence where two souped-up cars (one red, one yellow) rev up their massive engines and proceed to race each other on a lonely stretch of highway. From behind appears a motorbike ridden by Tom Cruise Junior, sorry, I meant Australia’s own Martin Henderson, who proceeds to beat both cars, zooming by a highway sign that spins around to reveal graffiti written on the back reading, “Cars suck!” Once Tom Cruise Junior arrives at a diner for a pit-stop, he sees the drivers of the two cars picking on the small boy pumping the gas and so he steps in to defend the innocent type, kicking the crap out of these macho jerks with the closing line, “What is it about driving cars that makes you all such assholes?” Later in the movie our hero even repeats one of the classic pieces of dialogue from The Fast & The Furious, “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” Then his girlfriend (Monet Mazur) quips, “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Zing-g-g-g! So yeah, I’m not totally convinced that riding motorcycles makes you less assholish than driving a car, everyone riding a bike poses like they’re in a magazine and acts like they’re in a Kid Rock video. There’s an awesome sequence where the good guys hit some sub-cultural bike fair, which is introduced in a montage of babes ahoy all shaking their butts, washing cars in scantily clad gear and provocatively posed: it’s all butts, butts, butts! This is how the world of underground bike clubs roll. First rule do not talk about underground bike club. Second rule check out the chicks, yo. So, yes, it is somewhat amusingly ironic that this film takes pot-shots at The Fast & The Furious every now and then, even though the only reason a film like Torque was produced was because of the success of the Vin Diesel/Paul Walker movie. What we have then is a silly film that is somewhat self-aware that it is silly, coming off like a live-action Americanised adaptation of a anime series that never existed, all the bike gangs wearing bright colours and all the motorcycle chase sequences overlaid with wirework-meets-CGI backwash from the popularity of The Matrix.

Back to the story of Torque, Henderson plays Cary Ford, a champion race who has returned after a sojurn in Thailand after being wrongly accused of drug-smuggling, the result of becoming mixed up with the evil white trash biker gang leader Henry James (Matt Schulze, a really bad actor who seethes non-stop with creased eyebrows in an attempt to look "dangerous"). I don’t know if the filmmakers intended the chief villain to have the same name as the famed English author as an ironic gesture, but hey, I’m sure the makers of Torque are educated guys who have read The Portrait of a Lady. Henry James and his subordinates, the brutish Luther (Max Beesley) and the slutty (Jamie Pressley with dark hair and black eyeliner, playing the type of biker moll that quivers with desire whenever something violent happens) are out to frame Cary Ford, our hero, because he has hidden their drugs, so they kill the brother of biker gang leader Trey (Ice Cube!) who heads the Biker Boyz known as The Ravens and they pin it on Cary Ford, our hero. So, yes, most of the movie is a chase thriller with Ice Cube wanting to kill the wrong boy while the FBI is also on his trail, led by none other than Adam Scott playing Agent Henderson, who cockily strides in to a crime scene wearing sneakers and a t-shirt under a suit jacket, looking like he should be drumming in Phantom Planet basically. “You expected a straight-laced Fed?” etc.

What will I remember most from watching Torque? Well, one, there is Ice Cube playing Ice Cube basically, a welcome relief after sitting through some of Are We There Yet on TV the week before and seeing Ice Cube playing Bill Cosby. Every scene with Cube is him sneering and being a bad-ass, saying stuff like, “I can smash you right now and your little tricycle...” or “Think you’re man enough to drop that hammer?” Even better during the freeway motorcycle chase car crash extravaganza, which is like a more entertaining version of the one in Matrix Reloaded, Cube zips past the Feds in their Hummer and drops the line, “Fuck the Po-lice!” Genius! I will also think back fondly on the hyperkinetic filmmaking of director Joseph Kahn who always seems to frame actors in reflections of a motorcycle rear-view mirror and has some silly but great over-the-top action sequences like Henderson and Cube chasing each other on motorbikes on top of a moving train, eventually having our hero jump from the top of a carriage INTO the next carriage, driving past nervous passengers. In the climactic chase between Henderson and Henry James, any semblance of reality is completely detached from the proceedings with their bikes zooming through crowded city traffic like they were in Tron, even blowing up the skirt of an attractive model wearing a garter belt and panties (they did the same thing in the Stallone race-car movie, Driven, just one more vicarious thrill for the overheated 13-30-year-old boys who are the target audience). Henderson launches off a truck and lands on Henry James, blowing him up like Ghost Rider and rolling away into the path of an oncoming bus that screeches to a halt just in time, the front tire caressing his face. EXTREME. Even better is the large amount of product placement that occurs in the movie, particularly in the motorcycle cat-fight between Monet Mazur and Jamie Pressley, facing off against giant billboards that might make you imagine it’s a duel between Pepsi and Mountain Dew. (There's also a bar-brawl earlier in the film where some dude knocks another out and snatches his beer, holding it up to the camera to display the Budweiser label innocently). Oh, and of course, there’s a Dane Cook cameo but this was before he was a mega-famous douchebag comedian and he gets punched in the face, so it’s okay, people. Naturally any good-feeling or guilty pleasure you might feel from experience Torque will be tested in the end when our heroes shout, “Let’s ride”, jamming down the highway to a fucking Creed song. Maybe I needed to take Adam Scott’s advice and have been really stoned to receive the full gamut of Torque, though you already receive a contact high from how cartoony and silly and self-conscious it all is, so let's assume the inclusion of a Creed song was either studio interference messing up the screenwriter/director's awesome vision or a satirical comment on the type of douchebag action film that would end with a Creed song. That question, well, I leave you to decide.

Future Zone (1990)

2010-06-05T10:22:00.001-07:00

Director: David A. Prior

After the bullshit masterpiece that was Deadly Prey, I was keen to experience further work from director David A. Prior and the production company behind it, Action International Pictures, a name you can trust when it comes to shitty movies released on VHS in the 1980s-1990s. Working in the tradition of Roger Corman by sticking a name actor low on funds into a cheaply made genre picture, Prior directed the sci-fi cop movie non-classic, Future Zone (1990), a sequel to the film, Future Force, where David Carradine plays bounty hunter John Tucker and was more than likely hired for only three days of shooting, slouching around like John Wayne with two holstered revolvers, the kind of hero who walks into a room of three drug dealers and quick-draws them to oblivion with fast-shooting. "You have the right to die!" he quips like a soft-spoken Judge Dredd. Yet when the situation is too hairy for conventional weapons, such as when another drug dealer attempts a getaway in a van that is going nowhere, Carradine pops his trunk, unlatches a secret case and takes out a Nintendo Power Glove! Yes, a mechanised glove that acts as a lethal weapon by shooting BLUE LIGHTNING straight out of a Thomas Dolby music video, which Carradine uses to shock the runaway drug dealer into an elliptic fit. All hail the Fist-o-matic 3000! However, as my co-viewer, The Genius, pointed out, “If the glove is so awesome, why isn’t he using it all the time?” Well, a glove like that probably sucks up a lot of energizer batteries. Be judicial in your Power Glove usage.

When not exploring the A and B buttons of a power glove, Carradine cruises around his rusty pick-up truck, receiving orders from the sassy Southern babe on dispatch through their two-way TV intercom, which seems to be the only signifier that this film is set in the near future. The actual “future” in Future Zone relates to the presence of Billy (Ted Prior, the hero from Deadly Prey) who is zapped down to Earth like Starman but is actually from the future, arriving in cowboy boots, leather jacket, mesh muscle shirt and mullet power! Beamed in to kick-start the lame buddy cop comedy engine this film is powering on, ducking bullets and trading stilted quips with his new partner, Carradine. Why? Because Ted Prior is Carradine’s son from the future, but it takes the whole movie for Carradine to figure it out, and Ted Prior is there to save his father's life. Ah, like The Terminator but in reverse and quite lame. Otherwise Future Zone is pretty generic stuff even opening with what The Genius termed to be “the scene of a hundred action movies from the 1980s”: a meeting down at the docks, a double cross with a subordinate...

Subordinate: “Hey, what’s this?”
Erudite evil boss, Hoffman: “A gun.” [shoots him dead]

Then Hoffman and his henchman assassin hit a switch and detonate an explosion on a docked ship, which keeps exploding on and on for five minutes like a sketch from The Naked Gun series. Usual buddy cop action movie bullshit follows with nerdy businessmen suspects dying in car-bombs, witnesses killed in protracted Russian Roulette torture sequences, lines of dialogue like ‘Would you like me to take him out of the picture?” and “All the loose ends have been tied up except one!” and then there’s also the great shark-smile of Charles Napier as a corrupt official caught in the middle named Mickland (!).

What distinguishes Future Zone as an Action International Picture is the lame-ass action sequences where guys run around abandoned locations to fire off blanks and stagger uncertainly when their squid-pack goes off. For example, Carradine heads to a warehouse set-up where Hoffman tries to kill him with a dozen henchmen, all hiding behind pylons, firing off a dozen weapons, but completely unable to hit the looping gait of a 50 year old codger. Prior busts in with his van to rescue Carradine and they’re shooting crooks left and right then having an “intense” high-speed chase down an empty city street, which culminates in Carradine and Prior standing in the centre of the road, waiting for henchmen in two cars to ram into them at high speed, man versus machine, man victorious with a slow-motion quick-draw. Along with the stock music score, which sounds like it was lifted out of a generic 1950s-era thriller, the whole film feels like an old western with a bit of “Future” paint splashed over it. Anyway, Carradine’s wife who looks zonked out on painkillers and is pregnant with their son, the future Ted Prior, well, she is kidnapped by Hoffman to be exchanged for confiscated drugs (no, not the wife’s painkillers, but lots of A-Grade dope from the streets). Carradine and Prior hit the weapon room with the one-liner, “Grab some of this stuff. We got bad guys to catch!” A bumper sticker could be made of such a carefully written piece of dialogue like that! A climactic junkyard confrontation occurs that eventually ends with Hoffman holding a gun to the wife’s head and threatening her death. Carradine says, “You let her go, you’ve got a chance to live.” So Hoffman lets the hostage go like the genius criminal that he is, placing his faith in these renegade cops upholding the democratic rights of due process. Carradine and Prior look at each other.... “Nahh.” Then they blow him away! Wah-wah-wah. Thankfully a helicopter with a bad guy firing a machine gun offers some more interest after that stupid scene. The Power Glove returns! Carradine hits a button on his key ring and the glove flies out of its case onto his hand and then he zaps with BLUE LIGHTNING the helicopter, turning it into an explosion. Then he tosses it aside once evil is defeated with the carefulness and respect of used washing gloves; ahh, it’s just a highly sophisticated piece of technology that saved your life twice, but yeah, hey, leave it lying around for a junkyard dog to use as a chew-toy.

Carradine is younger than he was in Kill Bill but he is in poorer shape in this earlier movie and isn’t trying too hard on the acting stakes. After his seething muscular performance in Deadly Prey, Prior is surprisingly subdued and somewhat alright as the cocky asshole he plays here. There’s some lacklustre action scenes, a boob shot here and there, some unmemorable dialogue, a lot of unnecessary pauses and grinding pointlessness. You can watch the whole 80 minutes on YouTube if you have nothing else happening in your life, but you’re better off watching the trailer and thinking of the power glove of blue squiggly line power appearing in every second scene. Now that would have been some Future Zone shit right there!

Cool As Ice (1991)

2010-05-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Director: David Kellogg

Cool As Ice a.k.a. the Vanilla Ice movie is the bullshit movie classic of the 1990s. An old friend Magnus used to work at Civic Video in Mount Hawthorn (don’t look for it anymore, it’s not there) and obtained an ex-rental copy of Cool As Ice with the illogical front cover tagline: “When a girl has a heart of stone, there's only one way to melt it. Just add Ice.” Magnus, Seymour the Genius and I added Ice to our lives by watching it repeatedly, continuously using lines from the film as common greetings like “So what’s up with TOMORROW?” (it’s all in Ice’s delivery) or “I’m gonna across the street to schling a schlong” (Yeah, I don’t know what that means either). A misconceived vehicle for the man who made rap safe for white folks with the smash-hit ‘Ice Ice Baby’ (hey, it’s still a good song), Cool As Ice apparently only lasted three weeks in U.S. cinemas. Obviously patterned after the Purple Rain marketing trifecta of selling a film, a soundtrack and a pop star simultaneously, Cool As Ice displays a similar amount of self-aggrandising ego displayed by the featured star. However, at least Prince wrote awesome pop tunes and there was a sense that he was in complete control of the way he was represented in Purple Rain. Whereas Vanilla Ice, reportedly paid one million dollars for Cool As Ice, is just along for the corporately-sponsored ride. I have visions of screenwriter, David Stenn, trying to ascertain what Vanilla Ice would like to be in the film – a lover, a fighter, a hero? – and continually hearing the reply from Ice himself, “Whatever it is, just make it COOL, yo!” What makes Cool As Ice so fundamentally bullshit is that it sells us its pop star hero as all types of COOL, but to any logical-thinking person who is not a thirteen year old white girl seeing this film in a suburban strip mall cinema in 1991, Ice comes off instead as a giant douchebag of epic proportions.

Cool As Ice begins with the title tune rapped by Vanilla Ice in some downtown club where everyone is gyrating in slow-mo and Naomi Campbell is singing backup. Ice already comes off as totally ridiculous with his plush orange jacket and silver brimmed black cap, dancing around like he’s swatting off invisible bees from his body, and throwing in lame rhymes about “how all the gays, they’re amazed” (re: his MC style). Then some blonde fly-girl with bike pants, a bra, and a leather jacket gives Ice her phone number (her name? “Monique”) and his posse are all like, “DAMN!” Like a 1990s incarnation of Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Ice hits the road with posse intact, all riding hyper-colour motorbikes, touring the countryside for no apparent reason. Wait up though because there’s some chick driving a horse in a fenced-off paddock alongside the road. Ice and the girl exchange slow-motion stares. Tension is in the air scored by constant record-scratching. Now what’s the best way to thaw the ice-cold demeanour of a princess on a horse? Well, rev up the engine and launch across the fence like a lime-green spaceship and land right in front of the horse, kicking the girl off onto the ground. Step aside Horse-and-cart era, the Industrial Age is here courtesy of a little Ice. Checking to see if the girl is okay, y’know not suffering any spine fractures from being thrown off a horse because some idiot jumps their motorcycle right in front of it, Ice receives a punch in the chest from this girl to which he says, “What’s your problem?” Then more priceless dialogue:

ICE: “You hit pretty good... for a GIRL.”
CATHY: “Well, coming from a big macho jerk like you, I’ll take that as a complement!”
[She rides away leaving Ice to nod his head, smiling]
ICE: “Yep yep, she likes me!”

Vanilla Ice continually demonstrates the supreme cockiness of an absolute cockhead. Then if you thought that wasn’t COOL enough, there’s some more comedy shit when Vanilla’s home-boy, Sir-Dee’s green-and-black-tiger-striped motorbike breaks down in the middle of a main road in a small town. Everyone gets off their bikes to check out what’s the problem, yo, without ever thinking to maybe move off to the side. Then again we wouldn’t get close-ups of frustrated townie squares being all Jonathan Winters with their “grrrrrr” double-takes. WHITE PEOPLE ARE FUDDY DUDDIES, YO! That ain’t nothing when Vanilla and his crew take the bike to the WEIRDEST HOUSE ON THE BLOCK, a blue-painted, abstract-art-decorated home for the criminally insane with Sydney Lassick (Cheswick from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and Dody Goodman (Blanche the secretary from Grease) being wacky-doodles with Humpty Dumpty music in the background. They offer to fix Sir-Dee’s bike like the silly wacky white people they are but end up deconstructing it entirely (Uh Oh!) giving Vanilla Ice an excuse to stay a night or two in this Blue Velvet styled burg. Whilst the rest of his crew are given pointless “doo-doo-doo” montages where they eat gross sandwiches of pickles and peanut butter or play with giant salt shakers, Vanilla Ice bare-chested with his orange jacket and rainbow-vomit baggy pants starts dancing like an animal in heat, particularly when he sees that girl on the horse in an open-top Porsche driven by some clean-cut yuppie, which provides another serve of Ice-cold poetry: “AWWWWWWW YEAH!” While Cathy (the girl on the horse) and her yuppie boyfriend asshole Nick are arguing about some petty couple crap, Ice steps in like the definition of a Neighbourhood Watch creep to engage in some more flirty banter, particularly when he finds out her name:

ICE: “Caaaathy? [thinks about it] Cat.”
CATHY: “Come on, we’re wasting his time.”
ICE: “Oh, you’re not wasting my time, I’m just COOLING. Check this, if you need me, I’ll be right over there.”
NICK: “She won’t!”
ICE: “Yeah we’ll see about that [leaves, stops at the gate and turns around] Cat, words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero!”

Wow, that Vanilla Ice is such a fucking jerk... He's so dreamy! This classic scene capped with another example of Ice COOLING when he calls Cat’s boyfriend “Dick.” “Hey,” he says, “it’s Nick!” YA BURNT, DICK... OOPS, SORRY, NICK! I think the worst thing about all of this poor Kristin Minter who plays Cat and seems nice enough in a cut-rate Jennifer Connolly type of way, has to ACT like this is all cool, continually chuckling over both Vanilla’s wit and wisdom.

Well, Cool As Ice can’t be all about Vanilla Ice cooling. An additional subplot is thrown in when we discover that Cat’s parents are played by Candy Clark (American Graffiti) and Michael Gross (Family Ties) are in the witness protection program and are being stalked by the most bumbling pair of crooked cops ever (Jack McGee and S.A. Griffin) who continually have lame dialogue scenes that feel largely improvised, particularly when one stops to ask the other, “Say, you ever think that this would happen?” You could be forgiven for thinking you’re watching another movie at certain points with this bargain basement cop thriller malarkey, but thankfully we have a scene where Vanilla Ice goes looking for Cat at the local hang-out, the Sugar Shack, wearing a giant black sunglasses, a new black leather jacket that does not waste any space with the amount of words and slogans written upon it (like DOWN BY LAW, SEX ME UP, AH YEAH, YEP YEP, etc), looking like a cross between Max Headroom and the lamest Cyberpunk you could imagine. Anyway, some boring old rock band playing cheesy music is boring everyone to sleep and so Ice nudges his posse with the classic line, “I’ve got an idea!” Faster than a Mentos commercial, Ice has pulled the plug on the OLD music, taken a mic and with his command, “Drop it!” we see some bumpkin drop their drink, glass smashing on the floor as the NEW SOUND takes over with Ice’s hilarious performance of ‘The People’s Choice.’

What else do we have here?

When Vanilla Ice finds Nick, drunk on alcohol with his cronies, beating up Sir-Dee’s motorcycle (or as Ice explains later, “Whackhead tried to play baseball with my homeboy’s bike!”), and then Ice takes down Nick and all his buddies with kicks and punches that are all soundtracked with synthesised ‘BAMFS!’ and record scratches.
The CREEPY scene where Vanilla Ice returns Cat’s black book (which he stole by the way) by breaking into her bedroom and waking her up in an uber-phallic fashion by dripping an ice-cube into her mouth while she sleeps, whispering, “Let’s not wake up mummy and daddy.” Skin-crawling!
Vanilla Ice and Cat spending a magical day together, jumping around a housing construction site to some bland dance mix whilst Ice drops some more wisdom like “If you ain’t true to yourself, you ain’t true to yourself. Live your life for someone else, you ain’t living. Straight up FACT!” Then he lets her ride his bike, she lets him ride her house, and then they ride each other in the desert while some bland Ice slow-jam love-song plays out.
Later, Michael Gross suspects Vanilla Ice of being in league with the crooked cops and so he forbids her daughter to date him. When Ice gets dissed by Cat, Cat starts breaking down, getting deep and emotional over this love of a lifetime that she’s only known for ONE DAY!
The bumbling crooked cops kidnap Cat’s little brother Tommy by running around his house in some esoteric slow-mo Home Alone shit that features the line, “I’m gonna get you, kid!”
Cat coming to Vanilla Ice to help with Tommy’s kidnapping by listening to the tape the kidnappers left and only Ice with his supersonic hearing is able to decode where they are by the sound of an industrial pump. The gang hit their bikes to rescue Tommy with Ice warning his posse: “Just because we can’t hear it, doesn’t mean they’re not here.” (Are they in Predator now?). Then Vanilla Ice busts through the wall like Batman on his motorbike, defeating the bumbling cops with more synthesiser-scored punches, even knocking one out with a Tweeting Bird sound.
Michael Gross having to tell Vanilla Ice that he was wrong about him and thanks for rescuing his son blah blah, all the while Vanilla Ice wears a big East 17-styled sock-hat that looks like an extra appendage grew out the top of his head.
Vanilla Ice taking Cat on his bike and then Vanilla Ice driving off, stopping to say, “I forgot something!” to which he drives back to ramp off Nick the Dick’s spotless Porsche.
Final hip-hop performance with Cat dancing seductively in the crowd audience as Vanilla Ice (now in an orange-blue suit!) raps about how she’s the one whilst engaging in some dodgy looking 69 sexual position choreographed routines with his male dancers.

If you want to feel totally STREET and get an education about how a rapping white-boy from the HOOD copes in the wacky world of small town suburbia, y’know where he was from originally and where his target demographic lives, then check out the NEWS with Cool As Ice. Especially when it’s last educational message on the closing credits is to “b kool stay n skool."

Deadly Prey (1987)

2010-04-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

Director: David A. Prior

A low-budget Rambo: First Blood knock-off, Deadly Prey looks like a cross between gay porn and a snuff movie, a comparison accentuated by the cruddy VHS visuals I saw it in that made everything look cheap and sordid. Yet this film is a blast since it’s a lot of 1980s muscular dudes stomping around a park where location shoots were cheap, punching and shooting each other into poorly-choreographed oblivion! What we have here are numerous Soldiers of Fortune operating in a forest clearing outside of Los Angeles where nobody notices all the infantry, all the tanks and all the helicopters sitting pretty out in the open. C’mon, the late 1980s was a boom-time for mercenaries who could make millions working for tin-pot dictators in countries like Parmestan. Mind you, wannabe mercs don’t just jump into the war-zone without some experience! Thus the insane ex-army general Don Michaelson (Troy Donahue) orders his men to kidnap random people off the street and turn them into “runners” i.e. contestants for the Most Dangerous Game, yes, the of hunting humans for sport or rather for training purposes (this was before paintball was invented, I guess).

First scene follows a squad of tubby mercs in camo gear and Aviator shades chasing a tubby Spanish dude who in one scene manages to survive a grenade they lob at him (blows up at his feet, but no big deal, only scraped his knee) and brains one of them with a rock. However, before you think this dude is the film’s hero (too fat) he is surrounded in a clearing and screams “Nooooooooooooooooooooooo” before he is shot in the gut by the evil alpha henchman Lt. Thornton (Fritz Matthews). No-one can wear Aviator shades and a muscle t-shirt like this guy! Anyway, Thornton cannot abide any of his men getting hit with a rock so he takes his pistol and shoots the weakling soldier (a recurring motif). What’s great about Deadly Prey is that after this ten minute set-up, it completely dispenses with the real business of a First Act. We are introduced to our hero, Michael ‘Mike’ Danton (Ted Prior), a Dolph Lundgren lookalike with the perfect 1980s mullet-and-muscles combo and all we learn about Danton is that he sleeps in a water bed and is married to a big-breasted blonde wife, Jaimy (Suzanne Tara), who cooks him eggs for breakfast. Wearing little more than tight crotch-hugging denim cut-offs outside, Mike indulges in some regular guy bullshit like taking out the trash before being nabbed and grabbed by mercs in an unmarked van who were scouting out for a new “runner” in that street: “This guy looks like a lot of fun” we hear a merc remark in one of the many lines reminiscent of Deliverance. Boom! Hero shot of Danton as the camera pans up his oily muscular body while the soundtrack kicks out with its synthesizer bombardment of “BAMFS”!

Deadly Prey then enters the narrative equivalent of an action-packed mobius strip since the first half of the movie involves Danton running around the forest like Tarzan and the Predator combined, killing stupid mercs left and right, and then the last half of the movie involves Danton running around the forest like Rambo and Commando combined, killing stupid mercs left and right. I believe if you screened the film in reverse, it would make just as much sense. The acting might also be improved particularly Prior’s fierce annunciation of his lines, which he emotionally strangles with all the agonised fury he can, putting Stallone to shame in the slurring stakes: “How does a man go from being the highest decorated officer in the Special Forces to being some goddamn bloodsucking mercenary?” Yes, it turns out that Michaelson the bad guy was Danton’s old colonel back in Vietnam so they have a convenient back-story much like Rambo and Colonel Trautman but with increased homosexual tension. These confrontation scenes are brilliant not only for the high quality of ACTING and the wisdom of the writing (“They said I was crazy! War was crazy!”) but the fact they break up the monotony of Danton springing up on some slack-jawed merc in countless scenes; whether Danton is hiding in the thick of the jungle (sorry, forest) or hiding in the water to jump out like Jason in Crystal Lake or best of all hiding in the ground, buried in the leaves as a trap for any wayward enemy footsoldier, springing out like a Californian surfer-dude zombie with a knife in his hand and screaming, “GARRRGH!” The Z-Grade budget means that the props and the supporting cast are not up to scratch, which results in some truly hilarious action sequences where people are shot with what look and sound like cap guns. Then we have the supporting actors hesitate for thirty seconds before deciding that, yes, they have been shot, and finally reacting to the blood-pack that has popped in their chest.

Naturally for a 1980s bullshit action movie there’s a strong undercurrent of sexism and misogyny one has to contend with. The former can be seen in Michaelson’s bitchy second-in-command, Sybill (Dawn Abraham) who is dressed in standard issue military uniform of tight green singlet and no-pants, well, thigh-high cut-offs. She engages in pseudo-S-and-M torture and seething insults to the captured Danton, who is tied to a chair with a loose piece of rope. Michaelson and Thornton also kidnap Danton’s blonde wife who is thusly sexually ravaged and confesses this to her ex-cop father on the case (Cameron Mitchell, a cut-rate William Shatner type) with the painful line, “They raped me, daddy!” Well, not to worry, the hero proves to be as vile as the villains in his retribution particularly when he finally escapes to his house and finds Sybill there with a gun, informing him that his pretty little wife has been kidnapped. After a phone call with Michaelson to substantiate this, Danton turns on his acting chops once again and sneers, “Fuck you!” to Sybill, knocking her out cold with the phone and then shooting her three times while she’s unconscious! COLD AS ICE! Deadly Prey is also righteously nasty in the way a low-budget action movie VHS-release-only flick can be.

What other genius scenes does this sucker include?

Michaelson’s boss turns out to be a distinguished grey yuppie businessman who arrives at the merc camp in a suit and delivers lines like “You’ve got one month, not a day more!” and “I’m a businessman, not a fool” with the lifeless affect of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Danton is cornered by a moustached merc who he knocks out easily enough and then PICKS HIM UP and then SLAMS him against a tree, breaking his back. Oh yeah, he also knocks out another merc with the fakest looking prop of an apparently thick tree log straight out of The Flintstones. Last but not least, Danton faces off with a muscular blonde Danton-lookalike merc who carries a huge machete. On his back, Danton defends himself with what’s lying around – it’s a STICK! – and yes, he stabs the stick through the blonde muscular merc with the swiftness of a sword. The forest is Danton’s weapon!
Michaelson surmising the situation with the dead bodies piling up with the intuitive conclusion: “I know this style. This is my style. Danton? Mike Danton? ... I trained him. I know his style!” Then later around a camp fire, someone else remarks of Danton’s style: “He went through our men like they were toy soldiers!” Danton's Epitaph... THIS GUY'S GOOD!
Danton bumping into one of Michaelson’s men, Cooper (William Zipp) who is friendly to him and becomes a quasi-ally for this reason: “I haven’t seen you since you took that bullet to save my life back in ‘Nam.” One of the best lines of dialogue written ever! Take that, Robert Towne!
Hiding out in the forest like a castaway on The Blue Lagoon, Danton lives off the land and eats something that looks like a fat worm but was possibly a leftover Allen’s snake lolly.
The Thornton-lead squadron look for Danton in a section of the forest, glancing everywhere around them and then splitting up. The camera pans to the right to find Danton stuck up a tree hiding IN PLAIN SIGHT. Capped off with another synth-BAMF!
Thornton with his trusty Aviators on stumbles across another merc corpse. One of Thornton’s men starts to shake and quiver with true “Game over, man!” panic, yelling: “We’re not hunting him! He’s hunting us!” If that wasn’t hilarious enough, Thornton turns around and mutters, “Awful performance” (actually he yells, "Suck this!") and shoots the poor guy in the stomach (these mercenaries have a quick turn-over rate).
When Thornton gets the drop on Danton, they engage in some light kickboxing action and then clocking his gun at Danton’s head with the puzzling one-liner: “End of story!” However, Michaelson wants Danton alive and they engage in another confrontation scene with this priceless exchange on the merits of mercenary work:

DANTON: “Blood money!”
MICHAELSON: “It’s all green!”

Danton’s escape involves him placing a grenade down a sentry’s pants. Explosion and then a cut away to a smoking boot of the blown-up sentry. What is this, a fucking cartoon? More outlandishness in the scenes where Danton faces off solo against a tank easily (throwing a grenade in the opening) and then a helicopter (shoots it into stock footage explosion).
When the ex-cop father of Danton’s girlfriend corners the distinguished grey businessman and rips into an out-of-nowhere 10-minute monologue about how he spent thirty years as a cop with “filth in the street, there’s no music down there... blah blah”, about how corporate scumbags like him get away with murder and so he shoots the unarmed businessman three times. Later, the ex-cop father brandishing a shotgun comes across a merc and asks the question:

EX-COP FATHER: “Friend or enemy?”
MERC: “Friend!”
EX-COP FATHER: “You’re a liar” [BOOM]

The action climax where Danton goes Commando, reborn with face-paint and war-face and weapons galore, exchanging lame gunfire with the dopey remaining mercs, only to kill them all with twig-death-traps and one bazooka blast that blows up everyone. Of course, this leads to the Clash of the Titans between Danton and Thornton after Danton is too late to stop Thornton from shooting his wife dead, so he runs over to him with machete drawn, miraculously unimpeded by the bullets Thornton is firing at close range (the power of love, y’know), and he chops off Thornton’s arm and then beats him to death with his SEVERED ARM! While the sequence begs a suitable pun (“You’re disarmed!”), instead we have some grim shit where Danton scalps Thornton’s dead body, clutching a rubber wig with corn syrup in his hands as a trophy. Cut to the nihilistic conclusion where Danton with his wife dead and his life ruined, confronts Michaelson, forces him to take off his shirt and his shoes and become a “runner”, thus turning the hunter into the hunted but not before one more animalistic scream into the sunlight: “ARRRRGH!”

Deadly Prey... truly a bullshit action movie masterpiece of epic proportions. Much thanks to Everything Is Terrible for alerting me to this VHS classic. Check out their 3-minute summation of Deadly Prey’s considerable highlights:

Obsessed (2009)

2010-04-04T00:09:00.000-07:00

Obsessed must be the first film adaptation of a letter to the GQ advice column: “My secretary is obsessed with me! How do I fend off her advances while keeping my Brooks Brothers suits immaculately pressed?” Yes, Obsessed is Fatal Attraction in the Workplace, which means it’s basically the Disclosure of our times, warning us about the rise in sexual harassment against male bosses by their female underlings. Our tale begins with Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from The Wire) and Beyonce Knowles (Yes, Beyonce in her first non-singing role) moving into their new two-storey suburban mansion with their baby son, throwing the ‘For Sale’ into the fireplace whilst they cosy up underneath the mirror on their bedroom ceiling. So you have two extremely fine specimens of the human race in a happy relationship in a beautiful home... it’s too good to be true! I felt the first warning sign of trouble for this movie was the onscreen cast credit “With Jerry O’Connell,” but that’s just me. Thankfully O’Connell provides one of the dumbest lines in the movie as Elba’s frat-boy office colleague during a business meeting where their boss, Bruce McGill, notices the shape of a new female employee:

MCGILL: “Whose legs are those?”

ELBA: “That’s the new office temp.”

O’CONNELL: “More like temp-tress.”

Drinks on the house from the screenwriter because he got PAID for that line!

Yes, Elba is in the elevator to work when he spots Ali Larter from Heroes, they engage in some banter and she “accidentally” drops the manila folders she was holding. I did wonder whether Elba had used Lynx aftershave because this is usually how their commercials depict the consequences of the Lynx Effect. Whilst helping her with the files, Elba looks too long at her legs and the obsession flares up! Soon enough Elba’s secretaries are taking ill with the cold and Ali Larter takes over their duties and she is just TOO EFFICENT – Gasp! Horror! Not since Lara Flynn Boyle in The Temp! Larter knows what type of coffee Elba likes (black, one sugar) and knows that he likes to send flowers to his wife first thing in the working day. Based on the subtlety so far displayed in this movie, I’m surprised they don’t pipe through Gnarls Barkely’s ‘Crazy’ into the soundtrack every time she does something obsessive like burn him some live Crudo bootleg CDS (“Dan the Automator is king!” he writes to her on office chat)! The usual notes are hit with a movie like this: one scene where Beyonce is like “not tonight, honey” because she wants to study, one scene where Elba tells Beyonce that the new office temp is “plain-looking”, and one scene where Beyonce visits the office with her baby boy and sees how pretty the new temp actually is. Larter says hello to the baby but the baby is eerily quiet. As Beyonce says, “That’s strange. He’s usually not this shy around strangers.” Thank goodness babies contain crazy stalker radar – THE SON SENSES SHE’S EVIL! Then Elba walks into the office tea room and finds Ali Larter crying. Here’s some more original dialogue from writer David Loughery:

ELBA: “Why are you crying?”

LARTER: “Oh, allergies...”

ELBA: “What are you allergic to?”

LARTER: [pause] “Men.”

Skip along to Larter “accidentally” bumping into Elba at a upper-class bar while he’s having a beer and a burger, soon enough they’re having “Dirty Martinis” and high-fiving each other, and then it’s the Office Christmas party and they’re standing under Mistletoe surprise surprise, and then Elba goes to the bathroom and Ali Larter follows him into a stall, gyrating against him like a Las Vegas showgirl. Obsessed? This movie should be called Shameless! So, Elba is Trapped in the Bathroom and he’s being a good boy resisting, throwing her aside, and returning home and not telling his wife about the fact his crazy temp tried to sex him up. Then it escalates to Ali Larter jumping into Elba’s car in a trench-coat and revealing she’s only wearing fancy underwear and despite Elba’s protests she won’t listen to reason (she’s obsessed, y’see) and she’s sending him e-mails with multiplying images of herself (thrilling sequence where Elba tries to delete them all whilst his wife is in the same room - quick, delete the JPEGS, String!).

Elba is bugging out and goes to a weekend resort retreat with O’Connell and their boss where Ali Larter is, slipping Rohypnol into his drink and taking advantage of him while he is falling in and out of consciousness in his hotel bed. The next morning, Elba is furious and threatens Ali Larter to which she replies, “Go on. Hit me. You can do anything you want to me.” Finally Elba finds her again in his hotel bed after trying to commit suicide with a punch of sleeping pills. Christine Lahti turns up as a cop investigating the case and finally all of these stalking shenanigans are revealed to Beyonce the dutiful wife who angrily throws Elba out while Larter recovers in hospital. Then Elba is given leave from work because of a possible sexual harassment charge to which Bruce McGill provides one of the funnier lines with his comment, “By now I bet you wished you had banged her for all the trouble she’s causing you.”

Skip ahead to Elba and Beyonce making up, throwing on some classy threads and eating at a classy restaurant whilst Ali Larter breaks into their home and kidnaps their kid, leaving the baby boy in their other car with a love note. NOT COOL, DUDE. So Beyonce helped produce this sucker and her character is pretty much in the background for most of the movie with Elba as the protagonist, but then she steps up to the plate with a close-up of her ringing Larter and leaving this message on her phone: “You think you’re crazy, I’ll show you crazy! Now try me, bitch!” CAAAAAAAN YOU DIG IT? I dig it, movie. Yes, the most generic movie in the world finally takes it up a notch in the climax when Larter breaks into their home again, throwing on Elba’s college football sweater and waiting for him to return home, but Beyonce comes home because she forgot to switch on their security system and she catches Larter in her bedroom and then it is on for young and old. We have a knock-down, clash of the titans, catfight with Beyonce versus Ali Larter as they throw each other around the room and throw each other down the stairs, kicking and clawing like the Switchblade Sisters. They even chase each other up into the top of the house where Beyonce in her brown boots tricks Ali Larter who is swinging a block of wood around the place to step out onto the thin attic floor where Ali Larter falls through, hanging on for dear life. Now we can’t have Beyonce wanting to intentionally kill someone so she snaps out of the Warrior Queen mentality she was going through and offers help, “C’mon, take my hand.” Ali Larter takes her hand, but she’s still a psycho-hose-beast and tries to drag Beyonce down, but Beyonce won’t have that shit, and has to let her go to save her own life, so we have Ali Larter fall down smash bang into a glass table, but she’s still alive! SAY WHAT? Thankfully the chandelier hanging over head breaks and falls with the sharp end stabbing deep into the psycho crazy obsessed stalker’s chest. Elba returns home to find his wife battered but victorious: no woman is going to steal her man or her baby. Then in a profound moment of actor-producer-star fusion the image of Beyonce hugging her man is scored to her song, ‘Crash Into You.’ So, yes, eighty minutes of pure predictability and ten minutes of Beyonce Action Hero awesomeness. I wish they could have just made the whole be about that whole epic beat-down with breaks for more Beyonce songs whilst she and Ali Larter took a breather between punches. In fact, recast Ali Larter with Lady Ga Ga and think about how the Telephone music video could be a feature film extravaganza rather sit through a weekly rental like Obsessed.

Gamer (2009)

2010-04-01T22:23:00.000-07:00

Have you ever entertained the notion whilst you’re decimating soldier-shaped pixels on Call of Duty, spoken aloud to yourself as another man blows up in a shower of graphically-realistic guts:“What if that guy I’m playing, the dude running around onscreen and killing dudes as I press the X button, what if that dude was like real?” MINDEXPLOSION TOWN, POPULATION: YOU! I’m sure you have especially if you’re like fifteen years old and have an ex-rental copy of The Matrix: Reloaded, the cover of which you use to roll your very first joint of The Pot. The thought has also occurred to Neveldine/Taylor, the directing duo of douchebags who made Crank, which functioned itself as a live action videogame what with its 1980s-video-game graphic title card and Jason Statham running around like Sonic the Hedgehog trying to keep his heart pumping and his dick hard by doing crazy shit. Neveldine/Taylor were probably blowing up some Nazi soldiers on Call of Duty: The Search for Hitler's Bunker while they reclined on leather couches, their feet resting upon the naked prostitutes they pay money to act as flesh-furniture, cocaine and crack on their crevices, while they bluetoothed their agent into finding some immigrants to enter into illegal bum-fights in the bowels of their Hollywood mansion, and the thought struck, “Let’s make a fucking movie about this fucked up shit.” Or as they so eloquently describe on the making of: “This movie was birthed in the canals of reality TV and UFC and the internet...” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gamer, another in the long line of sci-fi action movies that ask the question, ‘What is reality?’ The answer: explosions and shit.

Yes, Gamer is set “Some years from this exact moment” (as a title card helpfully informs us) with Marilyn Manson’s cover of ‘Sweet Dreams’ sneaking over the soundtrack as the global community of online media goes ape-shit for the biggest game/reality program, Slayers, with its featured players projected onto the sides of gigantic office buildings and the title stencilled across walls everywhere in the world. We proceed to experience what Slayers is basically like as we follow behind Kable (Gerald Butler), our hero, grunting along a deserted city block, blowing away other dirty-faced soldiers as explosions continually spark in warehouse warzones. Along with the fragmented cutting and hand-held camera work, it’s like you’re watching the climax to Children of Men, but it’s like more cool and shit, because it’s violence and it’s death and you don’t know what’s going, so who gives a fuck anyway, dude. Or as a colleague Nelly said while watching it: “I feel like I’m on crack just watching this.”

You might be confused as to what’s going on but not to worry Kyra Sedgwick pops up as the glamourpuss host of The Exposition/Backstory Chatshow where she interviews the creator of Slayers, Ken Castle (Michael C.Hall) who helpfully explains what the fuck is going on. See, he’s a Bill Gates clone with a broad Southern accent and philosophical nuggets like “You can get paid to be controlled or you can control to get paid” or “We live in society, we visit society.. . which one’s real?” During this sequence, Hall provides the movie with a big slice of ham with his devious and smarmy character; he’s an avator himself being controlled by an unseen Gary Oldman for over-the-top villain perfection. Y’see, Castle pioneered the mind-map viral network where implants are stored in people’s heads which means they become human avators and can be played and controlled and manipulated by gross individuals in the privacy of their dank rooms. Castle’s first success was Society, an online simulation game where people put on their best wacky Cosplay shit and stand around in a city square acting like they’re in a Dave LaChappelle photoshoot doing crazysexy stuff (Wow, a Hari Krishna listening to a boombox! A priest running around with balloons! TAKE THAT, SOCIAL ORDER!). Castle’s next game is Slayers, which features prisoners signing up to participate in online warzone death games in order to have their sentences commuted; freedom comes at a cost though... 30 missions successfully completed. It’s all very Running Man/Rollerball basically with death sports providing some sort of quasi-satirical critique on society at large through our valorisation of future-gladiators like Kable. And of course, there is an underground pro-freedom anti-authority rebel alliance with pirate transmissions that interrupt the global cable video game uplink with the face and the voice of their leader... Ludacris!

Speaking of Gladiator, Kable sits in the white-sand prison, letting the soil drift through his hand, thinking of his wife and child in nostalgic sepia-tinged flashbacks, just like Russell Crowe in Gladiator. Just in case you weren’t exactly clear what Kable’s motivation was, he also has a tattoo on one arm that reads, “I am right here with you.” I get it; he misses his family and shit. That’s what you call characterisation, dude! When he doesn’t have John Leguizamo as a crazed prisoner popping up and whispering improvised shit into his ear about “how spooky he is,” Gerald Butler is ready for the next round of Slayers and we find out that he is controlled by this wealthy 17-year-old douchebag that stands in his circular Minority Report-styled internet hovel, ignoring various requests from online teenage sluts with respectful names like ‘Kumdumpsters” and buying weapon applications that are not “gay” so that he can perform balletic movements that control Butler’s actions in the game, which is all really confusing because who is actually doing all the work here? Butler or the kid? It’s not really explored in any depth nor their relationship as player and playee (or as someone lamely says, “What are you going to be - a player or a slayer?”) Anyway, there is a gloriously lame poetry-of-war moment where we see Butler killing dudes in the warzone with the douchebag kid superimposed behind him, performing the same Tai Chi gestures in the bullet-time Matrix world they all live in. Then there’s the new future hero of the Slayers, Hackman (Terry Crews), a big black dude who keeps cracking his neck and being insane and visiting Gerald Butler in the showers naked, singing some song about “puppet masters” and “strings.”

The most completely bullshit aspect about Gamer is its attempt to have its cake and eat it too by casting judgement on the sick fucks that enjoy the sex and violence in online games like Society and Slayers. Like we cut to another round of Slayers where Gerard Butler visits the Come to Daddy music video set for a grim battleground of flaming motorcyclists and exploding heads and severed limbs. Then the slow-motion cinematography creeps in and the soft piddly-piano music (seriously they almost play ‘Mad World’) and it’s like “Oh man, ever think about the pain and horror that must happen in war and shit? What a bummer. Must really suck. Onto the next level of Call of Duty: Kill Haji Motherfuckers Dead!” As my colleague Dan pointed out, “This is war-porn basically.” From war-porn to softcore, we also follow Kable’s wife, Angie (Amber Valetta) who is an actress and works in Society basically disconnecting her identity to be controlled by an obese dude who sits naked in his dark apartment forever touching his sweaty skin in ecstasy at the sick shit he makes Angie do. Dressed up like an anime sexbot at a comic convention, we see Angie being sexed on by some dude with a pig-nose and get the close-up of her crotch getting rubbed, thanks to Neveldine/Taylor, and then they cut back to the fat gross dude because he is the type of scumbag getting off on this type of shit, not them, by any means. "We’re filmmakers, dudes, making a profound cultural commentary on internet culture and the fat dudes who whack off to this bizarre crap, not like us at all, who write and directed this shit. It’s a statement, man!" Very fitting for a writing-directing team whose aesthetic can be likened to that of a 15-year-old-boy simultaneously cutting himself on one arm whilst masturbating furiously with the other free hand. Yeah, the internet is fucked, dudes. Real Life exists in the hope of reuniting with your underwritten family or the social issues like Health Care that get two minutes of dialogue when Gerald Butler escapes from the Slayers game and contacts the rebel alliance known as the Humanz who say things like “That’s right, it’s a game! You’ve got to cut the strings, puppet master!”

Other highlights from Gamer include: Butler downing a bottle of whiskey before playing Slayers, then puking up and pissing into a deserted car’s petrol cap in order to provide fuel to escape in an insanely illogical sequence worthy of Crank; a welcome appearance by character actor Keith David as Agent Keith, the FBI dude interrogating the punk kid as to Kable’s whereabouts once he’s escaped; the presence of old video arcade games like Galaga and air-hockey tables at the rebellion’s headquarters because back then you knew when a game was a game; a memory doctor employed to hack into Butler’s mind and see the Manchurian Candidate mind-controlled murder he was involved in; Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia popping up as a weirdo in Society named Rick Rape who wears leather and almost sexes Angie (wearing a red wig and blue underwear so she's basically Lee-Loo in The Fifth Element) before Gerald Butler steps in and breaks Milo’s back over his knee; the final confrontation between Butler and Hall where Hall leads a group of henchmen into a lip-synched dance of ‘(I’ve Got You) Under My Skin’ to demonstrate his complete mind control of other people through advanced ‘Built to Send’ technology; Gerard Butler killing Terry Crews twice, the second time snapping his neck twice for no discernible reason (are you less dead on the first neck snap?); Hall shirtless showing off his ripped pecs and engaging in a Bruce Lee tribute with his beatdown of Butler; then Butler with the help of the kid breaking Hall’s mind control, stabbing him in the gut, reunited with his family, letting all the mind-controlled human avatars free and driving off into the sunset as the title card pops up, ‘GAME OVER.’

There is a lot of bullshit discussion on the Making Of where Neveldine/Taylor, sipping beer cans with the logos blacked out (Hey, we leafed through Noami Klein and shit), framing Gamer as their attempt at a mainstream audience after the success of Crank, which they compared to a constant “punishment” for both the characters in Crank and the people watching Crank. However, they maintain their individuality and personality as auteurs throughout Gamer, particularly a scene where Gerald Butler escapes from footsoldiers into a bizarrio FUTURE RAVE sequence where everyone wears neon colours and dresses like they’re in the 1990s. As laser sights target Butler’s face, stray bullets hit random ravers. We close-up momentarily on an attractive young black girl in a white wig who gets shot and then spectacularly flies across the room with the impact of the bullet and I had to exclaim knowingly, “Ah, it’s a Neveldine/Taylor film!” With a persistent delight in semi-nude attractive female bystanders being violently dispatched during hyper-stylised shootouts, their auteur themes prevail.

Collision Course (1989)

2010-03-06T23:40:00.000-08:00

Director: Lewis Teague

Every stand-up comedian gets a vehicle at some point, manufactured to display their talents in a larger arena than a dusty stage in a two-drink minimum comedy club. Jay Leno eventually rose to stardom by inheriting The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson in 1992, “retiring” from The Tonight Show to begin The Jay Leno Show in 2009, and then “re-inheriting” The Tonight Show in 2010 from Conan O’Brien all thanks to the brilliant programming practices of NBC. Way before all of those shenanigans, Jay Leno tried out another vehicle for his comic talents, which was Collision Course, another production off the Dino De Laurentis assembly line. As film critic Joe Bob Briggs points out, this film is basically a remake of Red Heat, the Arnold Schwarzenegger/James Belushi East-meets-West-fish-out-of-water-buddy-cop- action-comedy where a slob Yankee cop is partnered with a fussy foreign other; this time not the Other is not Russian but Japanese, so you could call Collision Course the original Rush Hour if there was anything original at all about Collision Course. Pat Morita, Mr. Miyagi himself, shares screen space with Leno’s chin as the Japanese detective on the hunt for a “top secret turbo-engine” on the mean streets of Detroit, their partnership summarised by the highly original tag-line of the movie poster: “The only thing stopping these two cops from solving the crime of the century... is each other.” Hi ho!

The first scene has Leno driving a classic car - a ’57 Dodge’ - through the streets, which makes it feel as if the script was specifically written for him what with his renowned fetish for collecting classic cars. So, yeah, he’s driving down the street being cool, stops at the lights, trades some quips with some funky black dudes eating pizza and listening to funk, and then they agree to drag race for $20, and you’re like ‘Woah, who is this cool maverick who is down with the brothers and likes to put the pedal to the metal?’ Then there are sirens and Leno waves off the black dudes to escape while he deals with the fuzz and the uniformed cops are like ‘Hey now, you were speeding’ but BAM, Leno shows off his shield, “I’m a cop, you idiots.” Uh Oh, Spagehtti-O’s! Then he snowballs them with some cockamamie story about working undercover and then grabs the number of the fetching female blonde cop. Classic character introduction there and a contender for MOVIE COP OF 1989! Pat Morita doesn’t really get an equivalent scene; he’s just told to come into his superiors’ office in Japan, ordered to fly out to Detroit and locate a missing engineer who is selling this “top secret turbo-engine” to American car manufacturers. Turns out the engineer was killed by criminals working for a corrupt car manufacturer wanting the turbo-engine to bolster their sales. Of course, the criminals who are played by stand-out character actor favourites Randall “Tex” Cobb (Raising Arizona) and Tom Noonan (Last Action Hero) also wind up killing a junkyard owner who was an old buddy of Leno’s (just like in Turner and Hooch!). This provides the funniest moment in the movie when Leno is told of the bad news and you get to watch him feign sincere human emotion like sadness with his huge-head and little-face, uttering in his helium-addled voice, “He’s been shot?” with the grace of a chainsaw carving up a bonsai tree. Then Leno finds a keycard to the engineer’s hotel room and its there that he meets up with Morita snooping around in the dark for the turbo-engine. Before Morita can say, “I’m a cop, you idiot”, Leno is switching on the hotel lights, pointing a gun at him and uttering the lamest line ever, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees!” I look back on my notes and realise that I wrote the word “BROAD” in big letters if you need any further indication of how such classic one-liners are delivered.

So Collision Course was made in the late 1980s and set in Detroit, back when American anti-Japanese sentiment was high with their growing economic power and the resulting closure of American car plants thanks to the success of Toyota etc, so there’s a great vein of casual racism throughout the whole enterprise, not simply the obvious meathead racist cops who call Morita “Tojo” and lines about the dead Japanese businessman like “Do you call a Jap a John Doe?”, but also Jay Leno’s “harmless” rib-tickling with great jokes like when his angry black police chief has Morita in his office and Leno comments that “They’re performing a Kabuki in there with Madame Butterfly” and when Morita is on the phone to his angry Japanese superiors, Leno is all like “Hey, better warn the village that Godzilla is invading!” Zing and double-zing! However, sure enough, Leno and Morita bond over one night of drinking 12-year-old scotch (much like in Shanghai Noon) and they’re overcoming their differences and learning to trust one another and getting into crazy scrapes like a brawl at a bowling alley where Morita confronts the grizzled Randall “Tex” Cobb with a karate stance (in like a wink wink nudge to fans of The Karate Kid) and Cobb retorts, “Karate this!” and bitch-slaps him through a divider. They also crash a city planning ceremony where slick evil businessman and head villain Chris Sarandon is cutting the ribbon for a new community centre in the inner-city and so Leno starts acting like a rogue cop once again by yelling out accusations of Sarandon’s misdealing which leads to this classic exchange:

SARANDON: “What’s the matter? Are you on something?”
LENO: “Yeah, I’m on something... I’m on your ass!”

Then Leno and Morita also find themselves jumping out of an exploding house when bald, gun-nut, psychopath Tom Noonan (the crook who killed the junkyard owner with a “gyro-jet rocket gun”!) fires a rocket launcher at them and chases them onto a cargo train, but not before they trick him with some secret documents wrapped in a grenade that blows him up and leaves Morita to say to Leno, “I think that you have avenged the death of your friend now.” However, Morita finally lives up to the Japanese stereotype he is playing with some grace and some charm and not being Jay Leno when after the three car chases they have at the climax, he stands by the wounded Jay Leno and faces the oncoming car of the murderous Chris Sarandon and Morita does a Banzai run towards the speeding car - it’s Man versus Car basically - and then Morita does a fly-kick and smashes his feet right through the windscreen and crushes Sarandon’s face in, which was basically the best bit of the movie. My second favourite moment was Ernie Hudson playing Leno’s other partner, Shortcut, who refers to one of the criminal’s rap-sheet with this line: “The guy’s done everything except rape Bambi!” Fast forward to the end and you have Leno seeing Morita off at the airport (just like in Black Rain) but they are both in wheelchairs and body casts because of their adventures and Leno gives Morita the “turbo-charger” and bows and then Morita returns the gesture with a trademark Leno “up yours” hand gesture, and then cut to the final split-screen freeze-frame shot of them smiling at each other, East and West united in this partnership until anti-Japanese pro-American sentiment would be stirred once again with the film, Rising Sun in 1993. In conclusion, Pat Morita is dead and Jay Leno is still on television with 84 cars in his possession, which says it all really.

The Wolfman (2010)

2010-02-17T18:56:00.000-08:00

Director: Joe Johnston

It’s very hard to fuck up a werewolf movie. Even in these days of CGI that has forever hampered the greatest thing about the werewolf movie, which are the transformation scenes, ever since An American Werewolf in Paris where rather than a werewolf looking like a guy in a great suit and make-up now you have a werewolf that looks like a big piece of blurry poo. Aside from that technological hurdle, the rest is quite simple: protagonist arrives in strange place, protagonist avoids advice of gypsies and townfolk, protagonist is bitten by mysterious creature, protagonist’s senses improve dramatically, protagonist turns into werewolf and rips a few faces off, protagonist-turned-werewolf is killed by silver bullet, etc. The Wolfman has all of those elements, but assembles them into a moribund, entertainment dead zone as if it’s a Michael Haneke art-house take on the genre, but no, it’s a Universal Pictures mainstream Hollywood movie that makes Teen Wolf Too look like the better werewolf movie.

So, Benicio Del Toro stars as Lawrence Talbot, a touring actor who is informed in a letter that the brother that he never really knew was killed by a mysterious assailant lurking in the moors of Blackmoor, England. Note: Benicio is saddled with an awful haircut that makes him look like Jerry Lewis in the 1960s. Anyway, arriving at the gothic estate, Benicio is confronted by an evil looking hound that growls at him and then a grizzly Anthony Hopkins brandishing a shotgun. “Hello father,” Benicio says. Sitting next to me in the cinema, my friend Peewee remarked, “That’s to establish that Anthony Hopkins is his father.” How does that work? Oh, Hopkins’ dead wife, dead mother to Benicio, is revealed in a painting and then some flashbacks to be a Spanish senorita. Oh, okay, that makes sense. So, why is Benicio speaking with the American accent then? “When I discovered my dead mother, my father sent me to an asylum and then I was raised in the States by my Aunt who was living there,” Benicio explains to Emily Blunt, his dead brother’s shapely betrothed. Blunt was staying at the Talbot mansion but stays for the funeral, which they all attend, and then she has to leave after the funeral, and then she returns anyway, and then yada yada. The movie continues on like this with every scene about who someone is, what they are doing there and where they are going. When touring England, The Wolfman always likes to stay in Exposition City. As Peewee remarked twenty minutes in, “When do you think the film will start?”

The film seems to start when Benicio investigates a Gypsy camp and some ornery townfolk rock up to kill a bear they think is eating people on the moors and then the Wolfman attacks, shredding out entrails like spaghetti and tearing off limbs like they were breadsticks. Highlight includes a scene where a bobby policeman has his hand ripped off and screams in shock-horror at the latex stump he is left with. Bada Bing, Bada Boom, Benicio is bitten by the creature and lies in bed dreaming of wolf-boys under his bed. Couple of days later, Benicio is feeling better, his wound is healing amazingly, and he is starting to sniff around Emily Blunt more and more like some kind of... animal? They even share some airless “flirtation” down by the lake when he teaches her how to skip a stone in the great tradition of all Victorian romances. Then some more ornery townfolk rock up at Talbot mansion, which Benicio hears with his super wolf ears, and they try to take away Benicio because of his regenerative powers. Anthony Hopkins rocks up again with a shotgun, but this time with an Irish accent (!), and he says that his Indian manservant Singh (Art Malik!) has a repeating rifle trained on them all from the roof. The townsfolk leave. Then Hopkins remarks to Benicio, “I will tell Singh this when gets back from town. You’re not the only actor in the family!” No shit. You’re the man now, Dog! Especially when you - as in Sir Anthony Hopkins - seems to be playing a different character in each scene! So random.

Speaking of acting, Hugo Weaving arrives as Mr. Smith – sorry – Inspector Abberline, the detective on the case who basically takes everyone to Acting School with his purred delivery that at least provides some life into all the glum performances on the screen: “Rrrrules are what keeps us from descending into a dog eat dog world.” Rules also hamper acting, particularly when it comes to Hopkins who is eventually revealed to be the real Wolfman even though Benicio is also turning into a Wolfman and killing townfolk. So, it’s basically like Teen Wolf but with less basketball. Suddenly Hopkins turns into the Hannibal Lecter of Wolfmen, appearing in his secret wolf lair cave that Benicio discovers and suddenly Hopkins is rocking the slicked back hair and leopard-skin coat look, providing a rambling monologue that is delivered very casually for its ghoulish subject matter. He says at one point about his dead wife, “Her death finished me. I was devastated... Oh well.” Later in the film when Benicio is captured and taken to London, Hopkins does it again when visits Benicio’s cell to reveal that, yes, it was he gored his own wife:

BENICIO: “You killed my mother!”
HOPKINS: “Yeah, I suppose I did.”

Shit happens in werewolf town. Pass me a brandy, my boy, and let’s start reading the new Dickens. One wonders if Hopkins was paid by the word or possibly by the shrug considering the care he gives to his performance. So, yeah, Benicio is imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, London, where he is water-boarded by some Nazi shrink and his giggling sidekick, all the while rambling like a lunatic and having surreal dreams that include some Emily Blunt side-boob and lots of wolfman imagery, y’know, like acting on stage with a severed head in your hand. Elephant Man: The Revenge strikes when Benicio is tied up and wheeled out in front of all these whiskered doctors chortling at the misguided idea that he is a werewolf until he turns into one, savagely kills a good deal of them, and then hits the streets to kill some more extras from Sweeney Todd. Seems werewolves don’t really need to eat human flesh for food anymore, preferring to act like a hairy Jack The Ripper. Now you might think that turn of the century London is a good place for a climax, but no, still more movie to get on with as all the characters return to Blackmoor for the finale. It’s basically as if the film was a palindrome with the first act replayed for the audience in reverse.

By this time Emily Blunt and Benicio are now madly in love after some lacklustre courting and she is looking through old Lycanthropy books, mainly looking at the pictures just like Tom Hanks in The Burbs rather than locating that section of the text that states “CURES.” Then she visits Geraldine Chaplin as a Gypsy but her main advice is something along the lines of “Fate is a curse” or some such nonsense and on reflection old gypsies are quite useless by this film’s representation of them. Anyway, Benicio kicks down the door of Talbot mansion and finds Hopkins playing a piano with bloody fingers, reciting some “Prodigal Son Has Returned Scripture” and looking a lot like he’s in a Miracle on 34th Street rather than The Wolfman. Benicio has the shotgun now and presses the trigger but no luck, Hopkins “took out the gunpowder from the shells years ago” because he had a time machine like Bill & Ted and knew this would happen. The full moon comes out for the third act and cut to Hopkins-Wolfman and Benicio-Wolfman having a UFC grudge match amidst an accidental fire blazing within the mansion interior, lots of back flips and high kicks, and then a flaming Hopkins-Wolfman is decapitated, his head rolling across the floor still breathing in a nice touch. Then there’s some boring love stuff where Emily Blunt keeps failing to shoot Benicio-Wolfman at the appropriate juncture, letting Hugo Weaving get bitten, and then she draws out the human side of Benicio for a moment before shooting him anyway with a silver bullet, but then he turns back into a human for some parting words of thanks, “Great job, kiddo.” Final shot is of the moon with Hugo Weaving now one of the savage beasts though I doubt there’d be any sequel to support his character's further adventures.

So there you have it, Hugo Weaving provides some subtle overacting and Anthony Hopkins provides some broad overacting. Emily Blunt is quite nice to look at alongside all the moody gothic establishing-shots that try to give Dracula and Sleepy Hollow a run for their money. Finally, Benicio Del Toro whose pet project this was is in the end quite miscast in the title role because (one) he is a glum absence when someone like Nicolas Cage was dearly needed and (two) he already looks like a wolf. To put it into perspective, I only saw The Wolfman at the cinemas because we were originally supposed to see Valentine’s Day as a bad joke for a friend. When that friend was waylaid, we saw The Wolfman instead. Once the lights went up on The Wolfman, the same thought occurred to all of my friends, “We should have seen Valentine’s Day instead.” The running time would have been shorter and the screen would have had more colour.

Then again, would it have had Anthony Hopkins serving up a big slice of acting ham?

"Make sure you get paid by the word when acting, my boy!"

American Ninja 4: The Annihilation (1990)

2010-01-11T05:28:00.000-08:00

Director: Cedric Sundstorm.

American Ninja 4: The Annihilation is an annihilation, you betcha, an annihilation of logic with its complete randomness as an action movie sequel that is totally defined by ninjas jumping up on All-American hairdo heroes. We are firmly in Canon Pictures territory from the very first scenes where an elite military unit runs through jungle terrain, which looks like a Southern California national park, firing off guns unconvincingly, like they’re on a Weekend Warrior retreat, at the threat chasing them, which are – you guessed it – ninjas! Yes, stuntmen in black pyjamas pop out from behind every surrounding tree with bows and arrows, picking off the grizzled dogfaces one by one until the survivors hop onto an inflatable boat, escaping by the river-bend when all of a suddenly sudden twenty ninjas jump out of the water, all of whom must be very good at holding their breath under water (they teach that at Ninja Academy, I hear). Watching from a great mountain overlooking the captured American G.I.s is a sneering evil British warlord, Mulgrew (James Booth chewing the scenery like the British ham he is) with a panama hat and binoculars, seconded by a masked super-ninja who wears a white hood and a white vest, looking like a New Romantic bassist who is full of mystery.

Cut to David Bradley as Sean Davidson, the tanned stud who talks like Owen Wilson and who replaced Michael Dudikoff as the American Ninja in American Ninja 3, which by all reports really sucked. Anyway, Bradley is best man at his black side-kick’s wedding and just when the rings are about to be exchanged, what do you know, but a beeper is heard and an important call comes through the Government, forcing Bradley and his tuxedo-wearing buddy to leave the bride at the altar and take the limo to HQ, no doubt paying tribute to the exact same scene from Navy Seals. In a boardroom with a framed picture of then President George Bush Snr, Gavin, their superior officer, gives them the scoop about what happened in the opening credits with those American Delta Force Commandos captured by ninjas in red pyjamas and held hostage by Mulgrew who we are told “above all, hates Americans!” However, Gavin the boss man wants to send both Bradley and his useless sidekick but Bradley warns his superior with the funniest line in the film: “This isn’t a game, Gavin! Those were NINJA!” So, our heroes parachute into a foreign country who are never told the name of, but looks like South Africa but should be called Ninjastan, and they meet up with a street-wise punk kid called Pongo who totes a shotgun and speaks in an accent that sounds like a synthesis of all accents. They get taken to some redneck bar to meet a sleazy contact with a hat and then a Roadhouse-lite bar brawl kicks off amazingly, even though everyone is on the same side. Then they are taken up into the sleazy contact’s office to hear the plans for their secret mission, but the evil Mulgrew (terribly acted by James Booth), a British Colonel Renegade Bad-Guy and his men bust in, shooting the sleazy contact in the hat and chasing our heroes in a Raiders of the Lost Ark styled sequence who manage to cheekily hide under some more hats. Thankfully there’s a sexy Peace Corps agent named Sarah (Robin Stille) who has terrible 1980s, Dallas-styled, big-hairdo and hides our heroes in her mortuary. In keeping with the tradition of the American Ninja series, all of these shenanigans feel like you’re watching a lost episode of The A Team where ninja costumes were sold in bulk.

Moving along, there’s a hilarious sequence where David Bradley and his sidekicks all wind up in a forest clearing chased by ninjas. So, he meditates with his legs crossed, doing the splits no problem, while having a profoundly spiritual moment assembling his high-tech bow and arrow. Then twenty ninjas pop out behind the trees once again and Bradley succeeds in hooting them with arrows and beating them up with his martial arts skills, even though in the background of each fight scene are a dozen ninjas hanging around, waiting their turn basically. Then Bradley realises there’s twenty more ninjas nearby and so he pulls out his playing-card-collection-mini-case of throwing stars and kills them all. Bullshit highlight has Bradley’s useless sidekick confronting three ninjas from his hiding spot, turning his gun on each, firing off one round - BANG - as the ninja dodges the bullet with precision timing, then he turns the gun on the next – BANG - and the second ninja dodges it also, and then he shoots at the third ninja – BANG – and you know what, the ninja dodges the bullet as well, all of them demonstrating reflexes with the slowness of the ancients. Our heroes are captured and there is an outlandish presentation of all the ninjas the evil Mulgrew has at his disposal, which the movie shows off in an overhead helicopter shot of blue, yellow, red and black ninjas all performing choreographed kicks on a mountain top, all for the benefit of an evil Arab general, Maksood, dressed in the Lawrence of Arabia get-up. Then the silver super ninja with an eye patch turns up and runs some new recruits through a training montage and there’s a balancing beam covered in shards of glass that one ninja slips on and gets it right in the undercarriage. Ouch.

With Bradley and his team now captured, handcuffed and tortured by the evil Mulgrew (who even intones to the tied-up Sarah, “all she needs is a stiff talking too!” Hi-ho!), one wonders where is Michael Dudikoff (a.k.a. the walking embodiment of every dated hair salon photo of the Kevin Bacon look) as Joe Armstrong, the original American Ninja, in all of this. Samuel Beckett presents Waiting For Dudikoff. For whatever reason Dudikoff opted out of the third film, money or pride, that’s gone now and he walks into the movie, standing in a church for some reason and teaching kids about the environment. Then Gavin the boss man turns up and tells him to save Bradley and save the franchise in another mission to Ninjastan, which is basically like the movie restarting from scratch. Anyway Dudikoff needs some time to think about this so we get a montage of him sitting by a campfire near his cabin by the lake, drinking coffee and making out like he’s in a Nescafe ad. Then he’s on the plane to Ninjastan, meeting Pongo the cheeky punk kid contact and being driven to the rebellion basecamp of Ninjastan, which looks like a post-apocalyptic quarry where everyone is dressed in leather despite the hot African sun. So, yes, Dudikoff has walked into Mad Max world, or Barter Town as it’s also known as, and fly-kicks a few toughs here and there to prove himself to the resistance while a grizzled rebel leader oversees the action from his tower, proclaiming, “We need men like him!” Anyway, all of this takes a long time, dragging out as if the director had to make a 90 minute movie for Canon, only had 60 minutes of footage in the can, and decided to just keep filming stuff to make up the running time. Finally Dudikoff makes a new ninja sword and strides through the morning sunlight, ready to rescue his friends, by which I mean the also-ran who replaced him in American Ninja III. In one bullshit awesome scene, we see him creep through the jungle wearing a white shirt and jeans, then he drops into a hole in the ground, and out he jumps IMMEDIATELY wearing his American Ninja gear, just like Clark Kent turning into Superman. Amazing.

Skip to the climax where the captured heroes are tied to wooden poles like Joan of Arc multiplied, flames at their feet and arrows pointed at their chests (in the case of actress Robin Stile, their expansive chests). Dudikoff sneaks in the back entrance, scuttling through drain pipes, beating up ninjas here and there, and even CATCHING AN ARROW BETWEEN HIS TEETH, SAY WHAT?!!! Then Dudikoff finds Bradley alone in the prison basement and unties Bradley who then proceeds to fight him and then Dudikoff stabs him a knife because Bradley was trying to kill him but don’t worry about it because that wasn’t Bradley just some ninja in a Bradley mask! Huh? Whatever, let’s keep on with the movie. Then Dudikoff knocks out one yellow ninja, puts on the yellow pyjamas, walks out casually into the imminent execution of his friend, and then kicks some butt while the Mad Max resistance force ride in with their pink Cadillacs and their shotguns to invade the evil ninja training camp. Then Dudikoff unties the real Bradley who proceeds to rescue Sarah from the evil Mulgrew while Dudikoff fights the super-silver-ninja with the eye-patch. Cutting between the two climactic fight, the Dudikoff match wins by a long-shot in the entertainment stakes simply because it ends with him high-kicking the evil super-ninja into a pile of boxes and then, in a traditional move of honour and respect practised by the ninjas long since scribes were able to record such traditions, he throws a grenade onto him and blows him up into a containable explosion. Ah, just like the ancient warriors would have handled it. With the camp overrun by the resistance, Dudikoff strides through the multi-coloured-uniformed dead bodies all around him and turns around to Bradley who killed Mulgrew and has Sarah at his side, and imparts some final words of wisdom from one American Ninja to another American Ninja:

“Sean... you can find me at the school.”

Well, not exactly a closing lines of the likes of ‘You know, this is beginning of a beautiful friendship,” but you know, it works to impart All-American values combined with the Ancient code of the Ninja, which is to stay in school, kids. Get a rad haircut like Dudikoff and catch arrows in your teeth.

Righteous Kill (2008)

2009-12-23T08:13:00.000-08:00

Director: Jon Avnet

You know how it is when you’ve been a cop in the NYPD for over thirty years: “Most people respect the badge. Everyone respects the gun.” You want to protect 99% of the population from the 1% of “degenerates”” who prey on the innocent and you watch paedophile priests, swarmy yuppie rapists and white trash child killers go free because of the “lawyers.” You see young club skanks snorting “primo” cocaine or “blow” which is what they call it in the streets, and they are doing that shit in public toilets in fancy big-time clubs and you have to “flip” cute female legal cokehead secretaries to “rat” out their supplier who looks a lot like 50 Cent. You arrive at a crime scene standing over the dead body of Rambo the Skateboarding Pimp (that's a street name for all you not from the street) and the first thing you think to say is “We gotta find out who did this!” like the wizened professional that you are. Anytime you see a brother officer in uniform at a crime scene, you always have to ask, “How about those Mets last night?” You also have to contend with your Brian-Dennehy-sized chief, the weasel IA officers (that’s Internal Affairs for all you people who are not from the street) and a hot Carla-Gugino-shaped forensic specialist who always wants to have sex with you (Sheesh, can’t an old cop near retirement get a moment’s rest around here?!). Then there’s someone out there playing vigilante, murdering all the criminals who got away with it and they are making a RIGHTEOUS KILL and it is also the name of this cop movie that I watched, which is also funnily enough a RIGHTEOUS KILL of your time as well as your faith in the acting abilities of co-leads Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Boy, it’s been over a decade since Michael Mann paired together the two finest Italian-American actors together for the epic cops and robbers film, Heat, with that classic diner scene discussion between the two of them, finally uniting in the one scene two thespians often mistaken for each other. Well, neither actor have been doing much decent work since then, so why not pair them together once again? So, we have De Niro and Pacino playing two old partners in fighting crime, introduced in a title sequence montage where they shoot off rounds at a firing range while a remixed generic rock guitar tune underscores that these Old Dogs still got it. Yes, in a surprising casting move, De Niro plays a gruff, irritable cop who is seen throwing a tantrum coaching little league and in an even more surprisingly acting choice, Pacino plays a gum-chewing wise-ass who is seen beating an egghead at a twin game of time-clock chess. Yeah, so there’s a vigilante bumping off bad guys who our heroes wanted to see put in bars and once again the line of dialogue is heard, “I don’t know whether to arrest these guys or give them a medal!” which we haven’t heard since Magnum Force or Death Wish or every other movie that put together cops and vigilantes. A calling card is left behind on the dead bodies, written poems found at the scene of the crime and circumstantial evidence points to the fact that a cop is most likely doing it, compounded by the video footage of De Niro offering a confession of his “crimes” to the camera. The younger dogs, John Leguizamo and Donnie Whalberg as another set of partners eventually come to think De Niro did it too. Oh boy, this movie is leading me down one path, I don’t suppose SPOILER ALERT AS IF YOU CARE that they might switch it up and offer a plot twist, particularly with such clues when the grizzled old police chief has both cops in his office and says ‘The killer might be right in front of you and you wouldn’t even know it’ and then we see a scene start with Pacino at a crime scene speculating ‘I’m the killer and I walk into the apartment...’ Hey, I’m no detective but I think someone else may have made those RIGHTEOUS KILLS... wink-wink, hoo-hah, and who cares? Cue a re-run of the climax to Heat but with the roles reversed and there you have it.

Now I love cop movies, even the most cliched cop movies, but by those standards, Righteous Kill is quite the boring cop movie, featuring standard issue stuff that wouldn’t look askew in an episode of CSI or Law & Order or any other cop show in the last ten years. What really sinks it is its sole attraction, which is De Niro and Pacino together again, both wearing faces that look like beat-up catcher’s mitts and neither displaying much of the fire that gave them the recognition of high calibre actors. Take me down to Mugging Central because that's what we're dealing with here. I can only imagine actors like Gugino or Leguizamo or 50 Cent signing up to this film so excited to work with Taxi Driver and Scarface and then being stuck acting opposite guys who look like they are sleeping with their eyes open, delivering weak and forced banter such as the extended discussion of Wonderdog as a metaphor for drug-taking that would put Jim Belushi sitcoms to shame. I would have preferred this film more if they had starred two professional lookalike impersonators of DeNiro and Pacino, strutting around alternating between standard lines like "What am I, alone in this world?" and "Hoo Haa!" ad nausem, or even if they stitched together outtakes from the countless other films where these two played leather-jacket wearing cops stalking the streets of New York; Sea of Love and 15 Minutes partnered together to solve the mystery of the plot from a thousand movies!

The Steam Experiment (2009)

2009-12-12T21:02:00.000-08:00

Director: Phillipe Martinez

The Steam Experiment is where a fat Val Kilmer plays a loopy college professor genius who has locked six people in a steam room because of global warming. Why? It’s an experiment, you see, to determine what will happen to humanity when the Mayan Calendar is proven in 2012 and the apocalypse will turn ordinary people into panicky idiots. It’s also a hostage situation with Kilmer imploring a local newspaper to publish his cockamamie theories about global warming or the six people who were lured into the steam room by Kilmer posing as an online dating service will all die from the rising temperature of the steam room. Basically The Steam Experiment is Saw but with semi-nude hostages and Val Kilmer hamming it up like Jim Morrison in a turtleneck sweater. So, it’s clearly better than Saw.

Talk about exposition: the film’s first act is basically a lot of characters repeating the details of the high-concept plot to each other. Kilmer tells the local news editor about his nefarious plan, then the local news editor tells detective Armand Assante about Kilmer’s nefarious plan, then Assante asks Kilmer to explain his nefarious plan, Kilmer than explains his nefarious plan to Assante, and then Assante asks Kilmer, “Let me get this straight: you’ve got six people locked in a steam room... because of global warming.” (Hey, why not repeat the plot ad nausem, it was the reason why I rented this Direct-to-DVD movie alongside Val Kilmer's expansive face on the cover) All the while, Kilmer plays the mad professor as a coy intellectual who is able to notice that the local news editor’s clock is five minutes fast and utters pithy, pseudo-philosophical lines like “If you want to play trivial pursuit, it’s on your head” and “We’re a nation of sheep.”

Even though Kilmer is top-billed, I think he only had three days of shooting on this project since he is only in it for approximately thirty minutes of screen-time. We have some surreal images of him at the start standing in front of a carousel at night, which I guess is supposed to signify how "nutty" he is and what a "thrill-ride" this movie will be. Then there are close-ups of his fat face with a thousand yard stare. The best stuff though is Kilmer being interrogated with Assante who basically mumbles his dialogue through his flappy-lips, the lower-class man of the streets up against the intellectual master-mind. Yes, there are lots of bits where Kilmer psyches out Assante by asking him questions like “Have you ever been to Italy, detective?” or commenting on his cheap cologne and insulting him in a high and haughty manner, “Your vulgarity is pathetic! It annoys me!” We also see Kilmer turning the tables on the ‘bad-cop routine’ by slamming his own forehead against the interrogation table and then takes everyone out to acting school with his performance of crazy with twitchy eyes and rambling about his father (About his controversial theories on global warming, “I could take the humiliation but he couldn’t...”), bugging out like nobody’s business. With such scenes, one can glimpse the mannered charm of Kilmer adding a bit of business to a dumb role and proving Chuck Klosterman’s pronouncement of Kilmer as an example of “advancement” – that is that Kilmer as a performer is so advanced that we might not understand his acting genius in such trash for years to come.

The majority of the movie takes place in the steam room with the hostages who includes Eric Roberts with a wavering Southern accent, Melrose Place’s Patrick Muldoon, a neurotic brunette, a neurotic blonde, a slutty waitress type who takes her top off in an extended slow-mo sequence to ‘Bolero,’ and then this Matt Dillion lookalike who plays the most over-the-top Italian-stereotype you could think of with scenery-chewing dialogue like “I’m from Booklyn, born and bred...” and “I love everybody, you know what I mean, forget about it!” (Naturally he’s the first one to crack and go kill-crazy in the steam room). Tensions escalate as the director desaturates the visuals with an orange lens flare and people start turning against each other – a stabbing here, a few nails to the forehead there, a suicide and a death match. The result of all this huffing and puffing is that we find out that Kilmer is actually a mental patient and all of this was possibly a fabrication in his twisted mind. TWIST! That would be too easy though. Big spoiler alert (as if you care): Patrick Muldoon is actually Kilmer’s doctor! Muldoon and his wife (the neurotic blonde hostage) actually volunteered for this experiment, which actually happened and Muldoon found that he and his blonde wife surviving the steam room was a profound life-changing experience (you know, like Fight Club but in a Steam Room... Steam Club). TWIST TIMES TWO! Final scene has the blonde wife standing by Muldoon’s study and discussing Kilmer:

“You don’t control him anymore. He controls you. Kill him and come home.”

Muldoon turns off his lamp very slowly. Ominous music. The End. Hmmm... What the hell? Way to blow my mind, movie. If I wanted to waste more of my time, I could extrapolate all the plot-holes from this last-minute development, but ah, much like the Average Joe’s response to global warming, I’ll leave it there as an impending problem that I won’t think about until I have to. Instead, I’ll stick to the basic pleasures that this movie offers – a fleeting glance of some boobs and a fat-faced hambone Val Kilmer. Hey, the movie even puts them in the same frame together!

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

2009-11-23T21:11:00.000-08:00

Director: Stephen Somers.

The box office success of a live action Transformers movie consequently made the green-lighting of a live action G.I. Joe movie inevitable. When I was a child I used to have a small collection of G.I. Joes, a line of toy soldiers that were all blessed with individual personas expressed in cool code-names, weaponsm and costumes that were unique to them; the army man as super hero. However, I can’t profess to any great nostalgic love for G.I. Joe (the only Joe I can really remember is Sgt. Slaughter and that’s because he was also a WWF wrestler); I mean I didn’t even remember that there was a difference between Destro (silver-face) and Cobra Commander (sounds like Skeletor). So, after having endured G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I won’t be using any silly phrases like ‘This film raped my childhood!’ That’s unnecessary. The film is pretty appropriate to the franchise since it’s basically an extended cartoon, but made with wall-to-wall CGI rather than cheap Korean animation cells.

Film kicks off with a strange Alexander Dumas opening set in France, 1841, where a Scottish arms dealer named McCullen is imprisoned with a burning hot iron mask that sears itself to his face. Then we get a the title card “In The Not Too Distant Future,” which is always a promising sign in any motion picture since it always says ‘Hey, things are pretty much the same, but we use advanced technology that could only ever be invented in THE FUTURE.” Former Dr. Who, Christopher Eccleston makes a bad career move in sinking himself into this franchise, playing the Scottish heir to the McCullen line of arms dealing and treachery, selling the hot new weapon to the U.S. Military. What is this new technology? NANOMITES! Green CGI beetles that EAT TANKS! The Not Too Distant Future is NOW!

Now we meet our heroes charged with transporting the Nanomite missiles: Duke, a thick-looking white-guy hunk (played by Channing Tatum), and Ripcord (played by Marlon Wayans), his wacky black-guy comic relief sidekick. Yes, this is the Not Too Distant Future and we have moved on from questionable racial stereotypes! Now Duke and Ripcord are trading lame quips in their humvee when they are attacked by a spaceship that shoots electro-pulse lasers in Matrix-slow-mo. While every other soldier protecting the Nanomites is obliterated, our two heroes survive the multiple explosions and confront the alluring visage of the Baroness (Sienna Miller) who steps out of the spaceship looking like a model on the runways of Milan (dark long hair, tight skin-suit, and shades) and who also shares a mysterious back-story with Duke (yes, they know each other so it’s like a meet-cute on the battlefield). Then some mysterious super-soldiers drop in and defeat the mysterious bad-guys. There’s the silent killer-ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park), another hot model type in skin-hugging bodysuit but this time with red hair and is thus appropriately named Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), and a cockney guy built like a brick shit-house named Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agaje a.k.a. Adebisi in Oz). Who are these guys? Well, out pops a Dennis Quaid hologram, announcing that he is General Hawk and explaining everything with a voice that sounds like he’s swallowed a frog.

Duke: “What’s your unit?”
Hawk: “That’s classified!”

Cue to rocking Linkin Park styled music as the camera flies over the pyramids in Egypt for our introduction to the G.I. Joes. “The top men and women from the best units in the world,” croaks Quaid. “The Alpha Dogs!” As we see sexy female soldiers put on body suits that make them invisible, Quaid quips, “When all else fails, we don’t!” In no time at all, Duke and Ripcord have signed up to become G.I. Joes and grab back the stolen Nanomite technology. Before that we’re gonna need a montage set to an awful cover of T-Rex’s ‘Get It On’ as the two dunderheads suit up in Iron Man styled fighting gear (“Fully self-controlled fire power,” says Heavy Duty. “Perfect for a couple of cowboys like you two.”), shoot practice targets under Scarlett’s sexy gaze, and then are trained in hand-to-hand fighting by an unexplained Brendan Fraser cameo (Director Stephen Somers did the Mummy 1 & 2, so it’s like “Hey, Brendan, appear in my new movie and say ‘Go Joe!’ a lot”). Anyway, if you think this is ridiculous, the bad guys a.k.a. Cobra are also up to the task of equalling such over-the-top bullshit with a masked madman scientist injecting Nanomites into muscle-brained soldiers so that they “feel no fear, feel no pain, feel no concept of morality” (much like the people who produced this movie). All of this nonsense feels like you’re watching a James Bond movie but without the comfort of James Bond starring in it.

Now remember in Mission Impossible when they really pushed it with the one trick of spies pulling their faces off to reveal they were CGI masks? Well, G. I. Joe overloads on holograms – Eccleston appears in the G.I. Joe squadroom but it turns out he’s a hologram or Miller appears in Ecceleston’s jet but it’s like ‘Oh shit, she’s actually a hologram!” What’s the matter with the Not Too Distant Future? Are phones not acceptable forms of communication anymore? Another great technique that the film cannot get enough of is to introduce a character in close-up and then suddenly cut to a flashback that explains all their limited back-story and motivation. For example, evil ninja Stormshadow (white pyjamas) faces off against good ninja Snake Eyes (black pyjamas) when Cobra raids G.I. Joe HQ for the Nanomites. They face off, swords clash, and then Stormshadow says, “Hello, brother.” Cue flashback that shows them as little kids fighting each other for about ten minutes and making it clear that this film is targeted to children. The flashbacks help explain why the Baroness went from being the blonde airhead finance of Duke to his dark-haired heartless nemesis: Duke didn’t protect her dipstick brother played by Joseph Gordon Levitt who is quite a good actor (see Brick and The Lookout for evidence of this) and his presence is a puzzling sight, particularly when he’s top-billed in the credits but only appears in a total of three scenes (spoiler: he turns out to be the masked mad-man scientist who becomes Cobra Commander).

The action sequences are weightless. There is an abundance of CGI special effects, particularly in the extended set-piece where Cobra goes to Paris to blow up the Eiffel Tower, which they do in a scene that is like the opening of Team America: World Police but taken seriously (Consider this a live action remake pretty much). You see that they filmed a bit of location work in Paris (actually the Czech Republic masquerading as Paris) but used the old silicon chips to stick in flying super-soldier Iron Man suits and fast cars that whizz by unconvincingly through real French traffic. Oh, and Marlon Wayans puts on his million dollar super-soldier Iron Man suit and falls out of the team van with the quip, “My bad!” (Ahhhhhhh, the one-liner that never stops being funny! Thank you, Hollywood!)

What else can we mention briefly? Well, there’s the cat-fight hand-to-hand combat scene between Scarlett and the Baroness that had me thinking “Hello nurse!” and makes sure all those geeks watching this film have something to fantasise about. You also have Arnold Vosloo as Cobra’s Master of Disguise who is like Mystique in the X-Men movies but not female, naked and blue. There is the Marlon Wayans one-liner with regards to a Nanomite filled corpse, “Dead guys don’t breakdance!” Character actor favourite Kevin J. O’Connor pops up in the film for five minutes as a freaky scientist. There is also Eccleston turning into Destro in the climax with a silver metal face that makes him look like Kryten in Red Dwarf. The climax of the movie is an underwater version of the Star Wars Death Star attack with Quaid sounding the order, “Release the Sharks!” (the Sharks being the Joe’s vehicles but when he said that line without the context explained, I did laugh). In the end, G.I. Joe is a pretty dumb action film, but after awhile I was pretty bored, which is the worst crime that any movie can commit. At least I could use some semblance of imagination when playing with the figurines when I was younger, more so than what the filmmakers could dredge up from their bankrupt mind-tanks.

2012 (2009)

2009-11-17T17:30:00.000-08:00

Director: Roland Emmerich.

I was challenged by my friends Gabby and Zak to see Roland Emmerich's latest environmental disaster opus, 2012. Thankfully I sat next to Gabby as to hear her comments throughout the two hour and a half epic.

1. Danny Glover appears as the President of the USA:

Gabby [re: his slurred speech] "Did he have a stroke? What's wrong with Danny Glover?"

2. Close-up on a fake Mona Lisa's smile (the real one saved in storage for the upcoming apocalypse) and then cut to the title "2012"

Gabby [laughs] "Alright... bring it on, movie!"

3. John Cusack appears as the weary protagonist:

Gabby: "John Cusack? I thought Nicolas Cage was in this?"

4. John Cusack continues to perform in 2012:

Me: "Is John Cusack even in this movie? I know he is physically, but I don't know about the rest of him..."

5. As another character remarks in astonishment at signs of the impending apocalypse...

Gabby: "They should have really called this movie "My God!" as that seems to be what all these characters say."

6. On the mannered actor playing the bow-tie wearing background scientist with a crutch:

Me: "What an eccentric performance. This man should win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor."

7. Thirty minutes into the exposition:

Gabby: "Would something blow up already?!"

8. As John Cusack drives his limo through a crumbling L.A.:

Gabby: "Everything is exploding!"

9. Cusack looks in the rear view mirror as they outrace the devastation:

Gabby: "Watch out! The apocalypse is right behind you!"

10. Russian characters are introduced who help Cusack and his family:

Gabby: "This movie is packed with bad accents!"

11. Danny Glover continues to act as the President of the USA:

Gabby: "Man, what happened to Danny Glover?"
Me: "He's too old for this shit."

12. Sparks fly between the concerned scientist and the president's daughter:

Gabby: "Ah, they're going to be repopulating the species!"

13. The Vatican implodes and crushes all the praying Italians:

Gabby: "What is this? A snuff film?"

14. More people are swallowed up by massive tidal waves:

Gabby: "This movie is becoming really unpleasant."

15. During the mass exodus, a dog saves itself:

Gabby: "Oh, fuck you!"

16. During the tension-free climax where the USA ark is almost colliding with Mount Everest:

Gabby: "Okay, that's it... I've got nothing. This movie has drained the funny right out of me. This movie broke me. You win, movie."

17. During the end credits, Woody Harrelson's name appears:

Me: "Hey, remember when Woody Harrelson was in the movie?"

Gabby: "Yes, that was when I could still laugh and enjoy the movie, all those many days ago..."

In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)

2009-10-23T22:54:00.000-07:00

Director: Uwe Boll

In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale or ITNOTK:ADST as I like to refer to it (saves time) is based on a video game, a cut-and-slash RPG that I have not played, and it feels like a two hour collection of interstitial cine-scenes from the video game. So, you feel impatient watching it, like you want to press ‘Skip’ on the controller and start playing, but oh wait, this is not a game, it’s a movie, so that’s both impatience and frustration you will feel watching it. Then Matthew Lillard swings onto the screen like a big leg of ham, spitting all over the scenery as the cowardly Duke Fallow, and then you can add murderous to the feelings stirred inside of you while watching ITNOTK. The film was directed by Uwe Boll who has developed a great reputation as a master of shit-films, which are mostly based on video games. ITNOTK also feels like it was based on the Lord Of The Rings films as every second scene strikes a familiar note to Peter Jackson’s trilogy, but just shot in Vancouver instead of New Zealand, and the CGI is really shit-house, and the armour everyone wears looks plastic. Boll even goes so far as to poach John Rhys-Davies who goes from playing Gimley to playing the Gandalf/Obi Wan of this film, sounding like Sean Connery and looking like he’s wearing a fan-made Darth Vader costume sans mask. ITNOTK makes the recent Star Wars trilogy look like it’s overflowing with sophisticated special effects and intriguing plotting by comparison.

So, yeah, the picture starts off with no exposition, just some scenes of Ray Liotta and Leelee Sobieski sucking face intercut with sweeping shots of the Magic Kingdom that they all live in. Moving on we find Jason Statham ploughing turnips, farming with his son on the farm and then we find out his name is Farmer, which is brilliant. Statham also has a CGI boomerang in a holster that he uses to scare away pesky crows, which he will use later to smite his enemies. Then Ron Perlman shows up and says, “Hey.” Hey, Ron Perlman. Then we cut back to the Kingdom with a bored-looking Burt Reynolds sitting listlessly on a throne, like he’s in a dinner theatre production of King Lear, and then he says one of the film’s best lines, “This is some sort of... sorcery.” You said it, Smokey and the Bandit. Then we cut back to Statham alone in a field, looking menacingly over his shoulder with a trademark glare (basically earning his pay cheque), before some rubbery-looking mud-face monsters jump out of the woods, making the creatures in 1970s era Dr. Who look super scary in comparison; it’s Troll 2 quality basically. The mud-faces are called Krug or Krum or Krud or something like that as it is difficult to tell with all these actors mumbling their lines all the time amidst the overbearing Wagnerian score. These Krud-faces attack Statham’s village, kill his son and kidnap his wife, Claire Forlani, who is costumed in a Victoria Secret’s corset that proves cleavage was an inescapable part of life back in Middle Earth.

Now Ray Liotta is controlling these Krud monsters from a shadowy, smoky room where his eyes go blue and with his Liberace-styled wardrobe he resembles nothing more than a Las Vegas Magician (whoops, sorry, not magician, it’s Magii!). Then LILLARD stinks up a few more scenes, acting like a petulant member of Entourage, and he really should have been wearing a Court Jester’s hat with all his useless manic energy. You really want to see an axe thrown into his face but unfortunately that never happens (in fact, his fate is left a mystery by the end, which is annoying – a character this irritating requires a death scene!). Then we have Statham, Perlman and some blonde-haired Legolas dude hiking together from Stonebridge to Woodtree or wherever and they meet some wood nymph babes who dangle from vines like they are from Cirque de Soleil. Then Ray Liotta poisoned the sliced fruit that Burt Reynolds the King and Matthew Lillard the Stooge were eating, but he gives Lillard the antidote because they are in cahoots. Then there is a super long battle sequence in the woods where some ninjas jump out of nowhere and the Krud bust out of the ground like zombies. Statham runs through another scene like it is Crank: The Middle Ages (this time he has a ticking wooden clock for a heart!), jumping on the shoulders of bad guys, hanging off the side of horses and killing everything he can with the same pissed-off glare. Oh yeah, and Lillard sits on a horse surveying the battle and turns to an underling next to him:

Lillard: “They fight like dogs.”
Extra: [pause, unsure] “Uh... yes, sir.”

More shots of Ray Liotta with his trademark cackle in his Criss Angel room. By this point, you might think the film is ending, but no, only an hour has passed and there’s still another hour of this shit to go, even though it feels like two and a half hours have passed already. Then Liotta says this line, which feels as if it is addressing the audience of ITNOTK, “You’ve lost nothing but time.” Should I also mention that all his dialogue is delivered in a Joe Pesci accent, one of those wizards who emerged from Brooklyn even though it wasn’t even around in this alternative time period of the past? Then we find out Statham is actually the King’s son and he hangs out with Burt Reynolds on his death bed as Burt Reynolds tells him some stuff about farming and seafood. Melodramatic music, a close-up of a horrified look on Statham’s face and then cut to Reynolds looking like he fell asleep on set (oh, the pathos!). The King is dead. Long live our cockney geezer replacement! “Pity,” says Statham, or he should have said as this is what I think his action-hero catch-phrase should be after hearing him say it once in Death Race.

As King, Statham’s first order of duty is to run through the woods again, conscript Sobieski to help (she’s turned into a Joan of Arc again with some sexy armour and some magic powers) and Kirstina Lokken (the leader of the forest babes), and they walk up some snowy mountains just like in Lord of the Rings. Then Liotta and Rhys-Davies have a wizard duel in a tall tower just like in Lord of the Rings. Rhys-Davies bites the dust but downloads his magic into Sobieski and Statham follows Liotta to his magic study and they have a long duel with lots of Matrix Slow-Motion Moves while another army fights more Kruds in the darkness of the rain that Liotta has conjured. Then we have some Harry Potter shit with flying books attacking Statham and then Clare Forlani remembers she is in this piece of shit film, stabs Liotta in the back, but then Statham stabs him again because no woman is going to have the Final Death-Blow in this epic. The Krud are no longer under evil mind control and they wander off in a day that will be remembered for the day when Human Beings and Mud-Faced Krud People were united in solidarity. Statham and Forlani embrace – did I forget to mention she’s pregnant, so don’t worry about their son who died, the circle of life continues – and as they kiss, I wish Statham had winked to the camera, like ‘Ha ha, what a fucking joke this was, eh?’ But no, the credit ‘Director by Uwe Boll’ pops up and then we hears some medieval metal from Hammerfall rocking out over the end credits, which is maybe the best part of this whole film.

Firebirds (1990)

2009-10-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

Director: David Green

Starring Nicholas Cage, Sean Young and Tommy Lee Jones, Firebirds is one of those pro-American forces, gung-ho, flag-waving, bullshit movies that feels like it was sponsored on military payroll. What other type of movie opens with a quote from then President George Bush Snr about the war on drugs without any irony and with total sincerity? Bullshit propaganda about cowboy military pilots that rips off Top Gun but trades in the jets for gunship helicopters. The action is well-shot, but the film spends too much time trying to establish character during close-ups in the cockpit rather than on the aerial dogfights audiences came to see, which in their representation arouse absolutely no suspense or even boys-and-their-toys coolness. Like Days of Thunder and other bullshit movies from the 1990s, Firebirds does not contain much substance, only scenes required in the Top Gun regulation hand-book (love interest – check! father figure commander – check!). To illustrate how lame it is, Cage’s Goose, the guy whose death he must avenge happens in the first five minutes before we even get to know the guy (or remember his name for that matter). All the way through, I kept thinking maybe Tommy Lee Jones might be the next Goose, as he gets scenes with his wife and a surprise birthday party, which usually spells certain death in a war film. However, the movie is so lame and pro-army, that Tommy Lee Jones is still alive at the end after a near-fatal injury, still cracking jokes with his legs broken into bits. Even funnier is the bad guy, who supposedly works for the South American drug cartels (a reliable enemy in the post-cold-war context of the film), but looks Russian and is discussed by military superiors with 'menacing' photos that look straight from a promotional agency with their staged, head-shot aesthetic (example, one photo of the villain’s eyes only, looking sinister).

The reason to possibly check out Firebirds is the over-the-top performances by Cage and Jones (forget Young, she’s dull as dishwater). There are no real other characters in the movie, so most of the time is spent with the three leads. The irony is that though Cage’s character is against the drug cartels that threaten the American way of life, Cage the actor was probably high on the best cocaine of his acting career. He’s so over-the-top, acting like a cross between Elvis and Napoleon Dynamite to combine in the portrait of an unlikable, vain, cocky asshole! The most bullshit scene is when Jones puts Cage in a computer simulator (think Project X) to test him, and the movie cuts between a bad helicopter video game and close-ups of Cage, with his helmet and aiming monocle, shouting as he hits each target,

"I am the greatest! I am the greatest! I AM THE GREATEST!"

With all this showboating and over-the-top acting, you expect the no-nonsense Jones to eventually kick Cage’s ass into some fucking humility and respect, but no, except for a brief stumble over his eyesight, Cage remains a cocky asshole from start to finish. On the other hand, you have Tommy Lee Jones. He’s awesomely over-the-top in comparison. I mean he gets handed a role like an over-the-hill gunship commander and plays it right to the fucking tee. The greatest bullshit scene occurs near the climax where the squad has moved from their base in Arizona to South America (which looks remarkably the same in the film). On the morning before battle, Cage wakes up, sees Jones standing in a field and walks over for some male-bonding. They start telling each other how good they are, Cage calling Jones "the best", Jones calling him "better" – you know, usual military ego-stroking. Anyway, Jones starts chewing into a monologue that I still cannot believe he delivered with a straight-face:

"You know, I joined the army for the same reason you did. That’s to kick
ass. Just like in the old war movies. You know, to be a hero [pause] That’s what
I’m looking for in you [pause] First class all-American hero with his heart and brain wired together, cooking full-tilt boogie for freedom and justice… okay?"

Then bombs blow up behind them and the action kicks in, but I was too busy laughing my fucking ass off. “… FULL TILT BOOGIE…???” And the way Jones delivers that classic line in his trademark Southern monotone drawl makes it sound like this, "First-class-all-American-hero-with-his-heart-and-brain-wired-together-cooking-FULL-TILT-BOOGIEfor-freedom-and-justice." In the end, such All-American G.I. Joe Asshole antics enliven an otherwise generic pro-military Top Gun knock-off.

Extreme Ops (2002)

2009-10-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

Director: Christian Duguay

Remember those two Bill and Ted type yahoos in the fluoro-coloured jumpsuits from Cliffhanger who loved to base-jump and said stuff like ‘But we like it extreme!’? The movie, Extreme Ops, would seem manufactured for their benefit since it basically replicates the plot of Die Hard for the zillionth time, but sticks some EXTREME snowboarding footage as a shiny clock-radio addition to the well-worn genre. Basically it’s about a team of thrill-seeking adventurers making a commercial in Austria when, what do you know, they stumble upon a Serb-Croat war criminal long thought dead who has the very convincing name of Slobovan Pavlov. Woah, radical, dudes. Time to hit the slopes and snowboard the fuck out of those awesome mountains before that bogus grey-haired foreign dude shoots us from his helicopter! Make sure that The Crystal Method tune ‘Keep Hope Alive’ is playing non-stop as that is the unofficial theme of EXTREME activities! Yes, Extreme Ops is the type of movie where no-one can enter a scene without doing something EXTREME and having some observer provide the time-honoured punch-line, “You guys are crazy!” Y’all, woo-hoo and shit, yeah! Unfortunately, those EXTREME-loving comic-relief dudes from Cliffhanger would find Extreme Ops kind of boring with the plodding two-thirds of narrative it spends on plot and would throw on a DVD of Best of Blizzard Base Jumping Action Vol. 4 instead.

So, our heroes are people who make commercials (advertisers are hip!) and they are over a barrel trying to film an advertisement for a digital camera; their investors are naturally inscrutable Japanese stereotypes. There’s British actor Rufus Sewell as the cool-headed director who knows how to get the right shot of a white water rafting consumer throwing a digital camera in the air. How cool-headed is this guy? He’s trying to converse with an estranged off-screen girlfriend on the phone while he sits in a canoe hanging precariously from a steep waterfall, telling her, “Yeah, I’m just hanging around.” EXTREME. Then there’s his trusty lieutenant played by former teen heartthrob Devon Sawa who looks really bloated and is inflicted with that dreaded disease known as Stephen Baldwin Hair (definition: frosted blonde tips in a short doofus cut). Then finally another British actor Rupert Graves with a fucking awful American accent playing a phoney producer who promises to his investors that their rad ad will be even more EXTREME with a real shot of a consumer racing an avalanche! Graves blurts this out in a boardroom meeting, which pisses off Sewell and so he and Sawa dangle him from a rooftop by his ankles to teach him a lesson. EXTREME and COMICAL. Oh yeah, I forgot there’s a tough-guy German dude played by Heino Ferch (he played Albert Speer in Downfall) and he gets to say the line, “I’m German. I’m never comfortable.”

Skip to them assembling some more EXTREME nitwits to help them film their ad. There’s a hot Beatrice Dalle punk-rocker chick played by the attractive Jana Pallaske whose voice sounds dubbed throughout and is so hot that even her pants break apart during EXTREME scenes of action tension later in the piece, so we can have some skin amidst all the snow (Thanks, Hollywood!). There’s also Bridgette Wilson Sampras (she played Sonja Blade in Mortal Kombat) and she plays a Champion Skier who won a Gold Medal in the World Games and her boring character motivation is that she’s bummed out that she can’t be as EXTREME as everyone else. She has a deep and meaningful conversation later on where she admits this: ‘I thought for once in my life... I could ski for fun.’ The punk-rock chick tells her, ‘Let the mountain tell you what to do.’ Seriously we should have heard the off-screen cry of a distant eagle during that moment of motivational inspiration. But my favourite is Silo (Joe Absolom) who has the most EXTREME introduction shot where we see him skateboarding on top of a moving train... just for fun! Then if that wasn’t enough to make you understand how radical he is, we have another scene where the crew wait around for him in an airport. ‘Where’s Silo?’ There he is skating through the airport like a dick and then cut to a close-up of him with the wisecrack, ‘Wassup, bitches?’ SILO 4 PRESIDENT OF RADITUDE!

I’m spending too much time on these characters, let’s fast forward to the plot where they stay at a half-built mountain-top resort after Silo and the Punk Rock Chick get them all thrown out of their hotels for snowboarding off a roof, down a bar of flaming alcoholic shooters and then through the hotel window. Sawa starts filming things left and right with a video camera, even when he and the girls hit the spa with some beers and some zany Truth and Dare games, providing some lowbrow titillation when he dares the two girls to kiss each other! EXTREME and TASTEFULLY DONE! So, then, they cross paths with this Slobovan Pavlov and Sawa accidentally films him and then Pavlov finds out. He wants that footage proving his alive since the world thinks he died in a plane crash and so he sends his creepy son to kill them, but he fucks it up by being a sleazebag who wants to see the two girls kiss again and he gets killed in a Reservoir Dogs type standoff with his henchman who objects to all this mucking about, “I’m a soldier, dammit!” So, yeah, they shoot each other and Pavlov thinks the American commercial film crew are CIA and then you can cut to the last half hour, which is a long chase scene basically where our heroes snowboard down the mountain while Pavlov tries to shoot them all. THESE GUYS ARE SKIING FOR THEIR LIVES. By this time, I was pretty bored watching Extreme Ops and the only moment of interest was the lame moment when Devon Sawa cracks onto the punk-rock chick while they are hanging off a cliff with the terrorist shooting at them: “Does this mean you’ll go out with me now?” Yes, comedy is still able to scale these high altitudes, particularly with my favourite exchange earlier in the piece:

Graves: ‘Nice Austrian trailerpark.’
Punk Rock Chick: ‘G’day, mate!’
Silo: ‘Put another shrimp on the barbie!’
Bridgette Wilson-Sampras: ‘He said, “Austrian, not AUSTRALIAN”’

Zing! Never forget to underline a joke – people’s minds are too busy being blown by these thrilling stunts, they need reminding of what humour actually is! The tough-guy German throws a cord that twists the helicopter’s motor, killing the terrorists, while Sewell and Wilson-Sampras outrun an avalanche on their skies, finally able to get their advertisement money-shot of her catching a digital video camera. Commercial sold and that’s a wrap. What better way to celebrate than by all skateboarding on top of a moving train! EXTREME... and I don’t mean that band from the 1990s!

Okay, I’m done and now you don’t have to watch this movie.

Over The Top (1987)

2009-09-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Director: Menahem Golan

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to respect Sylvester Stallone more and more. Now I never was a big fan of his work growing up; maybe I could just sense his embodiment of Reaganite era values with his reigning characters Rambo and Rocky. However, Stallone is a firm believer in the the underdog. I remember a bit from his own reality show, The Contender, basically a boxing version of The Apprentice, where he cast a vote for a contestant on that very basis – “He’s an underdog.” It’s a philosophy that has basically guided his career since the first Rocky and I guess when I was young he was still a bankable star with hits like Cliffhanger and having enough studio support to ruin a comicbook franchise like Judge Dredd. Stallone seems to be at his best when he himself is an example of the underdog ideal, particularly in recent years when he made pretty decent films out of what seemed like silly ideas when they were announced (Rocky 6 and Rambo 4). However, this doesn’t excuse the fact he made some shit films during his reign as a box office superstar and 1987’s Over The Top is another fine Golan-Globus production of bullshit, co-written and starring Stallone.

Taking a break in between Rocky sequels, Stallone decided to vary the formula a tad and stretch himself by not playing a rising underdog boxer. Yes, Over The Top represents new territory for the man since it’s about a rising underdog arm-wrestler... Big, big difference (boxing you use your fists, arm-wrestling you use your wrists). Yes, arm-wrestling was apparently a sporting craze tearing across America with a subculture of truck drivers gambling on dudes arm-wrestling in the back of local pit-stop bars. There’s even a World Championship Tournament held naturally at Las Vegas where contestants from all over the world with freakishly huge upper bodies and fat necks wrestle to win prizes and cash, readymade for our movie's finale. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves as this film isn’t simply about bulging veins in the forearms of muscled meatheads. No, it’s Stallone as the underdog once again, an estranged father trying to bond with his snooty military schooled estranged son over the course of a road movie. Over The Top was Stallone’s stab at the family friendly market and when you think about it, this is basically a remake of E.T. but instead of finding an alien in your backyard you find out that your long lost father is actually a mumblely, duck-mouthed, muscle-bound, short-arse, arm-wrestling champ big rig trucker named Lincoln Hawk (Lincoln like Abraham Lincoln, Hawk like the mighty hawk...). This is the predicament Michael Cutler (David Mendenhall) finds himself in when he graduates from Summit Crest Military School. He doesn’t throw his hat in the air like the rest of the toy soldiers because they have families and he is sad and stuff, but then he finds out his dad is lower class trucker and that makes him angry. Of course, it’s no Swiss picnic for Stallone when he discovers his son has been turned into an upper-class snob robot who says things like “Sir, there’s no need to make conversation on the road.” When Stallone suggests father and son chow down a steak, naturally the son is all “blah blah cholesterol, order me a tuna salad and spring water with lemon.” Warning: military schools turn your children into yuppie vegetarian mutant! Never fear, because when the kid discovers his old man is a champion arm wrestler after some barbarian with a blonde mullet named Smasher challenges him to a duel of forearms, the kid soon becomes a student to the way of Lincoln Hawk. Tight close-ups magnify what is essentially two idiots gripping their hands together into a veritable Clash of the Titans and we get what we pay for with Stallone yelling like grizzly bear with a buckshot in his butt. Then in one of the many scenes that unfortunately bristle with paedophilic overtones, a bald mountain of muscles with a handle-bar moustache and dark shades, approaches Michael and grunts, “What are you doing with that guy?” Don’t worry though, it’s just the villain who WANTS Stallone and his name is BULL and he’s played by Rick Zumwalt in a magnificent performance that is one step away from twirling his moustache and threatening to tie his son to the tracks: I AM A VILLAIN, his presence screams with every appearance. When Stallone refuses a challenge from this arm-wrestling champ, Bone cracks-wise, “Too bad your old man’s yellow, kid. See you in Las Vegas, Hawk!”

Stallone begins the interminable process of deprogramming his son of being an uptight stiff and teaching him cool stuff like how to drive a truck and a questionable move of parenting how to arm-wrestle ugly video-gaming punk kids for money in order to fully understand the teachings of Hawk with pithy maxims like “The world meets nobody halfway” and “If you want it, you can take it.” Yeah, there are also some creepy overtones with Stallone pulling the truck over and telling the kid they are spending the night in the truck and that “if your neck gets sore, use my shoulder as a pillow.” I know, I know, it’s father-and-son Cat Stevens time and all perfectly innocent, but I guess it’s the fact that Stallone wears overalls and muscle tees and has a set of weights in his truck so he can improve his arm muscles and everything is so OVER THE TOP 1980s style that such Todd Solondz-styled perverse overtones seem very natural in such a context. Oh yeah, they also have the occasional phone call to Susan Blakeley who plays Stallone’s separated wife and Michael’s mother, bed-ridden in hospital with Ali MacGraw disease. Then there is also Robert Loggia, father to Susan Blakeley’s character, a rich, tanned businessman who lives in Scarface’s old mansion and wants Michael for himself as he doesn’t have any family left and Stallone is a no-good lower-class loser. This is the TV Movie of the Week conflict that drives two-thirds of the film’s narrative unfortunately. Mendenhall is an unlikable brat who can’t act, performing with a dimpled grin that bespeaks of great talent in fast food commercials but no great shakes as a naturalistic thespian. Maybe this was an intentional move as placing Mendenhall next to Stallone makes Stallone look like he is Robert Duvall with the soulful underplaying on display. Now Stallone co-wrote this sucker with Stirling Silliphant (who also wrote The Swarm) yet it doesn’t seem a lot of time was spent on dialogue as the film can’t last five minutes of screentime without throwing in another montage of father-son bonding with a cheesy Giogrio Moroder-produced soft-rock anthem (the musicians involved are a Murderer’s Row of Middle-of-the-Road 1980s Pap like Eddie Money, Kenny Loggins, Asia, Sammy Hagar and of course Frank Stallone).

Now the reason you should watch Over The Top is the climax as it’s a hilarious nightmare orgy of arm wrestling. Under the glitzy lights of a packed Vegas arena, we get contestants who are all basically grotesque ogres with beards and tight muscle t-shirts and giant shoulders. My favourite was the one named John Grizzly who is a mass of crazy hair and wears a military single with ‘Fubar’ written on it and munches down on a cigar before he faces off with Hawk. All these tight shots of grown men face to face with each other in eye-popping, forehead vein emphasising, muscle quivering pain, arms bulging from the exertion, it’s like a 1980s approximation of Dante’s Inferno, particularly when Golan goes for a slow-motion arty vibe at certain points. It’s pure art, totally in the spirit of Francis Bacon, what with all this flesh and rage flying at you, especially manifested in the showdown between Bull and Stallone, “or should we say David and Goliath” as the announcer helpfully informs us, with Goliath, I mean Bull, continually bellowing threats like “GET IN HERE!” and “I OWN YOU!” I mean, this is why cinema was invented basically. Oh yeah, there is also some time for characterisation with fake TV interviews with these arm wrestling titans and Stallone informs us as to why he seems to turn his cap around before he wrestles: “I turn it around and it’s like a switch that goes on, it’s the switch... I feel like another person. I feel like... a truck, a machine.” Improvisational brilliance worthy of Cassavettes! Eventually, in the spirit of Rocky, Stallone climbs from despair into victory, suffering a few setbacks from Bull’s rage (the dude even clocks him one in the nose with no penalty from the ref!) before overcoming the odds with the power of his son’s love and his own trusty winning move where his fingers slip over the opponent’s hand, basically going OVER THE TOP. Cue another inspirational 1980s soft-rock anthem over slow-motion re-runs of the Rocky finale but this time with a stupid kid instead of Talia Shire and crusty old Robert Loggia moved to tears by the combination of man-flesh wrestling and father-son bonding. The message is clear: respect the pumped wrist of a honourable trucker in a ripped t-shirt who has the love of his son on his side. Nobody puts Stallone in the corner.

Future Bullshit: Legion (2009)

2009-08-14T21:55:00.001-07:00

I watched Terminator again the other week (once again, it's brilliant) and it did make me wonder when they would remake it but with angels instead of robots and with a diner full of TV actors and worn-down character actors: HD widescreen trailer here.

Y'know if I was a fallen angel, I'd need to use machine guns too.

Flatliners (1990)

2009-08-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

Previously a costume designer and set designer in Hollywood during the 1970s, Joel Schumacher began helming his own movies and entered the pantheon of directors widely disparaged as ‘hacks.’ Some of his films are considered classics, particularly for evidence of 1980s gloss and absolute cheesiness (The Lost Boys) and occasionally he has offered a flawed film that contains some substance (Falling Down). But of course, he’s also made a lot of shit... St. Elmo’s Fire, Batman & Robin, The Number 23, etc. Arguably where he was most interesting was during his successful years in the 1980s where he had money to throw around on-screen in the aim of being the successor to Stanley Kubrick’s work on The Shining, only with Kiefer Sutherland as his leading man. So after The Lost Boys earned money with teenagers wanting to see the two Coreys stake punk vamps in beach locations, Schumacher must have thought he was the new Master of Horror and reunited years later with Kiefer for another horror film, Flatliners, in 1990. Now this film really scared me when I was like thirteen and watched it on television late one night. Popping it into my DVD player on a whim, I wasn’t that surprised to find out that time had not been kind to Flatliners and that it worked as a bullshit morality tale with a lot of creepy gloss.

Basically it’s another round of young maverick doctors playing at being God with Kiefer introduced to us in an elaborate tracking shot across the river up to his pug-nosed baby-face sneering, “Today is a good day to die.” Yes, he and four other medical students decide to embark on an experiment where they self-terminate by flatlining, experiencing brain death in order to see what’s on the other side. So, the film’s repeated set-piece are these five Brat Pack actors taking turns being on a make-shift medical cart while everyone else stares intensely at the heart monitor then the EKG read-out and then yell out ‘CLEAR’ and zap their dead comrade with the defibrillators, etc. Kiefer goes first and brings back with him memories of how when he was a kid he accidentally killed this kid, Billy Mahoney, by chasing him up a tree, throwing rocks at him until he fell to his death. However, these memories turn into creepy scenes where a kid in a red hoodie beats the shit of him, which if it wasn’t for the MTV-styled blue-toned lighting would look quite hilarious (it still is, to be honest). Then William Baldwin flatlines and has a black and white montage of sexy women but realises what a bad boy he has been, cheating on his fiancée (Hope Davis in her film debut!) by videotaping all of his sexual conquests at college, which then begin to haunt him as he sees black and white videocam footage of him boning broads all over the place. Then Kevin Bacon – who we are first introduced to being suspended for four months for SAVING A WOMAN’S LIFE without approved authority (stupid medical board dunderheads) – experiences death and wakes up to say the Sioux word for ‘Today is a good day to die’ and then finds himself being called swear words by this little black girl (best one is that Bacon’s character is named Labraccio and she calls him “Fellatio”) who turns out to be this girl, Winnie Hicks, he teased a lot in the schoolyard, which makes him feel guilty and stuff. Finally, Julia Roberts flatlines too and remembers that her Vietnam Vet father was a junkie and committed suicide, which also makes her feel guilty and stuff. As Kiefer helpfully sums it up for the audience, “Our sins have come back in a physical form... and they're pissed.” Oh yeah, Oliver Platt also hangs about being Oliver Platt, wearing a bow-tie and making wisecracks into his Dictaphone (“Good thing I didn't flatline. My 350-pound babysitter would be chasing me for the half-eaten pastrami sandwich I stole from her”).

First thing, you notice about Flatliners are the locations. Joel Schumacher is the only director I can think of who makes films where the sets steal the scenes: from the apartments these stressed out students lived in, which are all have high-ceilings and artistically arranged clutter and even striking street graffiti on their outside building walls, to the abandoned museum that they all get together in at night to perform their flatlining experiments, which has ornate classical paintings and sculptures of man and God and angels and demons and all that other atmospheric shit (all due respect to the combined efforst of Production Designer Eugenio Zanetti, Art Director Jim Dultz and Set Decorator Anne Kuljian). All of these elaborate backdrops helps to heighten what is really a silly Twilight Zone episode re-do. Even though the poster copy says something like ‘some lines shouldn’t be crossed’ and the after-effects of playing with death seem really terrifying and punishing in the first hour, basically as long as you forgive the demons that haunt you and learn to forgive yourself, you’ll be okay and won’t be haunted by little boys that beat you over the head with hockey sticks (That’s Kiefer) or women who treat you like a piece of meat with seedy pick-up lines (That’s Billy Baldwin). Then there’s this weird vibe where some of their problems strike historical analogies with America so Julia Roberts is asked forgiveness by her Vietnam Vet suicide dad and they hug and it’s all like ‘We’re sorry, Vietnam Vets.’ And then Kevin Bacon makes an effort to apologise to the little black girl grown up to be recognisable character actor Kimberley Scott and he is sorry for calling her ‘ugly’, which has an undercurrent of apologising to Black America for racial vilification without bringing in the topic of race (maybe I’m reading too much into this... Curse you, Cultural Studies! Allow me to enjoy my Joel Schumacher film in peace!).

When you actually think about it Kiefer’s great suicidal experiment that he predicts will make them famous and earn them a place in history and is applauded by his colleagues ("You walked on the moon, buddy" says William Baldin) – basically intentionally killing themselves only to revive themselves through medical science – is pretty stupid from a scientific point of view. All their evidence is first-hand, subjective accounts of what they felt when they were ON THE OTHER SIDE and their decision to film their experiments with a black and white camcorder will not obviously capture all the cliché sublime footage Schumacher uses to depict the inner voyage to death: tracking shots of a snow-covered mountains or a gigantic golden field captured by D.O.P. Jan De Bont before he would direct Speed and Twister. Then also dig on how this Brat Pack of Flatliners are portrayed like a bunch of maverick renegade jocks when it comes to wanting to flatline, challenging each other to go under longer and suffer brain death for two minutes in total. “Two minutes and twenty,” Julia Roberts counter offers. Somehow in the climax, Kiefer dies for ten minutes but is successfully brought back without too much brain damage. I guess maybe there is a God after all; is that the message, Schumacher?

Demolition Man (1993)

2009-07-29T23:49:00.000-07:00

Schwarzenegger and Stallone were the titans of the action movie genre during the 1980s because both of them were muscular, spoke in impenetrable accents, and both served Regan-era America by killing drug dealers, ethnic criminals and evil communist in all of their films. I was more of a Schwarzenegger fan myself and as the early 1990s began, Schwarzenegger seemed to be the clear winner with sci-fi blockbuster epics like Total Recall and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, as well as more importantly ingratiating himself with mainstream America by branching out into comedy successfully, sending up his own screen image with director Ivan Reitman for Twins and Kindergarten Cop. However, Stallone’s attempts at showing he could do more than be Rocky and Rambo failed miserably with the John Landis mob comedy Oscar and the unrelentingly terrible Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! The end seemed nigh. Then Cliffhanger was a box office hit and there was relief for Sly. He then took a page out of Schwarzenegger’s playbook and made Demolition Man with producer Joel Silver, a film that combined science fiction and comedy to bullshit effect.

Opening like a cross between a James Bond film and Tim Burton’s Batman, the film throws us into the middle of an action climax where Los Angeles is a pitch-black war-zone as signified by the fact the Hollywood sign is on fire (APOCALYPSE IMMINENT!). We find our hero Sylvester Stallone, wearing a nifty Special Forces beret (taking a page out of the Steven Segal playback), zip-lining from the ass of a helicopter into a hostage situation where a crazy ass criminal played by Wesley Snipes has like forty civilians inside a building wired to explode. Stallone quips, “You’ve got to send a manic to catch a manic,” which is like a 1990s remix of that old Rambo maxim, “To win a war you’ve got to become a war.” Snipes doesn’t really have much of a character, just being a crazy dude. The main thing that distinguishes him is his Vanilla Ice hair-do (as my friend Adam remarked, “A black dude with white hair goes against the laws of nature”). Oh, and he’s also named Simon Phoenix so that someone later in the film can say with a straight face, “A Mr. Phoenix has risen from the ashes.” And before, I forget, Stallone’s character is called John Spartan, also satisfying bullshit action movie heroes with ridiculous surnames espousing their heroic character (up there with John Matrix from Commando). Back to the film where Stallone and Snipes kung fu each other around this smoke-filled building amongst tons of barrels with “C4” stamped on the front, which caused my friend Dan to state, “I wasn’t aware that C4 was a liquid?” Anyway, they both fall out of a window or something and the building EXPLODES, collapsing into rubble, following the template that Lethal Weapon 3 set, which is that if there’s a building about to be demolished in L.A., hold on everyone at City Planning and let Hollywood set its cameras up to catch that shit for their next outlandish action epic. Turns out the unseen hostages were killed on account of the explosion and the Police Chief yells at Stallone, “Try to remember a little thing they call Office Police Procedure” and is blamed for their deaths. So, we have Stallone playing Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, lowered into a cryogenic freezing device, which is how we decide to imprison people in the near-future of 1996.

Fast forward and its 2032, which is the future to us mere mortals, and the film proceeds to establish its main satirical thrust in imagining an ordered society where political correctness has gone mad! Yes, everyone wears Japanese-styled kimonos, sports strange vertical haircuts with the sideburns removed, and speak like robots with sentences like “Attitude readjustment... Info assimilated” or “the lack of stimulus is truly disappointing.” The do-gooders have had their way and everything is really peaceful and no one has been killed – sorry, Murder Death Killed as they call it in this movie – for over twenty years or something, which really does stagger belief in the idea that murders have been eliminated, even without a Pre-Cog System in place of preventative psychics floating in pools. Sandra Bullock plays a restless police officer who finds all this peace SO BORING and loves the 1990s as evidenced by the paraphernalia all over her office with a Lethal Weapon 3 poster and a Blood Sugar Sex Magic poster, causing Dan to remark, “This is such bullshit! No one in the future is going to have nostalgia for the 1990s!” Back to the plot, Snipes is let out of cryogenics but is able to speak Mexican and unlock codes and basically escape by killing everyone, even gouging out a scientist’s eyeball to pass a retinal scan in a sick twist. All the Future Police can do is watch on their security cameras as Snipes wastes everyone the 1990s way, which includes soundtracking his martial arts fighting with record scratches and ‘Bam’ horn samples, las if Terminator X from Public Enemy was hired to Mickey Mouse his every move (nice appropriation of black culture, Hollywood). Thankfully, Bill Cobb, a kindly old black cop remembers the good old days of the 1990s, remembering that maverick renegade they called ‘The Demolition Man’ and that they need ‘an old fashioned cop.’ So, they thaw out Stallone and he’s like ‘Take me to Planet Hollywood!’ but they are like ‘Sorry, your wife and everyone you knew is dead.’ Before Stallone can get too weepy, he remembers his old warrior instincts and hunts after Snipes across Muesuems that feature wings dedicated to Violence and Weapon stashes, all the while reacting to the madcap zaniness of the future where cigarettes are banned, sexual intercourse is relegated to virtual sexing, bad language is always being fined by ticketing sensors, and as my friend Dan remarked, “even their high fives have no balls!”

Demolition Man satisfies as a Joel Silver produced action flick as all the clichés are in full swing from scenes being swathed in smoke machines for atmosphere, gratuitous female nudity (minimal really, but yeah Stallone gets a wrong number video call from a naked woman for no reason aside from showing some tits), people firing off handguns and machine guns with volcanic sound effects, and even corny one-liners. Our favourite was the pay-off to a running gag involving the farewell phrase that everyone in the future uses, which is “Be well.” Later in the film, Stallone realises that Cocteau (Nigel Williamson from Yes Minister), the leader of this Brave New World is duplicitous, having released Snipes/Phoenix in order to kill a dirty rebel leader who lives in the sewers, Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary). CONSPIRACIES OCCUR IN THE FUTURE. So they have one of those scenes where Stallone punches a lot of television screens and angrily accuses Cocteau of his evil-doings, but he’s the leader of this Brave New World and he tells Stallone that he’ll be hunted down by the police and put in cryogenics. Stallone, pissed, moves to leave.

Cocteau: “Be well.”
Stallone: “Be fucked.”

High fives for the screenwriters! They must have taken the day off after coming up with that spectacular punch-line. There is also obvious product placement masquerading as comedy where in the future fast food is now upscale cuisine with Cocteau asking Stallone to dinner at “Pizza Hut.” However, this was great as though his voice said “Pizza Hut”, his mouth clearly said something different, a really obvious example of ADR post-production overdubbing. Turns out it was originally Taco Bell as Adam explained to us after having done some pre-film research. They have a scene in the restaurant where the signs are replaced and there are two more examples of characters saying “Pizza Hut” while their mouths say “Taco Bell.” We all thought that it was because Taco Bell didn’t want to be associated with Demolition Man. Turns out it was more the fact that Pizza Hut had an international reputation while Taco Bell hadn’t quite hit the global market yet. Purchase your John Spartan and Simon Phoenix action figures next time you are at Pizza Hut, gang! (Note: sources inform that Pizza Hut and Taco Bell were owned by the same megacorporation so greedy capitalistic product placement wins again!)

What else do viewers have to contend with in Demolition Man? You have Rob Schneider during his SNL years being an annoying cop offsider. You have Sandra Bullock pre-Speed fame being quite attractive in her police leggings, well, the most I’ve ever found her potentially sexy. You have Sandra Bullock in awe of Stallone’s ability to kick ass with the line, “You’re better live than on LaserDisc.’ You have a silly virtual sexing sequence where Stallone gets angry that he was given a towel and computer headgear instead of being able to get physical. You have really sub-par Robocop-styled satire where things like commercial jingles are referred to as “golden oldies” by the air-head citizens of the future. You have a lame running joke where Sandra Bullock always incorrectly utters standard tough-guy lines into malapropisms like ‘You really licked his ass.’ You have another relic of the 1990s, Denis Leary, cast as a grimy resistance fighter who champions his cause in a speech that is basically his rant from the middle of his one-hit wonder ‘Asshole’ repeated for mass consumption. You have Jesse Ventura in a bit part as one of Snipes’ unfrozen henchmen and he is not given any dialogue in the film! INCORRECT, MOVIE! You’ve also got a car chase where Stallone drives off a bridge into some water and the car fills up with protective foam because it’s the future and that’s how airbags work now, and he quips, “What happened? This car suddenly turned into a cannoli!’ ZING. Anyway, fast forward to the end where Stallone sprays Snipes with some liquid nitrogen and karate kicks his head clean off. Then we hear a Sting cover of ‘Demolition Man’, which apparently was a song by The Police that this movie took its name from. End of movie. Yet, this exchange was often remembered when Schwarzenegger became Governor of California:

Lenina Huxley: I have, in fact, perused some newsreels in the Schwarzenegger Library, and the time that you took that car...
John Spartan: Hold it. The Schwarzenegger Library?
Lenina Huxley: Yes. The Schwarzenegger Presidential Library. Wasn't he an actor when you...?
John Spartan: Stop! He was President?
Lenina Huxley: Yes! Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment which states...
John Spartan: I don't wanna know. President...

Commando (1985)

2009-07-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

An action classic that my parents taped off television and that I watched repeatedly as a child, Commando was and is still one of my favourite action films of all time. Back when I was growing up under the influence of such demented action films, I even had the Commando action figure with a little plastic Arnold Schwarzenegger figurine that came with a comic-book re-telling of the movie though sanitized of the movie’s violence for the under-13 year old market for the toy, which is funny as the movie is totally made for 13 year old boys. It’s an awesomely bullshit action movie that doesn’t mess around with complex characterisation or plot (i.e. a minimum of “boring” scenes). It’s basically 87 minutes of Arnie running around in on a race-against-time to rescue his kidnapped daughter (Alyssa Milano) from some bad guys who want him to assassinate the president of a tin-pot country. Y’see, Arnie led a Special Forces squad that made enemies all over the world and the pre-credit sequence has his ex-men being picked off one by one. As soon as Arnie’s former commander, General Kirby helicopters to his isolated mountain home with two men to protect him and then leaves after this warning, the bad guys strike with excessive machine gun fire. This movie doesn’t mess around! Now a disposed Latin American dictator (Dan Hedaya) wants to reclaim power and is using Arnie’s daughter to do this (great scene where he asks her “Wouldn’t it be nice to see your daddy again?” and she says “Yeah, when he smashes your face in!”). Arnie escapes the clutches of his foes by breaking the neck of his guard on the airplane, makes it look like the dead guy is sleeping by sticking a blanket over him (quipping “Don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired!”), and then jumps off the wheel of the plane. Before long, he’s grabbed an airhead stewardess (Rae Dawn Chong) to help him, joining his quest of fucking shit up in the name of fatherly love. The rest of the movie is Arnie running around, punching dudes out, throwing them off mountains, robbing a gun-shop with a bulldozer, and then invading a small island in the climax where they are keeping his daughter hostage and where he massacres an entire army single-handedly.

This is back in the good old days of the 1980s where Arnie was still making viciously violent movies in the period after Terminator made him a star and before he became a warm and cuddly mainstream icon with Twins and Junior and Jingle All The Way. Produced by Joel Silver, Commando is a prototypical 1980s action movie where all the bad guys are minorities, all the women are beautiful bimbos, and the one-liners are memorably corny, with even room to include Arnie’s catch-phrases like “I’ll be back” and “Trust me.” Not to mention the tell tale sign of a bullshit action movie... unbelievable hero names! Did I forget to say Arnie’s character is called John Matrix. I guess John Grenade or John Supersoldier would have been too obvious.

Classic bullshit scenes come thick and fast throughout this flick. The title credit montage has one of the greatest images ever, conveying the happiness Matrix and his daughter live in, with the postcard image of Arnie kneeling, smiling like a goofball, helping his daughter feed a young deer! HEARTWARMING! Then you have the aforementioned dialogue such as when Arnie gets the drop on the bad guy sleazeball Sully (David Patrick Kelly of The Warriors) who Arnie holds over a ravine in the attempt to obtain information about where his daughter is:

MATRIX: “Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last?”
SULLY: “That’s right, Matrix, you did!”
MATRIX: “I lied.”

Then Arnie drops him to his death. Then he busts into a hotel room to have a fist fight with another bad guy, the bad-ass named Cooke (Bill Duke of Predator):

COOKE: “You scared mothefucker? Well, you should be, because this Green Beret is going to kick your ass!”
MATRIX: “I eat Green Berets for breakfast. And right now I’m very hungry!”

And then Arnie punches him into another hotel room where a young couple are fucking (gratuitous nudity is a Joel Silver staple). The action sequences throughout, from the attack on Arnie’s home where he rushes off to his secret shed filled with automatic weapons, to the brawl in a shopping mall where eight security guards rush him and he throws them all off at the same time like’s he the fucking Hulk! Then the sequence where Arnie crashes into a surplus store and loads up on shells, grenades, weapons, and flip-flops is like Gun and Ammo porn for all the Soldiers of Fortune subscribers out there. Every now and then there will be a scene with General Kirby at the aftermath of all this destruction with some dialogue that testifies to Arnie’s brilliance:

SOLDIER: “What can we expect, sir?”
KIRBY: “World War III.”

World War III is what we get when Arnie and Rae Dawn Chong steal a two-prop plane and land near the island where Arnie blows away every swarthy military man extra in sight, which is a total massacre that Arnie only receives two superficial wounds after having killed two hundred soldiers, never missing with the dozen machine guns he has. There’s even a scene where he gets trapped in a shed and uses garden implements to decapitate and maim more soldiers. HANDYMAN ACTION!

Acting-wise, Arnie is Arnie. You know what to expect. Alyssa Milano is basically Punky Brewster in this. Rae Dawn Chong is hilariously annoying, a woman who whines constantly after being kdnapped by Arnie, comes to believe in his cause and helps him to the point by becoming bait to sleazeballs that Arnie fucks up. Dan Hedaya plays the dictator with an accent that makes him sound like Peter Sellars in The Party. However, the movie is stolen by Australian’s own Vernon Wells (of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior) who plays Bennett, a bad guy who must be seen to be believed. A former member of Matrix’s unit but was kicked out because he liked the violence too much, Bennett looks like Freddie Mercury with a thick moustache, close-cropped hair and a penchant for wearing chain-mail over his flabby gut. Now Vernon Wells is hilarious enough with his Aussie accent (when Matrix says “I’ll be back, Bennett”, he replies wryly, “Oi, John... I’ll be waiting, John.”). However, everything he says is tainted with this blatant homoeroticism as if Arnie was his former lover. This reaches boiling point in the climactic fight between Bennett and Arnie in a boiler room basement with Bennett holding Arnie’s daughter hostage after having shot Arnie in the arm. So, Bennett has the drop on him, but Arnie wisely convinces him to engage in a knife-fight instead:

MATRIX: “You can beat me... You want to put the knife in me. Look me in the eyes. See what’s going on in there while you turn it. That’s what you want to do to me, right? Come on, let the girl go. You and me. Don’t deprive yourself of some pleasure. Come on, Bennett: Let’s Party!”

Through this speech, the film keeps cutting to Bennett quivering in sadistic, orgasmic delight at the concept of sticking it into Arnie. And if this wasn’t enough, did I mention that Arnie kills Bennett by throwing a pipe into his body, stabbing him into a pressure cooker. “LET OFF SOME STEAM, BENNETT.” This homoerotic quality is a testament to the action genre’s assertion of right wing dogma, characterising the bad guy as a leather-wearing stereotype of 1980s Gay Culture, but then letting the camera fawn all over Arnie’s oily muscles whenever it gets the chance, producing a thoroughly confusing if not compelling comment on sexual difference. Anyway, daughter is reunited with father after witnessing such a shockingly violent sight and along with the airhead stewardess they walk into the surf with the cheesy end credits anthem by Power Station, ‘We Fight For Love.’

Sit back, turn off your brain, and strap yourself in for a perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger Joel Silver action special.

Bullshit Movies Extra Features: A group of us screened Commando once again for the benefit of someone who hadn’t seen it and here are some memorable comments made throughout.

1) Scene of Arnie carrying a log on his shoulders
ERIKA: ‘Is that a real log?’
DAN: ‘No!’
ERIKA: ‘Why would you carry that?’
DAN: ‘Because he can!’

2) Scene of Arnie teaching his daughter how to perform martial arts in the credit sequence
DAN: 'Yeah, we get that he loves his daughter.’

3) Scene of Bennett walking around with his chain-mail on.
SEYMOUR: ‘Look, he’s wearing it in public!’

4) Shot of Bennett in leather pants.
DAN: ‘This really is a gay movie.’

5) Scene where Bill Duke says to Arnie “fuck you” and Arnie replies in a camp fashion “fuck you, asshole”
ERIKA: ‘That’s so gay... [shot of naked women in the next hotel room] Oh my god, look at the size of her tits!’

6) Scene where Arnie rips open a chain lock on a fence
DAN: ‘Yeah, we get it, guys. He’s fucking strong.’

7) Shot of Arnie putting the brake on the bulldozer he’s used to smash into a gunshop
SEYMOUR: ‘He put the handbrake on the bulldozer... Didn’t want it roll away and make a scene’

8) Shots of Arnie taking lots of guns into a shopping trolley
SEYMOUR: ‘This is some Reaganite shit’

9)Scene where Arnie sets a C4 claymore that explodes a building into a gigantic fireball.
SEYMOUR: “Those claymores have a few ball bearings in them.”

10) Shot of Bennett chasing after Arnie’s daughter
DAN: “He’s so fat and weird.’

11) Many shots of soldiers being wasted by Arnie.
ERIKA: ‘These guys suck.’

12) Arnie hides behind a statue during a shoot-out.
SEYMOUR: ‘I’d love it if it was a statue of Jesus.’

13) Shot of Bennett during Arnie’s speech about sticking the knife into him.
ERIKA: ‘Oh my god! He’s actually having an orgasm!’

14) Scene where Arnie throws a pipe into and through Bennett
SEYMOUR: ‘There is no way that could have happened. The laws of physics are pretty against him.’

Hackers (1995)

2009-07-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

I like William Gibson as much as any other wet-wired meat-machine, but cyberpunk seriously has a lot to answer for. For one thing it allowed those involved in computers to portray themselves as cool and hip in a really annoying way, uttering things like “We are the samurai, the keyboard cowboys.” I’m not saying hackers and citizens of the online community are not important or skilled as I have little to no idea of the kind of smarts it takes to program code. Skilled like mathematicians and mathematicians helped break codes during World Wars like the whole Enigma thing, but that doesn’t mean I have to buy a math nerd as James Bond with a calculator. And when cyberpunk prompted a new subculture to be adapted and consumed into popular culture, Hollywood would strike, attempting to invest the mundane task of using a keyboard and perceiving data into a visceral, cinematic experience. Case example: Hackers, directed by Iain Softley, an attempt to translate the world of computer piracy into a hip and edgy and rebellious teen movie, where hackers are upstarts who rollerblade and tap keyboards with lightning dexterity while The Prodigy’s ‘Voodoo People’ continuously plays over the soundtrack.

Hackers attempts to blow your headspace in the opening sequence where SWAT team swarms over a white picket suburban home, kicking down the doors for a suspect, and then there’s a court case with the Public Enemy Number One they’ve captured. A young Felicity Huffman reads out the charges where hundreds of computers on Wall Street were crashed simultaneously through the power of hacking and there was a financial crisis and the camera pans to the right and finds dead air, but wait a minute, pan down and WHAT, it’s an eight year kid named Dade! Wargames wasn’t an effective warning obviously as our investment with computers has turned children into super genius rebellious criminal masterminds – Damien 2.0. The parents are sentenced to fork over thousands of dollars in damages and Dade is sentenced to not use a computer until he’s eighteen as obviously he would no longer be interested in defying authority or anything like that because teenagers follow the law to the letter, so nice thinking there, movie judge. Anyway, time out as I still need to recover from this concept that children can control the flow of society through hacking. Cue the Law & Order sting – DA DUNK. Fast forward to when Dade’s turned eighteen and is now Sick Boy from Trainspotting (Johnny Lee Miller) but with Matthew Boderick’s accent and his mother is knocking on his bedroom door asking,

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking over a TV network.”

Mind explosion control alt delete. Hack MTV, please! No, instead Dade uses his hacking talents to interrupt a Rush Limburagh conservative talk show host with an episode of The Outer Limits, basically turning over the channel but using the magic of computers and fooling dimwitted guards who don’t know what a modem is (a strange new world was 1995...). His user name is Crash Override and he meets another hacker named Acid Burn online and they have a hacking duel, which is portrayed cinematically with the director dropping in stock TV footage for a shoot-out montage while the trance megamix score is notched up a couple of levels. Sample text: “I will swat u like the fly u r.” BURN. Then there’s some Parker Lewis Can’t Lose shenanigans when Dade hits his new high school (see, his sexy single mother has moved them to New York, which Dade is annoyed about as you can’t do anything in New York apparently, NY = BORING!) and he meets some other hackers who don’t know he was that famous outlaw hacker child, but then he also meets Angelina Jolie in one of her first star roles, being sexy and full-lipped and not emaciated as she is currently. Jolie’s lips play a prank on him by telling him there’s a pool on the top floor but he gets locked out when it rains and there’s no pool. Dade uses his hacking powers to make the school computer turn on the fire sprinklers wetting everyone while he opens an umbrella because he is radical, woot. Then there’s a hip new club where the hackers meet and rollerblade and exchange illicit books of government code and the nerd fantasy is indulged that you can impress a girl with your video-game playing prowess when Dade beats Angelina Jolie’s score on a first-person race-game in a mind-numbing scene that makes none of this look very interesting.

The plot eventually kicks in when a corporately sponsored hacker named The Plague creates a Leonardo Da Vinci themed virus in the corporate Oil corporation super-network that embezzles money but throws off everyone the scent by a threatening plot to drop oil into the world’s oceans; the ethos of the 1960s is resurrected with the ecological concern displayed here (I have a dream and it involves hacking the planet to save the whales!). The authorities believe that it was our hero hackers who are responsible, all because of a floppy disc with the evidence on it, which falls into Dade’s lap eventually. First fundamental problem of this movie is that the villain of the piece, The Plague, is played by Fisher Stevens, the rubbery faced character actor who played the Indian professor in Short Circuit; Martin Short must have been busy. I had no idea what they were going for here because The Plague is neither threatening or funny and in the end is quite embarrassing particularly his introductory shot where he skateboards into the main computer network with a goatee, a fur coat and a grim look. The result is the question, “Wait, isn’t he the comic relief to the main bad guy, you know, a corporate boss played by David Warner or someone with... presence.” Warning: your movie needs a reboot, preferably the Alan Rickman version 2.0 villain program, please. And The Plague’s philosophy? “There’s no right or wrong, there’s only fun and boring.” And you, sir, are the latter. Also: the femme fatale of this movie is Lorraine Bracco in a blonde wig, which is neither sexy nor funny to watch. FAIL.

Speaking of things we are supposed to take seriously but cannot take seriously, here is some of the dialogue from Hackers:

“You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes
through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is
here now. He's livin' large.”

“You want to be the elite, you want to do a righteous hack.”

“Hacking isn’t a tool, it’s a survival strategy.”

“Has a killer refresh rate.”

“We have just gotten a wake up call from the Nintendo
generation.”

“It isn’t a virus, it’s a worm!”

“Hackers of the world unite!”

Yes, as Dade and the ragtag group of rebellious nerds on rollerblades are pursued by the Feds (headed up by Bunk from The Wire) and ‘Voodoo People’ is played once again, but they find themselves working together, particularly once Dade discovers Angelina Jolie is a secret hacker nerd who says things like “I want to triple my RAM” (nerd fantasy number two: sexy girls actually dig on this software bullshit!) and is actually Acid Burn (Hackers is the You’ve Got Mail of hacker movies then). Two Asian dudes who run a Wayne’s World public access show and are named Razor and Blade help them out, televising the union of hackers to log onto their laptops and hook up their cables to public telephones and defeat The Plague from realising his nefarious plan that seriously lacks any tension or interest. More Mission Impossible style break-ins into the corporate buildings, please, like Sneakers, thank you. We don’t even have any polygon avatar battles like Johnny Mnemonic or The Lawnmower Man in the climax and instead have arty shots of the hackers in telephone booths spinning in slow-motion. LAME. Give me a dated CGI hacker battle next time, Hackers, that is if you were like a video game and could possibly change at all when next experienced (Paging Tron!).

The worst thing that Hackers has to answer for, however, is the introduction of Matthew Lillard to the world of acting. While all the characters in the movie are spectacularly annoying, Lillard should get a special Mork From Ork Award for Achievement in Annoying with his character, Cereal Killer, a whacked-out, grandchild of Woodstock (or Hackstock, LOL) with pig-tails and suspenders and acts like a hyperactive tit. Then again, Lillard may be providing the movie’s sole smidgeon of truth, which is that hackers are actually rather irritating sorts who you wouldn’t want to meet in person and would rather read about in a Wired article. While he might not be the coolest Hacker in the movie, Lillard can rest assured with the data that he certainly is a Hack, ROFL. Oh yeah, HACK THE PLANET!

Twister (1996)

2009-07-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

Ah, the mysteries of Mother Nature have inspired great artists throughout the decades, none more so than that literary giant, Michael Crichton, who once pondered whether fossilised mosquitoes could retain dinosaur DNA that eccentric millionaires could exploit to create a theme-park island where everything would go terribly wrong in another example of that old chest-nut, “What Has Scientific Man Wrought By Messing With The Environment?” Of course, I speak of the tome known as Jurassic Park, which was adapted by Steven Spielberg into an international blockbuster that threw down a template for Hollywood producers to draw on from the mid-to-late 1990s; if a natural disaster is transformed into a CGI special effects shit-storm, then Mother Nature will provide with high international gross. For an insight into what was wrong with blockbuster movies in the post-Jurassic Park climate, I turn to Crichton’s original screenplay, written with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin, concerning tornado chasers, that painterly engagement with the sublime entitled Twister, which was directed by former cinematographer Jan De Bont who has experienced a hit with Speed and would yet experience the lows of Speed 2: Cruise Control.

For those who can’t remember, Twister follows a couple on the brink of divorce Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) because I all know you really care about the human characters in a movie like Twister. Jo and Bill were once scientific daredevils who chased tornados across the mid-west in order to study their movements, leading a ragtag bunch of geeks and nerds in sublime encounters with blurry grey tempests. Of course, there needs to be some tension in this movie so they have been separated with Jo still an active tornado chaser and Bill retired from the wild life for the chance to be a weatherman and be married to Jami Gertz. Of course, Bill’s attempts to have Jo sign the divorce papers are always interrupted by special effect sequences of whirlwinds sucking up and spitting out trucks onto roads while someone quips "Where's my truck?" before the truck explodes because Hollywood knows funny; all of which reminds Bill about the ole thrill of the hunt. What is magical about Twister is its wispy characterisation. So, we’ve got Helen Hunt offered as Bill’s true love in comparison to the nagging psychotherapist Jami Gertiz plays and we know she’s no good because she makes a face when someone sticks a plate in her face with a huge steak swimming in gravy (Subliminal movie message: I don’t want a wife who won’t eat a good ole fashioned American steak!). The sour-faced, sleepy-eyed Helen Hunt is comparatively a tomboy who loves chasing tornados and wearing white t-shirts and being called “Jo”, which sounds like “Joe”; basically she’s a man with long hair and breasts. Surely there must be a sensitive, more feminine side to her? Oh yeah, that’s right, Helen Hunt’s character was that little girl in the opening sequence where a tornado strikes through a farmhouse and sucks up the little’s girl Tom Joad farmer father into the spinning vortex. So, everytime Helen Hunt is chasing a tornado, the audience knows she’s really chasing a lost father figure. There a lot of scenes where she stops and gazes in wonder at the tornado, probably thinking, “Are you still up there, daddy?” Nice pop psychology there, movie.

Then again, when Bill, by which I mean Bill Paxton, is described as having an intuitive relationship with the tornadoes, which we can understand in scenes where they are chasing after a tornado and hail starts pummelling their car and he shouts out “We’ve got hail!” Or when they’re all hanging around at a drive in playing The Shining (side-note: one is always thrown off by the appearance of a better movie in the one you’re actually watching) and Dusty, the EXTREME dude with the red cap, shouts to everyone about an incoming tornado, “It’s heading right for us.” But Bill Paxton stands stoically and grimly remarks, “It’s already here.” The masculine cowboy knows the terrain though Bill Paxton really only shines when he is yelling some shit while standing in the rain like “Things go wrong. You can’t explain it. You can’t predict it! GAME OVER, MAN!” Of course, when the “villain” of the movie is a natural disaster that isn’t invested with much character despite the overlays of animalistic moans and groans whenever it appears close, you have to fire up some more tension with proto-villains like the rival tornado chasing team headed up by Carl Elwes. Why are they evil? Let Bill Paxton explain it: “He’s got a corporate sponsorship. He’s only in it for the money.” How do we know this? Cary Elwes has a broad southern accent and his team drives sleek black SUVs, the type that all Hollywood producers drive in L.A, the type of people who have corporately produced this movie in order to receive some financial gain for visualising the poetry of what happens when a tornado sucks up a cow and makes it fly around the van for some deadpan observational shtick, “We’ve got cows!” (We’ve also got punchlines!) Yeah, but how else would we know our team of tornado chasers were the heroes if they didn’t all dress like individuals and were played by recognisable character actors like Alan Ruck, Joey Slotnick, Jeremy Davies, Todd Field and of course, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty (who would have thought that the guy with lines like “He’s gonna rue the day he came against The Extreme” would eventually destroy everyone else starring in this movie acting-wise). Wear a red hat and listen to some Zeppelin and you’re an individual and non-corporate even though you’re basically comic relief. Down with corporate power, man. Love the tornado for what it can teach us about the environment, which is that the power of the twister will not be enough to suck up a reunited couple like Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton particularly when they are tied down safely to pipes using belts. Oh yeah, there was a point to everything with a machine that was is supposed to be swallowed up by twisters and tell scientists the great mysteries of what is going on inside and the machine is called Dorothy which is a reference to that movie The Wizard Of Oz, the one with a golden brick road and flying monkeys and more believability and less bullshit than this movie.

The lifespan of a big-screen blockbuster is seasonal. One summer, you’re sitting in a cinema seat as an adolescent, overwhelmed by the sound and fury, convinced that what you watched was something monolithic, then fourteen years later, you’re re-watching it on basic cable where the effects have dated and you wake up quite quickly to the thin characterisation and unimaginative dialogue. Eye to eye with The Suck Zone.

Action Jackson (1988)

2009-07-05T00:29:00.000-07:00

Better known as Apollo Creed in the Rocky series, Carl Weathers received further infamy when Mitch Hurwitz decided to cast him in Arrested Development to play himself, constantly referred to as the Actor Carl Weathers, the cheapskate thespian mentor to Tobias Funke (David Cross). Considering this revival of his screen presence, I firmly believe there’s one Carl Weathers performance that demands reconsideration, particularly in the terrain of enjoyably bullshit 1980s action films, and that is his character, Jericho Jackson, better known as... Action Jackson.

Now Action Jackson was produced by Joel Silver, the cigar-chomping, loudly obnoxious, sports-shirt wearing mogul who fronted capital for the Lethal Weapon movies, Die Hard 1 & 2, Commando, Predator 1 & 2, The Last Boyscout, and the Matrix movies. Undoubtedly conceived as a star vehicle for Carl Weathers, Action Jackson is in line with the Joel Silver action movie formula with the opening sequence covering a spectacular double-murder by an assassin squad that crashes through an office window from a helicopter in order to blow up their target – Ed O’Ross (Dimitri from Six Feet Under) – in a protracted death scene that ends with him being shot with a grenade launcher that turns him into a flaming pile shooting out of the fiftieth floor. Then there is a tremendous amount of set-up for Action Jackson’s introduction, a regular Dirty Harry in Detroit City, specifically a laboured sequence where two beat cops (including Biff from Back to the Future) pick up a purse-snatcher and evoke the considerable mythos of Jackson (“Jackson is so violent, we won’t even let him use a gun”). The spacious offices of the Detroit police is filled with colourful prostitutes, mountains of paperwork and an aloof yet angry chief Captain Armbruster (Bill Duke!). The young purse-snatcher tries to make a run for it in the police station but none of the doofus cops can catch him until he runs into the desk of Jericho Jackson, spilling coffee all over his paperwork. There’s a dramatic pause then an even more dramatic zoom in onto Carl Weathers who sneers to the kid, “Mellow out,” which my friend Seymour found to be the height of lameness. Jackson has been relegated to a desk for putting automobile tycoon the murdering son of Peter Dellaplane (Craig T. Nelson with a silver slick hair dye) in the hospital, which is explained to us in a trademark cop scene where Jackson is chewed out by his chief:

ARMBRUSTER: “You nearly tore that boy’s arm off!”
JACKSON: “So? He had a spare.”

We also find out during the course of this conversation with the angry chief that Action Jackson is also a former star of track and field, a Harvard graduate of law, and a lot of other amazing talents that cement him as multi-talented hero of our times. Of course, the Man of the Year awards unfairly go to Dellaplane who is always seen shaking hands with rich white dudes at fancy high society dinners, which should be enough to convince you that he is of course evil, an ambitious crimelord who wants to control the car industry through murdering opponents and installing his own puppet union leader. More familiar to myself as an All-American stalwart thanks to the sitcom Coach, Nelson inflects his performance with a haughty air of entitlement, providing an American version of what Alan Rickman did in Die Hard, the refined intelligent villain to the average joe hero. We get to watch Dellaplane be evil, such as breaking the arm of his martial arts instructor through underhanded tactics and delivering pseudo-philosophical nuggets like “My cars are a hobby, my real interest is power.” Naturally Dellaplane and Jackson have plenty of simmering confrontations during then movie, like this one at the fancy ball:

DELLAPLANE: “You have this nick-name, what was it? Excitement, enthusiasm,
esprit de corps-
JACKSON: “It’s ACTION!”

I’m glad they reminded us what Jackson’s nick-name was as they’ve only mentioned it, what, like over a HUNDRED times in the film’s first twenty minutes. It doesn’t let up either, especially when Jackson later is stuck with Vanity, the junkie mistress of Dellaplane who becomes Jackson’s annoying partner-in-crime and love interest despite Jackson’s chaste treatment of her (Vanity as her advances are rebuffed once again, complains “I thought they called you “Action” because I ain’t getting any” or something lame like that). In a post-Purple Rain marketing move, Vanity is also a pop singer of terrible Prince-wannabe sexy songs, two of which she performs in their entirety within the Elite Club that Dellaplane owns, but because it’s a Joel Silver produced action flick, also satisfies the requirements of any major starring actress by revealing her breasts in a doped-out seduction scene with Dellaplane. Ahh, the glorious, pre-political correctness, pre-internet days of casual female nudity in over-the-top action movies!

So, yes, there is an overload of grisly murders and plenty of explosions throughout the film’s running time. Yet Action Jackson also has a heightened comic tone that is obviously trying to cash in on the success of Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, which was a Bruckheimer/Simpson cop movie but with Eddie Murphy providing the yucks. This vibe is present in the opening credit sequence that plays an unremarkable 1980s pop tune from the Pointer Sisters over a tourist montage of Detroit (my friend Dan’s reaction, “Yeah, we get it already, it’s Detroit!”), which is also cemented by Herbie Hancock and Michael Kamen’s ‘Rock-It’ styled score, the synthesiser Mickey-Mousing every pratfall and hijink. The result is that Action Jackson often seems like a parody of itself with it’s over the top action bullshit. There’s a lame bit where Jackson is cornered by some hoods in a bar (including Renegade’s Bobby Six-Killer) who want to cut off his balls but Vanity convinces them Jackson’s an escapee from Bellevue and so he does some over-acting as a wannabe preacher with overlaid Gospel music before snapping out of that stale comedy routine and kicking some ass!

Even better is when Action Jackson, already established as a star of track and field, runs after an assassin in a taxi cab, manages to keep up with the car on foot, throws himself onto the roof of the car, punches out the window while the assassin shoots at him through the roof, is thrown off the roof when the assassin finally wises up to the fact Jackson will fall off when the brakes are hit, then Jackson in the middle of the road convinces the assassin to ram into him to which Jackson performs a vertical leap, flipping over the length of the car as it crashes into a car dealership behind where Jackson was standing. As Seymour observed, “He just jumped over a car.” Completely over the top action bullshit that almost veers into Naked Gun territory.

What else do we have in this sucker? You have tons of familiar faces from numerous Silver productions with pock-faced Robert Davi (Agent Johnson from Die Hard) as a doomed informant, Sonny Ladham (Billy from Predator) as a drug dealer that Jackson throws through one window and into another window in the opposite building, and everyone’s favourite Asian henchman, Al Leong (Genghis Kahn from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure) as another in his long line of Asian henchmen. You even have one of my favourite extras – the cigar-chomping garbage truck driver at the beginning of Terminator (the one who sees the electricity from the time travel and croaks, “What the hell?”), better known as Chino ‘Fats’ Williams, who plays a frog-throated former boxing star and mentor to Jackson who runs a flea-bit hotel that Jackson and Vanity have to hide out in. You’ve also got a young Sharon Stone who plays Dellaplane’s dim-bulb wife who discovers evidence of Dellaplane’s evil-doings, tells Jackson, then tells Dellaplane, which all ends in a murderous gunshot embrace from the evil Dellaplane (though not before Stone also provides an unnecessary but welcome shower scene). You’ve got a pseudo-crucifixion torture scene ala Lethal Weapon where Action Jackson is tied up shirtless while the Huey Lewis henchman from Die Hard intends to burn him with a fiery torch, quipping “We’re gonna have ourselves a barbecque.” Then you’ve got Action Jackson escaping and turning the tables on the Huey Lewis lookalike by pointing a hand-held missile launcher at him and counter-quipping “Barbecque? How do you like your ribs?” before opening fire and exploding the sucker (there’s even a classic dissolve from the fiery corpse to a plate of ribs cooking!). Then there’s the climax at Dellaplane’s mansion where Action Jackson and his crew tear up the joint, exposing Dellaplane’s duplicity, but not before another amazing bullshit action moment where Carl Weathers jumps into a Ferrari, drives into the mansion (that’s fine) and also drives up the stairs onto the second floor (as Seymour said, “The laws of physics are against him there”) in order to rescue Vanity from Craig T. Nelson’s evil clutches. One tough kung-fu fist-fight later and a shoot-out later where Dellaplane/Nelson has a substantial hole blown through his chest, Action Jackson stands victorious with an ex-junkie in his hands (she says she’s gone “Cold Turkey” after one day, which doesn’t sound right?) and Bill Duke, the angry chief, promoting him back to Lieutenant. Oh yeah, and as a Joel Silver produced action movie, every interior scene is drenched in smoke for atmospheric effect; it’s like “Cue smoke machine, okay actors, step into the fog and do your thing.”

In the end, Carl Weathers cooks up a stew of stupid one-liners and unbelievable action in Action Jackson, a fine example of the Joel Silver-produced action spectacular bullshit movie. Who else would wear a red V-neck sweater with such extreme style, but Carl Weathers?

Pathology (2008)

2009-06-29T04:52:00.000-07:00

Neveldine/Taylor are douchebags. This is a fact. Yet they have an instinct for making appealing if at times appalling trash. Re-watching Crank, their notorious writing-directing debut that's basically Speed in a human body, with several friends who had not experienced the movie before, reactions oscillated between outrage at its displays of racism and sexism (“That’s not right, hey” was often heard) and glee at its extreme ridiculous (“This is the best movie ever” was also heard). I decided to check out Pathology, a medical thriller they wrote and produced, but which was directed by Marc Schloermann and is enjoyably trashy if marked by the distinctive bad taste a Neveldine/Taylor production can leave behind, like eating too much candy-flavoured popcorn at the Royal Show.

So, yeah, the screenwriters’ manuals often tell budding writers to open with a hook in order to pull in the viewer and Pathology has three of them. First, we see shaky video footage of unseen hands treating cadavers like ventriloquist dummies, re-enacting the orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally in true po-mo Quentin Tarantino style. Second, we get the Hippocratic Oath repeated for us in white text across black, establishing a gravelly serious tone to the proceedings. Third, we get a close-up of Alyssa Milano’s lips imploring her boyfriend – our anti-hero Milo Vertimigilia (from TV’s Heroes) – to “fuck me.” This movie just dares you to watch the remaining ninety minutes with a triple-threat opening gambit like that.

What basically happens in this movie is that Milo playing a character named Ted Grey is a hot-shot forensic student who joins a prestigious internship presided over by John De Lancie (Q from TV’s Star Trek: Next Generation). Anyway, making the rounds of the morgue as bodies are sliced upon and cracked apart for our viewing pleasure, all the surgeons are Beverly Hills 90210 types and there’s a lot of dick swinging and name-calling between the new maverick and these snotty brats, particularly when they challenge each other in determining how an eleven-year-old fat cadaver died. So, it’s like the Top Gun of pathologist movies. Then Milo meets Dr. Gallow, Iceman to his Maverick, another young hot-shot played by Michael Weston (the ‘That’s my dog’ psycho from TV’s Six Feet Under) who inducts him into a diabolic clique of young hotshot forensic students who test their skill by playing a game; one murders a bad person (pimps and paedophiles are the first victims, so relax your uptight morals) and then guessing how they were murdered in a late night, sex-filled, crack-smoking bull-session, the allure of which causes Milo to leave his humanity behind. So, it’s like The Lost Boys of pathologist movies, particularly when Milo starts sleeping with Lauren Lee Smith’s red-headed nymphette who displays lesbian tendencies and is aroused by S & M shtick like slicing her tongue with a scalpel before making out. But then Schloermann obviously is a follower of the David Fincher school of film-making so everything is cloaked in pristine darkness and Nietzsche-styled phrases are thrown around like “[everyday people are] consuming, multiplying, copulating. It makes me sick” or “We’re animals. It’s our nature to kill.” So, it’s like the Fight Club of pathologist movies. Particularly when the third act twist involves Milo bringing his loyal girlfriend Alyssa Milano back to the big city and it all goes a bit like the third act of Se7en, just with the asshole villain being subjected to an autopsy but paralysed and conscious, like every second Stephen King short story you've ever read.

On one hand appealing to the sort of torture-porn in vogue with the success of the Hostel movies and yet also a throwback to ghoulish EC Comics trashy-horror, Pathology is entertaining to a certain degree. Milo Vertimigilia is solid as the tightly-jawed “hero” who proves to be as morally bankrupt as the villains in the end. So, it’s like the American Psycho of pathologist movies. Basically it functions as a pretty decent thriller as the majority of the characters are despicable jock assholes (there's that Neveldine/Taylor touch) who want to see hacked to death by the end of the film. However, it totally plays into that fusion of sex and death in its montages of Milo and Lauren Lee Smith copulating in cold medical labs while other strangers are killed off by the other students, which makes me wish I was a fifteen year old with pretensions to being a goth that reads Clive Barker and listens to Orgy so then I could really get off on all this sub-par sadomasochistic crap. Oh, and for another insight into the assholish auteurs that are Neveldine and Taylor, during their DVD commentary over the closing credits, they discuss the design of their onscreen writing credit “Neveldine & Taylor.” Apparently they had to accept an ampersand to join their names by the Writers’ Guild, which was an upset as they prefer to be known by the credit “Neveldine/Taylor” (the slash makes it sexy). But what they did, you see, is slant the ampersand, which “was our little rebellion to the Writers’ Guild.” Now I don't use the word "renegades" often, but they might be warranted here...

Days Of Thunder (1990)

2009-06-23T00:23:00.001-07:00

Note: the very first film I wrote a bullshit review for...

You may have heard that Days Of Thunder is pretty much Top Gun but with a NASCAR paintjob. And you’d be right. It’s all there -- Tom Cruise is a cocky stud with a drive to be the best; his love interest is an uptight professional older woman who needs his cock; his coach/instructor is a father-figure substitute for a missing father; there is a competitive rival but they turn out to be friends through begrudging respect, etc. And it’s produced by Bruckheimer/Simpson and has their trademark orange-sunrise polished aesthetic to all of the images. And it’s total bullshit. Just check out the characters’ names – Tom Cruise as Cole Trickle (!), Robert Duvall as Harry Hogge (!), Michael Rooker as Rowdy Burns (!), Cary Elwes as Russ Wheeler (!!!). You know just by those ridiculous action-figure names, that this movie will be a bullshit treat.

Days Of Thunder was one of those movies that my parents taped on video when I was a kid, and because I didn’t know any better, I just re-watched it again and again on the family VCR. Re-watching it now, I was struck by how vacuous it was. There is not a lot to it besides your usual Climb-From-Despair-Into-Victory sports movie formula. First, Cruise becomes a NASCAR racer. Then he wins. Then he crashes. Then he meets Nicole Kidman as the love interest. Then they fuck. A to B. B to C. It takes about twenty minutes before you even know Nicole’s first name (it’s Claire). But then is anyone surprised that Days Of Thunder would be a shallow movie? There are a ton of great bullshit moments. Cruise’s introduction hero-shot, riding through track-field smoke on a big motorcycle with his shades on - hilarious. Duvall, obviously taking a paycheck, being a salt-of-the-earth hillbilly who wears a different trucker’s cap in every scene and is so Southern that he only drinks moonshine from a jar - pretty funny. Cary Elwes as the Vanilla Ice-looking real bad guy racer with his constant smug look and gum-chewing - priceless. Nicole Kidman’s big speech to Cruise where he calls him an "infantile ego-maniac" and says that everybody in the world but him knows that "control is only an illusion" (really? Thanks, Nicole!) - classic.

But the whole reason for the movie’s existence is one great scene where after his first win, Cruise’s track-team pull a prank on him. When his tour van gets pulled over by the highway patrol, this real sexy blonde female cop pushes him against the side of the van and asks him to spread his legs. Then there is BULLSHIT low-angle shot of Tom Cruise’s crotch as the female cop frisks him, and it fucking looks like he has a banana stuffed down his tight jeans. Anyway, the female cop says that it looks like he is carrying a concealed weapon, and asks suggestively, "But does he know how to use it?" She takes off her hat, pops open her top, and it’s revealed she’s a stripper! Just part of a big ole boy's own prank on the Cruise Missile who smiles and takes her in his arms and plants her a big kiss. But the whole point of the movie is in that low-angle shot of his crotch, which effectively states for the record that Tom Cruise has a big cock. This is important, because it helps him bed Nicole Kidman as the "brain doctor" who treats him and helps him win Daytona at the end.

So check Days of Thunder if you want to see some fast cars, a good actor like Duvall coasting, Nicole still with an Aussie accent and a crimped perm, and of course, Tom Cruise playing the cocky, competitive, egotistic stud (y’know, the one he played in Colour of Money, Cocktail, Top Gun, Rainman, etc), but this time in a white-trash hick sport known as stock-car racing. Get the need for speed and feel Tom’s big-cocked thunder, people!

Memorable Quote:

DR. CLAIRE: "Tell me what you love so much about racing."
COLE TRICKLE: "Speed. To be able to control it. To know that I can control
something that's out of control."

Pterodactyl (2005)

2009-06-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

J-Ro dug up this direct-to-video b-grade Jurassic Park rip-off on a double video store screener (the Armand Assante net-thriller Digital Reaper was the flipside) obtained while his sister was still working at Video Ezy. Reasons for watching this was that the film was called Pterodactyl, features Pterodactyls and stars both Cameron Daddo and Coolio. Turns out it was also directed by Mark L. Lester who made a name for himself during the 1980s making trashy action epics like Class of 1984, Commando and Showdown In Little Tokyo. How the mighty have fallen.

Flick opens with some redneck poachers in the hills of Turkey becoming serrated in half by CGI globs that are actually Pterodactyls! Meanwhile in a nearby small town Cameron Daddo who has grey hair and is going for a third-rate George Clooney type of hero leads a band of plucky high-school archaeologists on a field trip in the one rusty jeep. Yes, the line-up includes one red-head assistant who has a student-crush on Professor Daddo, one busty blonde who is an archetype Beverly Hills bitch (and provides the cheesecake for this cheesefest) and a couple of flat-out science nerds. With the level of characterisation and performance, you might be confused and think you’re watching a Saturday Morning high school sitcom: “Stay tuned you’re watching Pterodactyl High!” Anyway, they hit the road while the composer of Gangsta’s Paradise, Coolio, is going for a third-rate Samuel L. Jackson type of hero, commander of a platoon of soldiers who are tracking some Turkish drug-dealing, women-thieving warlords. With the poorly choreographed action sequences and Coolio’s troops’ inability to look comfortable handling prop guns, you might also be confused for thinking you’re watching a high concept comedy about a Special Ed. branch of Crack Marines.

The plot begins to creak into existence when Cameron Daddo finds some dried Pterodactyl urine on the trees, which looks like someone dumped a kilo of Crunchie on the ground, and then the Blonde student takes a dip in a lake in her bikini before being pecked at by a Pterodactyl. Features genius cross-cutting between CGI dinosaur, resembling a refuge from a 1990s PC game, and a poor puppet dinosaur diving into the water, demonstrating seamless cross-cutting worthy of Stan Winston himself. Then the freaked out team of archaeologists bump into Coolio who has captured his swarthy warload and they are all attacked in an open field by more Pterodactyls that keep ripping off characters’ heads and arms. As Mitch asked during the screening asked, “Are Pterodactyls made completely of razor blades?”

The rest of the movie rips off Aliens, Tremors and Dog Soldiers and every other movie where a motley crew fend off a batch of creatures. You’ve got one nerd student babbling on about what Madame Curie has to teach us about science and then you’ve got Coolio using heat-seeking missiles to terminate the creatures with extreme prejudice. You’ve got the hero’s love interest, the red-haired assistant with the crush being picked up by a pterodactyl, but left unharmed UNLIKE EVERY OTHER CHARACTER, deposited in a cave for the rest of the characters to climb up and rescue her. You’ve got a wounded nerd throwing a chocolate bar at a pterodactyl before he is chomped. You’ve got pseudo-science and shithouse graphics when the sun goes down and the pterodactyls IMMEDIATELY fall asleep because they only sleep in the dark and that gives the humans a break (nice going, science). You’ve got a stupid climax where Coolio sacrifices himself by firing a missile at the last pterodactyl but then dying like an idiot and forcing Cameron Daddo to step up to the plate and finish the job by PUTTING ON SOME GOOGLES THAT GUIDE THE MISSILES (nice going, military). Then you’ve got Cameron Daddo and the red-haired laughing it up as they walk off into the sunset making some references to Jurassic Park before the camera tunnels into the depths of the Turkish mountains to discover a CGI T-Rex! Illogical bid for a sequel!

And now for the most memorable quote of the movie:

COOLIO: “Now Professor... tell me about these dinosaurs?”

Future Bullshit: Old Dogs (2009)

2009-06-12T01:14:00.000-07:00

Bullshit movies tends to stay away from comedies. When a drama or an action movie or a horror film or any other 'serious' genre fails by being bad, more than likely an unintentional comedy is provided. The existential question I always ask myself: when a comedy fails at being a comedy, what do you have? On the basis of this trailer for the upcoming Disney comedy Old Dogs, a black hole that swallows intelligence, laughter, ideas, goodness, decency, sunshine, and sensibility right into the eye of the storm and belches it all back to you as a hard lump of coal.

Seriously: you watch this trailer and you will want to hit yourself in the head with your own shoe.

There, how does your head feel? Not too good. I cannot remember a recent comedy trailer where I felt the straining for laughs more acutely in the pit of my bowels. Remember to put your shoe back on...

The Happening (2008)

2009-06-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

In little under a year, The Happening, which was released in 2008, has already become this generation’s The Swarm. For those not familiar with Irwin Allen’s late-1970s flop, The Swarm was a disaster movie predicated on a ridiculous threat, that of killer bees(important distinction: AFRICAN killer bees, not the hard-working and industrious American bees), a central flaw compounded by many more flaws. The Happening is also grounded on a ridiculous threat, one which was supposed to be a surprise in the narrative flow of the film, but which has already been exposed with the badness of the movie being culturally propagated like a swarm of killer bees. To paraphrase Michael Caine, I never dreamed it would be the trees... they’ve always been our friends! Yes, trees have had it up to here with mankind and have sought to teach us a lesson by releasing airborne toxins that make us want to kill ourselves in spectacularly grotesque ways, which also in turn makes the wind our enemy. Did I mention that The Happening was directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the auteur renown for illogical twists at the end of his movies like Signs and The Village? He’s given up on the illogical twists and gone straight for illogical here!

I have been inundated with warnings about how bad The Happening is: from my friend Jess’s hilarious discussion of it as the Worst Film of 2008 to Christopher Orr’s hilarious spoiler laden list of its terribleness and finally The I.T. Crowd writer and director Graham Linehan leading a global twitter-based viewing of the film here. What is great about The Happening is that you can read all this stuff, read all the reviews about how awful it is and get wind of all the internet chatter about its use of wind as a laugh-inducing threat, but when you watch it you’ll still be left utterly gob-smacked at how stupid the movie really is. It’s a bad movie classic that with its anti-science ecological message becomes totally bullshit. My friends Seymour, Mitch, Jarrad and I let The Happening into our lives one night on DVD and we were became Happened.

Field Notes from a study of The Happening:

1. The title itself, The Happening. Isn’t it the most generic, stupid title you could think of for a movie? Why not call it The Event or The Something? And as if to rub it in every character seems to say the word in dialogue like “What is happening?” or “An evil is happening!” or “Where is this happening?” or “Can this really be happening?” I suspect M. Night was stuck for a title and searched for the most popular word in his script – discounting “the” and “a” and “hotdogs” – and went with The Happening.

2. The problem with M. Night as a director besides his desire to become the next Hitchcock and Spielberg combined is the fact that he has talent. I’ve been an apologist for him in the past as I really liked Unbreakable and Signs was entertaining (a fucking masterpiece in comparison to The Happening) and The Village was decent if you didn’t pay too much attention to its ridiculous Twilight Zone twist. And why? Well, he knows what to do with a camera and he can create slow-building suspense effectively. There are several shots that are fundamentally creepy such as the opening scene where two best females friends chat on a park bench before the Happening causes people to stand still as if frozen by time and one of the female friends decides to stick a hair pin in her neck. Then there’s the one-take where the cop shoots himself in the middle of traffic and we watch several people pick up his gun and do likewise. And a one-shot special effect where a 4WD slams head-on into a tree was so enjoyable we rewound it to watch it again. The problem is that The Happening has the aura of a great zombie film but without zombies. Instead what is our threat? Wind! Fucking wind? How can you film that without being laughable? There is the classic scene where Mark Whalberg, our hero, leads some survivors through a field, running away from a soft breeze as if Days of Heaven was a horror movie. Quick, we need some wind-breakers STAT!

3. Speaking of Mark Whalberg, on the basis of his angry reaction to Andy Samberg’s impression of him on SNL, I fantasised that he went to the premiere of The Happening, saw how he came off in the film, and then went gunning for Shyamalan at the post-film party, ready to punch him square in the face: “Fuck you, dude, you made me look like a total dick!” I like Whalberg, he can be a really great actor and charismatic presence in any number of films (even a dumb action picture like Shooter), but I’ve never seen an actor saddle-bagged the way he is in The Happening. Our introduction to our ‘hero’ is a classroom scene where Whalberg stands in a vest, next to a blackboard with some Einstein quote, mumbling leadenly about disappearing bees. “Have you guys heard of this article about all these bees disappearing?”

The classroom scene also highlights M. Night Shyamalan’s – who is a devout Catholic by the way – broader theme of faith.

Whalberg: “Come on, buddy. Take an interest in science. What could be the
reason bees have vanished?”
Student:[after a long pause] “An act of nature, and we'll never fully
understand it.”
Whalberg: “Nice answer, Jake. He's right. Science will come up with some
reason to put in the books, but in the end it'll be just a theory. I mean, we
will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding.
To be a scientist, you must have a respectful awe for the laws of nature.”

As Jarrad remarked, “Is he a scientist or a religious teacher?”
Mitch: “Alright, kids, time to drink the special red cordial...”

Yes, part of the reason why Whalberg is directed to be so ineffectual and his character is written as such a dunderhead is that his role as a scientist means diddly squat in the face of this Happening. Yes, faith is a fact. Wait, sorry, faith is a facet of how we approach nature and the world and things like global warming. In Jake’s line of dialogue, replace “nature” with “God” and there you have it.

4. John Leguizamo plays Whalberg’s best friend in the picture and he’s introduced arriving after Whalberg’s class has ended, Marcus Brody to his Indiana Jones, and he spouts some dialogue about some stuff before remarking, “It’s good to be a Maths teacher!”
Mitch (quoting The Micallef Programme): “I’m only just a lowly Security Guard and that is what I am.”

5. However, it’s not only Whalberg who suffers, Shyalaman has also cast indie-movie delight and attractive songstress Zooey Deschanel as his estranged wife. The camera emphasises her delightful eyes and one can note the lovely dress she wears throughout, but the possibility that her and Whalberg have any kind of relationship is really difficult to discern.
Mitch: “The only chemistry here is the imported toxins in the air.”
Jarrad: “You can almost smell the acting.”

6. There are also a couple of lines of dialogue that seem like self-criticisms of the film itself, or at least fair warning as to what type of cinematic experience The Happening is. Sample 1: “Our brains come equipped with a self-preservation mechanism.” Yes, but can science really explain why I’m watching this film if I’m equipped with such a biological principle? Sample 2: “Why are you giving one useless piece of information one step at a time?” Answer your own question, Shyamalan!

7. In case it wasn’t clear what’s happening here, these airborne toxins cause people to kill themselves. Yet who wants to see simple,ordinary, meat and potatoes suicides? Give us some imaginative grotesque cartoon imagery if you can, M. Night! The prime example of this is when Whalberg and his motley band of survivors are sitting around sedately in a diner with all the other survivors who have left behind the mass suicides of the city. Whalberg makes nice with Leguizamo’s daughter and then suddenly a stupid woman sitting next to him says, “Look at this!” And we see her camera phone showing pristine footage recorded from a relative in another state of a zoo keeper walking into a lion’s den and allowing them to eat him. Yet, as his arm is ripped off by one lion, instead of the lion taking the whole body or him falling over from the shock of that, he proceeds to stand around in a daze letting another lion rip off another arm (in the same the scene is ripping off the Mexican-birthday-hey-look-its-an-alien video footage scene in Signs). Now what was funny about it – aside from everything – is that only one or two of us chuckled, a merriment that slowly developed into mass laughter as it all slowly dawned how STUPID that scene was, particularly compounded by all these shocked, stunned reaction shots to the footage from patrons in the diner.

8. We have a scene where John Leguizamo decides to leave his child with Whalberg and Deschanel so he can hitch a ride on a covered jeep to get to another city where his own wife is shopping for some toy or something. Jarrad: “Okay, that’s dumb, nobody would just abandon his child.” Then a slow-motion goodbye shot of Leguizamo looking back in sadness, to which we all bust out laughing waiting for a single tear to roll down his cheek. The plot machinations of the movie have us already prepared for the idea that a nuclear family is formed with Leguizamo’s child in Whalberg and Deschanel’s protection, which just leaves us with how is Leguizamo going to become Happened? Well, he’s in the passenger side of this crowded jeep as they hit Pennsylvania or something and it’s creepy with all these ladders near trees and Ivy Leauge college dopes having hung themselves from sturdy branches. Then Leguizamo decides to help out a lady in the back freaking out by forcing her to compute a maths problem while they believe serenely in the air-tight security of their wound up windows. Jarrad: “Yeah, cars are pretty much air tight.” Oh no, there’s a rip in the ceiling, emphasised in close-up, symbolic of the fragile nature of our social fabric?

9. Then we have some yokel that our ‘heroes’ bump into, a gormless, bearded, yokel, salt of the earth type who gives them a ride and starts to yammer on about hot-dogs for no reason. Why is he going on about hot-dogs a lot? He takes them to his greenhouse where we glimpse some not-too-subtle smokestacks on the horizon (what have we wrought?) and then he starts yammering on about plants, “I know what’s doing this, plants, they release chemicals in the air” and “Most plants react to stimulus ... they proved it in tests.” Basically all he says turns out to be true in the logic of the movie’s science, sorry, faith, no wait, bullshit, and so I guess all that hot-dog stuff is supposed to make us shake our hands ruefully, “What a nutty guy!” and then later, “Wait, he was right! Believe the hot-dog loving morons, they know the truth!” Then again it could also produce the reaction that Mitch believed in: “Plants and trees don’t care if you live or die, you hippie fuck!”

10. So as our heroes move away from the city away from the wind and plants that are killing people and into the natural landscape where wind and plants are minimal (wait, no, that’s not correct), they encounter this idiot fucking Shia LeBeouf type actor playing a panicky soldier straight out of a 1950s B-movie. This is proven when he leans into the car, shocked by the chaos created by this Happening and remarks, “Cheese and crackers!” Cheese and crackers? How home-spun. This and “Do you like hot-dogs?” are going to be bumper-sticker worthy catchphrases for sure! Question: is there a swear jar on Shyamalan’s set? Wait, don’t say anything believable like “Jesus Christ!” or “Holy shit!” because that’s a five dollar fine. Why don’t you use “Cheese and crackers” instead? Thanks, Mr Filmmaker!

11. Suspense. You can create this with people stuck out in a field and wind menacingly moving towards them, which the characters attempt to out-run. Yes, it’s the flipside of that old chestnut where a hero outruns a fire explosion. This time the wind gets a chance to show off its merits as a special effect. Also let’s show off Shyamalan’s command of direction with Whalberg being all confused and impotent as an action hero, trying to remember his five step empirical plan, and also Shyamalan’s command of believable dialogue when Zooey remarks in all the panic, “We can’t stand here like uninvolved observers!”

12. Marky Mark, Zooey, Leguiazmo’s pipsqueak daughter, and two boys who tag along for the ride keep on travelling through the scenic countryside when they find a model home. Then Whalberg finds himself in a study and notices ... a PLANT! Holy fucking shit. In the words of Ash, “Quick. Get an axe!” But no, Whalberg approaches slowly and starts talking softly:

Whalberg [to house plant] "Hello. My name is Elliot Moore. I'm just going to
talk in a very positive manner, giving off good vibes. We're just here to use
the bathroom, and we're just going to leave. I hope that's okay. [touches leaf]
Plastic. I'm talking to a plastic plant. I'm still doing it."

Ha ha. He was talking to a plant. Ho hum. As Seymour remarked deadpan, “That was an amazing scene.” Then the five heroes run away from the model home and see too many people around it (apparently the toxins affect people when they’re in large groups?) and then we see one older dude start up a massive lawn mower and then lies down in front of it. Jarrad: “This is going to rule!”

13. The heroes find another house boarded up and seemingly empty, but no, some guy is in there being all isolationist and “Don’t come in my house y’all!” The two boys keep banging on the house loudly like they’re the fucking Goonies and what do you know they both get shot-gunned to death by the crazy nut inside. Jarrad: “Oh, humans. We kind of deserve it, don’t we?” Embrace the wind when things are this grim.

14. The heroes find another fucking house this time run by a passive-aggressive kook grandma in a rocking chair who is all “Want some of my lemon drink?” and keeps being all “Well, come in and have some supper. Not that I made it for you!” and all “Don’t take my cookie, child! Here, have the cookie, child.” It’s like they walked into another movie, like a VC Andrews modern gothic horror novel, Flowers in the Attic 2: Electric Boogaloo. This is underscored by the scene where Mark Whalberg wakes up after spending the night at the house, walking around slowly in the emptiness, opening a door, and finding a bed, and oh shit, there’s this creepy porcelain doll on the bed, and yet, he keeps moving towards it slowly. Seymour: “It’s a doll on the bed. What’s he confused about?” Sure enough, the nutso woman springs up behind up and is all “Argh, get out of here!” Then she wanders off outside to where the wind gets her and Whalberg backs the fuck up closing the door before the wind jiggles the door handle (Mitch: “We’ll be okay until they learn how to open doors.”). Then the old woman begins to bash her head against the windows of the house in an effort to kill herself but unavoidably releasing the wind into the house. Jarrad: “Oh well, they’ve hypnotised her to act on behalf of the wind, that’s fucking retarded.”

15. Deschanel is with the kid in a farm house outside and Whalberg is in a cellar, barricaded against the wind, but there’s a talk pipe or something, which they can communicate through despite the fact the pipe is buried underneath a field between their two structures and they can hear each other with perfect pitch clarity. Mitch: “Fuck, this movie is making me angry.” They seem to be the only survivors left alive. Mitch: “This is like Noah’s Ark... where only the best people are meant to survive and one of them is apparently Mark Whalberg.” Then Whalberg who’s been wearing this mood ring because “science” has proven people emit colours that denote certain emotions looks at the wind outside, looks at his ring and its gone orange. Mitch: “Orange means scared of an impending apocalypse.” Then with their unconvincing martial woes and non-existent attraction to each other, Whalberg and Deschanel decide to cross the ground between them and meet in the middle of the toxin-heavy air. Mutual suicide! Nice going, humanity. Love conquers all, particularly when you pull along an innocent tyke who is of no relation to you. And then the wind stops because things were only Happening for twenty-four hours since it started. Woah, nice save, nature. ANTI-CLIMAX!

16. Then we get some quack three months later on the television nervously gesticulating about how “nature is something we’ll never understand” and the whole mass suicide thing “is a prelude, a warning, we’ve become a threat to this planet.” Jarrad: “Why is the film making the man espousing its message look so crazy?” Then Deschanel finds out she’s pregnant and then somewhere in France the same thing that Happened in the opening Happens there in the conclusion and then the credit “Directed by M. Night Shyamalan” came up and Mitch summed it up for all of us when he replied, “Fuck you.”

Hard Target (1993)

2009-06-01T04:34:00.000-07:00

So Van Damme decided to bring Hong Kong action master John Woo over to the United States to make another version of that hoary chestnut, The Most Dangerous Game, the story where rich people hunt humans for sport (the Ice T/Rutger Hauer version, Surviving The Game, would come out one year later). Woo was known in cult film circles for making awesome films where Chow Yun Fat would wear a trenchcoat and shoot a million dudes with two 45 handguns while chewing a toothpick and then some doves would fly through underscoring the poetic ballet of the mayhem. Hollywood action films had been aping his shit for the last ten years at that point in 1993 so it was his turn to turn the action genre on its head by making films in the West. While Hard Target was dismissed as an impure John Woo film, what with the censors forcing him to trim down the violence substantially and critics complaining that he had to cope with Van Damme’s acting limitations, even the film that stands as the perfect fusion of Woo and Hollywood, Face/Off, is still pretty silly on reflection (don’t get me wrong, I love Face/Off), so give Van Damme a break because Hard Target is fucking kick-ass. What other film opens with its screenwriter, Chuck Pfarrer (a former SEAL team commander), playing the first victim, a grizzled Vietnam vet who is hunted down and shot to shit with spinning steel arrows by a tanned rich yuppie, flanked by the nefarious Fouchon (Lance Henriksen) and his henchman Pik Van Cleef (Arnold Vosloo), the organisers of this secret hunting club?

Turns out that the homeless vet had a daughter who is played by Yancy Butler and her eyebrows venture out to find the father she never knew in an open top convertible through the mean streets of New Orleans. She turns up at a sleazy diner, flashing her cash and standing out in her yuppie wear. When she returns to her car outside, she is cornered by a dozen sleazy low-lives in broad daylight who proceed to slap her around, desiring to rob and rape her. Now we’ve already had one slow-mo intro shot to the formidable gelled mullet of Jean Claude Van Damme’s character, Chance Boudreaux, a Cajun drifter who sitting by himself at the diner counter eating some gumbo and calling it a “tragedy” to the waitress in his thick Belgian, sorry, Cajun accent. We then receive a second slow-mo intro shot with some B.B. King style slide guitar blues intro music as Chance steps onto the scene to showdown with the neighbourhood roughs, issuing the classic line to the tough guy with the flick-knife, “Why don’t you take your big stick and you boyfriend and find a bus to catch.” Of course, these punks aren’t listening even if they could decipher what Van Damme is saying and so they laugh and say stuff like “This guy’s funny” and proceed to surround him in the great tradition of every martial arts film ever made. Woo shows that he knows how to film this action shit as we get a solid ten minutes of Van Damme performing slow-mo high kicks to all the sleazy dudes, even going so far as to throw a guy through a store glass window like they were in a goddamned western and then taking a page out of the Seagal playback and snapping one dude’s arm backwards. “Y’know, it’s a shame,” Van Damme slurs as he hands back Yancy Butler’s purse as she sits behind the wheel of her car in shock, “this used to be such a nice part of town.” Then as Yancy Butler stares in awe Woo shots a slow-mo hero shot of Van Damme walking away slowly down the street, a parked car in the background picking up a lens flare before the image dissolves into the American flag and no one is in doubt: THIS MAN IS A HERO OF OUR TIMES. This is the Woo style; totally melodramatic and totally sincere. We get a third intro-hero-shot when Yancy Butler finally convinces Chance to help her track down her father and at first he refuses but then agrees turning up stoically behind a truck with tin drums that are moved aside to reveal him with another blues boogie guitar flourish on the soundtrack as he walks towards the camera in slow-mo.

Yancy Butler: “What kind of name is Chance?”
Van Damme: “Well, my mama took one.”

Great exchanges in this sucker. Van Damme is handed a decent amount of one-liners he sneers through such as when he’s been assaulted by henchmen and winds up in a police station asking the cops, “What did you arrest me for? Getting beat up without a license?” Anyway as Yancy Butler and Van Damme prowl around the Big Easy looking for clues, we have the bad guys preparing another hunt. The villains in this film are pretty great. First you have Voosloo, better known as The Mummy from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, introduced glowering in the dark with his bald head and deep eyes like he was Nosferatu. Eventually we understand how evil he is when he punches a fat sleazoid local operator right in the stomach while he is sleeping and then when the fat guy is being pulled up for fucking up a detail in the last hunt, he cuts off one of the fat guy’s ears with a pair of scissors and then quips the line, “He’s all ears.” Then you have the head villain played by the awesome Lance Henriksen (c'mon, Bishop from Aliens)who glowers like the best of them with his impressively lined and granite-like face, sitting around in his white luxurious mansion playing a white grand piano wearing a white silk shirt in a poetic touch that is supposed to show us his soul or some deep shit like that, while espousing new clients Nietzsche-type maxims like “It’s always the privilege of the few to hunt the many.” Of course, as vaguely European, upper class villains there is a thin line of homoeroticism in the main villain/second-in-command relationship, which comes to the boil when Van Damme and Yancy Butler discover the nefarious details of this evil hunting club and naturally Van Damme becomes their Hardest Target, but then you shouldn’t hunt what you can’t kill, and Van Damme’s so skilled that the hunter becomes the prey if you follow me.

The first half hour is pretty much atmosphere with lots of scenes of Van Damme being tough, like the scene where he drops in on the fat guy with one ear and purrs “Listen to me very carefully”, and then a few more scenes of Henriksen and Voosloo violently killing people in spectacular ways, such as the police doctor they pay to fake autopsy reports who is eliminated with the old standby of looking through his front door’s peephole and receiving a bullet in the eye. Then Van Damme, Yancy Butler and the only cop they trust, played by Kasi Lemmons, who could have been two days from retirement with the way she is gunned down, are all attacked and Van Damme grabs a pistol and starts performing some slow-mo shoot-outs against an armada of black vans and motorcycles filled with assassins. The action is gloriously non-stop in this chase sequence with Van Damme high-kicking one speeding motorcycle assassin in the head, breaking their neck, and then jumping on the motorcycle to make his getaway. Eventually Van Damme proceeds to surf on the seat of a motorcycle while firing his hand gun, speeding down a closed freeway ramp and into an oncoming van of assassins, letting the motorbike slam into them as he flips over the vehicle in a somersault, landing behind them and firing several shots until they explode. All of this is capped off by a hearty “Yeah!” by Van Damme. A-grade execution, Mr Woo.

The rest of the film includes: Van Damme grabbing a snake by the neck, punching it unconscious and then setting it up as a trap for Henriksen and his band of yuppie asshole hunters; an appearance from Cocoon’s Wilford Brimley playing Chance’s moonshine drinking Uncle who helps kill assassins with a trusty bow and arrow; Van Damme grabbing his trusty silver shotgun which is filmed in erotic slow-motion as if it was the modern-day Excalibur; a massive showdown shootout in an abandoned factory with creepy circus shit everywhere that goes into action overkill as there are only so many shotgun blasts and explosions you can handle; Van Damme riding on a paper mache Pelican and shotgunning bad guys to death like an avenging Carnival angel; Van Damme shooting a hand-gun upside down for no good reason with his pinkie finger, filling renown stuntman Sven Thorsen (the villain from Abraxas) full of holes and then fly-kicking the cigar from Sven’s mouth; Van Damme and Voosloo back to back against a dividing wall, reloading their two handguns each and exchanging snappy patter in a draft of the similar scene that occurs in Face/Off; Henriksen with his trenchcoat on fire which he takes off with a roar; and then Van Damme beating the shit out of Henriksen, saying “How does it feel to be hunted?” and dropping a grenade in Henriksen’s pants and high-kicking him to his explosive death with the concluding line, “Hunting season is over.” Then Van Damme, Yancy Butler and Wilfred Brimley all start to laugh it up, walking away from the wreckage while Creedance Clearwater Revival’s ‘Born on the Bayou’ plays over the closing credits. There you have it. John Woo comes to America so that Van Damme can kick New Orleans another arsehole in the name of homeless people everywhere who are hunted by rich arseholes.

Sudden Death (1995)

2009-05-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Catching up over coffee with a friend at an outdoor table I was trying to remember the title of a Jean Claude Van Damme film, saying “It’s not Kickboxer, the other one,” when a guy in his early twenties sitting next to us overhead and interjected, “Bloodsport.” He continued, “That was one of my favourite movies growing up. It was Van Damme’s first lead role.” A total stranger was opening up to us over a love of Van Damme. This is not the first time this has happened to me. I was once at a house party and was talking some JCVD and a random guy came up to me and advised me to see No Retreat, No Surrender (I have and it’s amazingly awful). Van Damme brings the people together, well, specifically brings together males in their twenties who spent their frustrated, overheated adolescence watching martial arts flicks. Back to the guy who knew the title of Bloodsport at the cafe. He threw in his five cents over the next Van Damme film I was planning to watch, Sudden Death: “That’s the one where Van Damme fights this she-male in a Penguin suit, some guy that has painted nails who you’re not sure if he’s a chick. They fight in the kitchen area and he/she eventually gets his hands boiled in the fry cooker.” I was totally sold on watching it then but it was capped off with the guy remembering, “It’s also the one with Powers Boothe as the bad guy.” Powers Boothe, the acting genius who played Cy Tolliver from the television series Deadwood? Let me at this movie already!

When I was a teenager I was resistant to watching Sudden Death since the trailer made it look like a carbon copy of Die Hard (right down to using Beethoven’s Ode to Joy overlaid over shots of action climaxing in the hero jumping off a high platform as an explosion happens in the background). I was a real John McClane fanboy at the time so I dismissed Sudden Death as a rip-off. Watching the Van Damme film for the first time recently, it was interesting to see that the film knows it is a Die Hard rip-off and knows that the audience would know that it is a Die Hard rip-off so it doesn’t waste any time and gives the audience what they want, setting everything up in the first twenty minutes of screen time. The set up is exactly the same as Die Hard: Darren McCord (possibly the most WASPish character name ever given to Van Damme) is a divorced former fire fighter, haunted by the tragic death of a little girl, who works as a fire marshal in Civic Arena Stadium while the Stanley Cup hockey play-offs take place and decides to take his two kids as a bonding experience. However, you know something is afoot with director Peter Hyams cutting to classic stock scenes where henchmen are halted by idiot authority figures with the line “Hey, what are you doing here? This is a restricted area!” before being met with the familiar PFFT PFFT sound of a pistol with the silencer capped on. The Vice President has decided to attend (played by awesome character actor Raymond J. Barry) and the darkened security of his box seat of the game is invaded by the sinister Joshua Foss (Powers Boothe), a villain that is essentially a variation on Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Under Siege (the rogue government agent left out in the cold who wants revenge and a big chunk of change). His plan is to kill a hostage at the end of every period of the hockey game unless he receives a bazillion dollars in off-shore bank accounts from the corrupt U.S. government. And Joshua is not too shy about killing people with this stock exchange:

Hostage consoling wounded agent: “This man needs a doctor!”
Joshua stands over the wounded man and shoots him: “Not anymore.”

Anyway sooner or later Van Damme stumbles across this sinister plot, starts icing terrorists left and right, disarming the bombs planted around the arena, and keeping in contact the stupid FBI (wait, Secret Service agents) outside who keep fucking things up, which leads to this classic exchange:

FBI Agent: “Have you had any contact with the aggressors?”
Van Damme: “I killed two. Does that qualify as contact?”

Then Joshua has one of his kids hostage (the little girl who practices sign language for no reason except for a later key plot point) and Van Damme is on the walkie talkie issuing threats, “Game over, pal!” The only real difference between Die Hard and Sudden Death is that every fifteen minutes you have a cut away to a hockey game being played and announcers yelling things like “Oh Stop The Press!” There's even a time-out from the action where Van Damme hides in a hockey player's outfit and plays as the goalie, halting a puck from shooting through, making his other child (the moppet who played Tom Hanks' son in Sleepless in Seattle proud).

Now Sudden Death offers two main pleasures. First, there is Powers Boothe as Joshua Foss. Boothe as an actor with his silky voice and glowering visage is pretty much awesome and his role is an underwritten part that he can perform in his sleep, injecting his performance with considerable charisma and menace. He brings gusto to such Big Bad Wolf moments as when he looks Van Damme’s six-year-old daughter in the eye and says, “I’m gonna kill your daddy. What do you think about that?” The scenes with him and Raymond J. Barry arguing over the value of human life etc is like watching two teachers give an acting workshop on how it is done, how you turn clichéd dialogue into engaging material, so pay attention, class, as your notes will be reviewed after the session. Second, the screenwriters must have given themselves a challenge to entertain themselves while they lifted scenes wholesale from Die Hard, Under Siege and Speed, which is that Van Damme should not use firearms throughout the majority of the movie. Instead each bad guy he kills is performed with some unique, grotesque and comic manoeuvre that is established in the first fight scene, previously mentioned, where he kung fu kicks a transvestite in a Penguin mascot costume around a kitchen, culminating in the tranny becoming strangled by a meat press machine. The next fight scene involves Van Damme snapping a left-over chicken bone and stabbing it into the neck of a terrorist who looks like Geddy Lee without the circular shades. The other memorable bit is where Van Damme finds a use for his son’s confiscated water pistol and some kerosene and MacGuyers together a miniature flame thrower when he is corned by the Secret Service agent turncoat who works for Joshua, lighting him up like he was a Guy Fawkes puppet. Fast forward to the climax and you have Van Damme swinging from a cord from the interior of the stadium dome, smashing into the box, shooting hostages left and right, chasing a disguised Joshua through the pandemonium and, rescuing his daughter for the second time. This leads to the awesome sequence where Van Damme climbs on the ladder trailing off the Joshua’s get-away helicopter, shoots the pilot, jumps off the ladder back onto the top of the stadium and watches Joshua scream as his chopper takes about five minutes to slowly descend vertically onto the abandoned hockey rink to his fiery demise.

Sudden Death was made when Van Damme was still a valuable commodity to Universal Pictures and he’s good in this, not really having much to say or do except run around in white t-shirts and perform a high kick every once and awhile. Yet his athletic prowess isn’t emphasised too much and the generic nature of the picture points towards his eventual decline with Double Team around the corner. I remember him appearing on Letterman to promote the film with Letterman providing the telling zinger, “Sudden Death? Isn’t that the title to all your movies?”

Deadly Force (1983)

2009-05-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

A friend found this gem on ex-rental VHS, which positions itself as a Dirty Harry knock-off but sillier, like it was in a tongue-in-cheek precursor to the Naked Gun series with a larger tally of grisly onscreen murders. I could only imagine what the filmmakers would say if they were given a retrospective documentary about Deadly Force: “You see, we wanted to give people a cop movie but we just wanted to tweak the clichés a little bit, poke a bit of fun at the super-cop formula. In a lot of ways, this movie was ahead of its time.”The film is a vehicle for Wings Hauser, a stock Hollywood action hero type, who likes a cross between William Katt from The Greatest American Hero and Ron Pearlman as the Beast in the television show Beauty and the Beast. Blonde curly hair, a tall imposing frame, a prominent overbite and a tendency to flex his arse muscles in tight pale grey slacks: basically your high school jock grown up to be a stupid movie star with a name that makes him sound like an Austrian Hand-Pistol. What strikes you as amazingly awesome in the first ten minutes is that Wings’ character – Stony Jackson Cooper (yes, that’s his name!) – is given not one but two introduction shots. We first see him placing money on some rat gambling game, throwing a soccer ball around like a Junior High coach, and walking through the streets like a man of the people. The next shot we find him in a black suit, open collar white shirt, as if he spends time reading Bukowski and listening to Sinatra, playing at a piano in a darkened bar while hitting back a glass of gin and receiving a phone call from a friend in an emergency (“I got a Puerto Rican revolutionary wrapped up in dynamite!” is the information that comes down the telephone). I kept expecting the next shot to be a third introduction to Wing’s character, him painting a landscape while jet-skiing down at the beach and protecting a young boy’s sandcastle from some Nazi surf punks. Anyway it’s the 1980s and Stony is a super-cop, which is established with the brilliant 1980s soundtrack of anthemic rock guitars and Casio keyboard orchestration, but you also receive the vibe that Deadly Force was a failed TV pilot with such Magnum P.I. touches like Stony being picked up by Estelle Getty of all people as a taxi driver who functions as his secretary and switchboard while engaging in snappy patter.

Like any cop movie, we see Wings/Stony work his magic at an unrelated crime scene that opens the movie with the Puerto Rican revolutionary wrapped up in dynamite bit. Yes, Stony’s shifty friend who operates a factory has a terrorist threatening to blow up his abandoned warehouse so Stony strides on in and jimmies up the iron cast frames to the moving platform where this friend of Castro’s is yelling threats. Wings aims his 45 at him and the revolutionary grips the plunger to his explosives tightly, resulting in this exchange that stands as an example of the film’s snappy dialogue:

WINGS: “Is this is what I call a Mexican stand-off?”
REVOLUTONARY: “I’m a Puerto Rican and this is real dynamite!”
WINGS: “I’m French, English and German and this is a real gun!”

The movie tries to show Wings as being all crazy and above the law as he threatens the Puerto Rican with the hand-gun, but all that happens is Wings negotiates the terrorist to leave the building for half of the $20, 000 he is being paid to stop this guy. “You’re crazy, man!” says the Puerto Rican. It’s all a bit nutty really. Y’see, Wings is a former cop now bounty hunter who flies over to L.A. to help out an old friend who is a safecracker and who’s daughter was killed by the mysterious X serial killer (“This freak kills anything,” we’re told), pushed out of a seven storey window in the opening scenes. No sooner than Wings is back in his former city does he have his old superiors on his ass, warning him to lay off the case, follow the rules or as the stern black chief warns him, “I’ll put you in for so long they’ll have to air-mail in light!” (this is one of the many ridiculous analogies used throughout the film). Then Wings is roughed up by goons of the city’s kingpin who put away for a number of years so he decides to pull a Jim Rockford, sneak into the crook’s mansion, surprise his elderly chatty mother (another zany touch by the filmmakers), interrupt the crook sleeping and ask for two week’s grace while he finds the X killer in exchange for a cut of the ransom money. The crook agrees but not before warning him if he doesn’t pay up then he’ll be “dick-deep in dog-shit.” Wings then sees that the crook’s mistress is watching a porno with two ladies kissing each other’s breasts and he asks innocuously, “They’re gay?”, which is either proof of how awesome he is as a detective or how lame the film’s attempts at humour are.

For most of the movie you have Wings hitting the streets to guitar-based montage music, roughing up teenagers in arcades playing games like THIEF, eating ice-cream cones with uniformed police, or throwing a perp against a wall and yelling out bizarrely, “HEY I’M NOT GOING TO BUST YOU!” Meanwhile we have the mysterious X killer who looks like Daniel Johnston running around and strangling people like the hooker with a heart of gold who is singing to her baby in a church when she is killed (the pathos is staggering). You also have Wings swanning into his ex-wife’s apartment, a third rate Daryl Hannah type who is also a reporter on the X case and is angry with him for walking back into her life in the first scene they have but in the next scene he’s hanging around her apartment and being all buddy buddy. This leads to a bullshit scene where Wings is lying nude in a bathtub when the X killer tries to assassinate him with a automatic machine gun (an Uzi with a silencer) from the other building across from the apartment and we have Wings flopping about, trying to find some cover in the apartment, all the while showing off his arse in three consecutive shots. He and his ex-wife then have a third scene where she finds the apartment shot up and him bleeding but before you know it they’re making love-sex in a hammock to a saxophone soundtrack. Who can resist broken glass and blood as compelling aphrodisiacs? However, halfway through the film Wing’s ex-wife also performs an interview with a Success-Training Psychiatrist who criticises people on the way they pose and dress and tells them to find the “power” within. And he’s played by the smooth actor Paul Shenar who played Sosa in Scarface so you know immediately that he is the villain behind this all (alongside his dialogue with gems like “Everybody lies. Women lie when they put on make-up” or when asked if he was ever in prison he replies, “We’re all in prison.”) Sure enough there’s some complicated backstory where Sosa was a Success-Training leader in prison who was killing all those connected to his mysterious past and murdering some random innocent people too to throw the police off the scent. About twenty car chases later, a few more scenes of the angry police chief calling Wings a “glory boy” and a protracted shoot-out where Wings breaks into Sosa’s mansion, rescues his ex-wife while being a shot in the leg a couple of times, but then fires one bullet into the back of Sosa’s getaway car as it drives off which then EXPLODES causing the X killer to die in a fiery wreck.

Deadly Force was vintage ex-rental early-1980s VHS bullshit gold with its blend of hoary old cop movie clichés and lame attempts to parody said clichés, introducing us all to the third-rate star power of Wings Hauser who joins the esteemed ranks of direct-to-video action heroes.

Future Bullshit: Gamer (2009)

2009-05-23T00:43:00.000-07:00

The jock-asshole pair of geniuses behind the Crank movies, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, are back with a film that will be sure to make online gaming nerds happy in a film surprisingly enough entitled Gamer (omg! lol!).

This trailer is amazing as it's like a throwback to all those lame hacker/computer game movies from the mid-1990s. In a world where it's the future and nerds get to play (in balletic slow-motion yoga moves) real life soldiers in Saving Private Ryan outtakes, even choosing Mr. This-Is-Sparta! himself, while once again we go through the same corporate control versus the freedom of sportstar slaves that we went through with the original Rollerball. I also like how Michael C. Hall, a very good actor, adopts a terrible Southern accent as if they'd worked out this character for Gary Oldman to overact in and couldn't sign him instead settling for Dexter himself.

It'll be interesting to see if a film like Gamer can lure actual gamers out of their online worlds and into a cinema where they can watch a movie that remediates the gaming experience but which they can't play themselves!

Death Warrant (1990)

2009-04-04T00:03:00.001-07:00

Before watching Death Warrant I had thought that the plot, which is set in an L.A. County Prison, revolved around a warden-sponsored prisoner-cage-match tournament for some reason. I think that was just a mistake on my part as all the late-1980s Jean Claude Van Damme flicks revolve around him having to take part in an Enter The Dragon-styled tournament. However, Mark DiSalle, the producer of Bloodsport, decided that Van Damme needed to expand his range and so cast him as an undercover cop from Quebec who is to investigate a spate of prisoner deaths within the big house. Yes, Death Warrant is another entry into the reliable prison genre (Sylvester Stallone’s Lock Up and Tom Selleck’s An Innocent Man were both released the year before Death Warrant). Like Oz, there are segregated racial tribes on the inside, particularly since it’s an L.A. prison, there are lots of over-acting Chicano stereotypes who threaten stuff like “I’m gonna cut you, esse” before Van Damme fly-kicks them in the face. Like The Shawshank Redemption, there’s a gruff-but-kindly, older, black prisoner (played by Robert Gulliuame) who comes to help the white “new fish” and therefore be redeemed in turn (though unlike The Shawshank Redemption there’s a lot more high-kicks to the face). Thankfully as well the prison issued uniform includes short-sleeved denim shirts, which finish just above Van Damme’s rippling biceps, always shown flexing whenever he is high-kicking a sadistic guard or a sadistic prisoner in the face.

While the opening credits play out over an arty, abstract image of rippling drain water, Death Warrant soon orientates us into the pleasingly familiar cop movie with Van Damme standing outside an abandoned building ready to capture the serial killer known as the Sandman. This is the first exchange in the movie with Van Damme talking to his superiors on a pay-phone:

Cop Over Despatch: “Burke! Wait for back-up!”
Burke (Van Damme): “No! He killed my partner.”

But before he can even enter the premises in his lone-wolf manoeuvre, three Latino gangster surround him to which he spin-kicks them into submissions. With his trusty 38 revolver, Van Damme then proceeds to stalk through dimly lit interiors before coming face to face with the Sandman who we know is creepy because the actor playing him, Patrick Kilpatrick, has wisely shaved off his eyebrows for the part. “I can never die... because I’m the Sandman,” he says. Van Damme blasts him six times in the chest and then adds, “You’re under arrest.” Classic stuff. This is then capped off with Van Damme walking through the L.A. police department high-fiving cops while up-tempo music that sounds suspiciously like the theme to The Cosby Show blares over the soundtrack. Then Van Damme has a meeting with the bureaucrats who sit in boardrooms in suits worrying over how the killings within this prison will affect the upcoming election. They want to send him in undercover as a prisoner to find out what the hell is going on with all these prisoners being spiked in the back of their heads while they're asleep and so the authorities give Van Damme a cute lawyer played by Cynthia Gibb as his contact (she will pose as his wife and will naturally fall in love with Van Damme’s smouldering presence).

Van Damme hits the prison yard and there is the usual bunch of agreeable clichés. His cell-mate threatens him initially: “Get down on your hands and knees and you pay like any other cherry.” Van Damme slams him against the wall and replies, “I don’t pay... I don’t punk.” And then after that exchange they kind of become friends. Well, that’s the spirit of fraternal brotherhood that prison creates in men. Van Damme’s investigation begins properly as he negotiates the racial borders set up within prison: the black guys all hang together listening to late-1980s non-descript rap, smoke joints and have posters of Malcom X on their cell walls while the Aryan brotherhood types have weird 1980s Mohawks that have the names of people they killed tattooed on the side of their skulls (“That’s very special,” Van Damme glibly offers). Death Warrant is the type of B-movie where not a scene can be wasted in the 85 minute running time, so when you have an odd moment that seems out of place then you can correctly assume that it is a clue to the mystery. Such as when the creepy prison doctor (played by the evil principal from Buffy) notes that Van Damme as AB blood, which is “rare”, and then the wife to one of Cynthia Gibb’s superiors, a kindly father-figure type, mentions her medical treatment, and you can ascertain that prisoners are being used as organ farm for the medical black market. But if you’re too thick to cotton onto this, don’t worry, you have the helpful father-figure bureaucrat who turns out to be the evil boss holding a gun on Cynthia Gibb and performing the time honoured tradition of the Talking Killer cliché where he explains his reasons while a swanky party goes outside his house.

Van Damme’s time on the inside is made even difficult when the corrupt officials send transfer The Sandman into the prison, blowing Van Damme’s cover and making sure that this mission leads to a showdown. And this time it’s personal. Particularly when the sick freak is tying Van Damme up to the prison showers and cutting him slightly with a blade in a torture scene heavy with allusions to Jesus Christ’s crucifixion (or Mel Gibson’s torture scene in Lethal Weapon 1). This leads to a great climax that gives us a showdown in the steel-girders and steam-pipes section of the prison where The Sandman beats on Van Damme for about twenty minutes, proving his credentials as a bruised and battered hero, before Van Damme regroups and proceeds to kick the ever loving shit out of The Sandman with an avalanche of high-kicks. He then kills the villain twice, once by kicking him into the furnace he was stupidly standing in front of, and then secondly when he jumps out of the flames in surprise, kicking the back of his head into an exposed screw.

Now what else is there to recommend about Death Warrant? You have the explanation that Van Damme’s character is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police so as to explain his slurred Belgian accent; you have an evil prison guard who uses the “n” word a bunch of times, but not to worry, he’s shot-gunned by an African-American in the climax so it all balances out; you have grisly prison deaths like a kook who helps Van Damme being drenched with gasoline and burnt alive in his cell for being a snitch; you have Al Leong, the Asian stuntman of the 1980s (you might recognise him from Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and as Ghengis Khan in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) attacking Van Damme with some chains to which Van Damme throws his head through a tumble dry and then turns the thing on; you have your boudoir of transvestite prisoners whose section has a lot of silk drapery; you have Van Damme naked and chained in a solitary cell at one point satisfying his one nude scene clause in his contract; you have a scene where Cynthia Gibb is felt up by sleazy prison guards who search her leeringly before she visits Van Damme in the conjugal trailer; you have a nerdy computer hacker teenager who helps Cynthia Gibb hack into some files while saying hacker stuff like “I’m a computer cowboy” and “you want to watch Star Trek?”; and then finally you have this classic line of prison-movie dialogue, “You’ve gotta cover your ass around here... and I mean literally cover your ass!”

In the end, a solid B-movie vehicle for Van Damme. Disappointingly, however, there are no scenes where Van Damme relies on doing the splits, no problem, in order to escape out of a tight situation.

12 Rounds (2009)

2009-03-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

12 Rounds is basically a throwback to your mad bomber movie that was all the rage back in the 1990s. It’s what would happen if Blown Away kidnapped Speed and only Die Hard With A Vengeance could save the day. The only thing that places this in 2009 is the continued trend of Hollywood studios and their directors to indulge in that hyper-style, over-done editing and camera tricks (basically what Oliver Stone did in Natural Born Killers but without the social commentary), which is usually the trademark of the headache inducing efforts of Tony Scott and not Renny Harlin who is at the helm here (he of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger) 12 Rounds is also another vehicle for WCW star John Cena who looks like Matt Damon if he was bolted by Gamma Rays. I mean this guy is huge; his neck looks as thick as an oil-rigger’s thigh. The most fascinating stuff in the film is watching this guy handle a phone or hold a gun in his massive paws; he looks like he crush them into dust at any second if he exerted any pressure. Cena plays a New Orleans cop who has unbelievably attractive wife, played by some slinky blonde model, with whom he has quaint fights about finding his badge that was left on the “thingy” (a shelf). He cruises the streets in a squad car with his partner a black guy who is stereotypically hypersexual and stumbles into an FBI hunt for an Irish bomber for hire named Miles Jackson played by The Wire’s Senator Carcetti. While the FBI drop the ball in their surveillance, Cena through his intuitive powers spots the bad guy with his own sexy wife, played by some slinky brunette model, and winds up pursuing their speeding car ON FOOT because he’s John freaking Cena and he doesn’t need a car to chase bad guys; he is a car! He ends up throwing a boat in front of their car, but when he draws down on the two criminals with a gun, a truck accidentally flattens the sexy wife of the bomber. Miles Jackson glowers and says to Cena, “I’ll remember you!”

One year later and Cena wakes up a Detective and finds his wife on his case about the plumbing and wouldn’t you know it he gets a call from Miles Jackson who says it’s their “anniversary” and that he wants to pay back Cena for taking away his wife. Then his car explodes and then his house explodes, which sets up a precedent that the movie sticks to of having an explosion every twenty minutes. Before you know it, Miles Jackson talks about how this is all a “game” and that they have “12 rounds”, which basically amounts to him telling Cena to drive like hell across New Orleans and stop another explosion from happening. The “12 rounds” concept is shoe-horned in there as if to touch upon Cena’s background as a wrestler without there being any reason for it in the film (I know there’s a scene where Miles interrupts a chess game and predicts each player’s move in that way that shows us he’s a bloody genius, but it’s not enough to explain all this “onto the next clue” and “game over” business that seems more the handiwork of a Batman villain than an Irish terrorist). In terms of the action stakes, there’s some good stuff here including Cena commandeering a souped up 1970s sports car to race a ferry, Cena launching from the top of a building with a hose just like in Die Hard, and Cena escaping out of an elevator that crashes into the ground, taking a fat security guard named Willie plummeting to his death. This last stunt is kinda funny because we only meet Willie five minutes before he dies (though he does mention he has a “wife and kids” if we want to feel sorry for him) and it carries the underlying lesson that if he wasn’t so fat and was instead buff like John Cena he’d be alive today (Cena should show this clip at schools if he ever gets involved in a Schwarzenegger style initiative to get kids fit). Anyway the best sequence is when Cena tries to stop an out of control tram from crashing into a nice street festival by planting his car in front of it, jumping out to help the driver stop the tram (that doesn’t work), jumping on top to separate the electrical wires (that doesn’t work), jumping back into the car in front of the tram, telling his FBI off-sider “that didn’t work” and then finally jumping out of the car as he drives it into the city’s electricity generator. There is some hilarious ADR business with dubbed generic lines from the tram driver telling Cena “I can’t steer” and “This thing is out of control!”

Now Cena excels with regards to the physical stuff, running around and shouting generic action dialogue like “If you hurt my wife, I will hunt you down and kill you!” or “You lose!” Y’know, stuff that’s par for the course for a wrestler in the ring. However, when he is called to do emotional stuff or just generally conversational exchanges, his eyes are like that of an obedient canine awaiting treats in between takes (I cannot claim credit for this description; my friend Mitch read this line in a review of 12 Rounds somewhere). I think he needs a wacky black comedian buddy for his next film, like JD from Scrubs if he’s available, to rub off some personality onto his hulking mass. Cena impressed me in his first, The Marine, which was awesomely bullshit and came out straight to DVD in Australia. 12 Rounds doesn’t quite reach the heights of The Marine but it’s still entertaining to the degree if you find intermittent explosions and implausible action sequences entertaining. I have hope for Cena though; he and Jason Statham represent our hope for the action movie hero in our contemporary period.

Bloodsport (1988)

2009-03-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

Bloodsport is a late-1980s martial arts flick produced by Cannon films as a vehicle for the talents of Jean Claude Van Damme, his first lead role, and it’s basically the umpteenth remake of Enter The Dragon. The soundtrack is traditional "Oriental" wind chime music intermixed with 1980s Phil Collins styled drums. Fight fans should know the drill: there’s a secretive competition to which fighters of all styles and nationalities are invited to, which inevitably boils down to our virtuous hero, competing for reasons of honour and respect, and the monstrous villain who strikes his opponents down with sadistic glee. The location this time around is Hong Kong where there is a hidden underground fighting pit where the fighters and gamblers assemble, “a no-man’s land in the middle of a tourist’s paradise” as one character helpfully explains. The tournament is Kumite, which is a full contact physical fighting challenge where only the best compete and there can only be one winner. The losers usually leave the arena dead, paralysed or struck in the face so hard they spit out copious amounts of blood accentuated in slow-motion close-up. “That’s why they call this thing bloodsport, kid!” is one line of dialogue we hear that subtly explains the idea behind the title to the audience in case they were confused that this was a Merchant-Ivory film and not a violent martial arts flick.

Jean Claude Van Damme is our hero, Frank Dux. Now before you mispronounce it as “duck”, be forewarned, it’s Dux as in Dukes as in “Put up your dukes!”, you follow me? He’s a soldier in the United States Army who goes AWOL in order to pay his respect to his mentor and trainer, Tanaka (played by Lao Che from Temple Of Doom), a tough but kindly martial arts expert who caught Frank Dux as a young kid breaking into his abode and attempting to steal his samurai sword (the flashback sequences that take up the first fifteen minutes are pretty great as the kid they pick to play the young Van Damme has an atrocious Belgian accent that makes him sound like a retard). Tanaka teaches Van Damme all sorts of helpful stuff like catching gold fishes with his hand with lightning fast super speed, serving tea to his Japanese faux-family with a blindfold on, and having his hands and feet tied to ropes, stringing him up like he was drawn and quartered. Of course, Van Damme beats this obstacle with his super-power of doing the splits, no problem. For the record, Van Damme does the splits about seven times over the course of Bloodsport both as an act of meditation and as an act of defiance. Jackson (Donald Gibb), the burly, hairy American fighter who becomes Van Damme’s buddy and the movie’s comic relief interrupts Van Damme in his hotel room while he does the splits, no problem, and has to comment, with a beer in his hand, “That hurts me just looking at it.” You said it, chief.

Anyway, skip to Hong Kong and the Kumite where Van Damme is to honour Tanaka who is now confined to a bed as he is old and sickly. But the fight organisers don’t believe that Van Damme is a student of Tanaka because Van Damme is a round-eye and they ask him to hit a pile of bricks but only break the bottom one, which Van Damme does in a glorious low-angle slow-motion shot that has his eyes wide and his mouth open mewling like a cat in that convention of all kung fu movies that Bruce Lee patented. Speaking of Bruce Lee, Bolo Yeung, the mountain of flesh that starred in Enter The Dragon is the villain here, Chong Li, a sadistic son of a bitch who is said to have never lost and killed a guy in the last Kumite, which has set a negative precedent for the guy since he can’t seem to leave a fight without breaking a limb in half or snapping a neck sickeningly. Once Chong Li puts Van Damme’s buddy, Jackson, the bruiser with the Harley Davidson head-band into the hospital in critical condition, the stage is set for a slow-motion high-kick climax where both Van Damme and Bolo Yeung wear short-shorts.

What else do we have here? You’ve got an awesome montage of all the fighting at the Kumite that is scored to the fantastic song ‘Fight To Survive’ performed by Stan Bush, king of the 1980s movie montage songs, which is thankfully repeated over the closing credits. You have Forrest Whitaker and another older white dude playing government agents assigned to bring Frank Dux back to the military in a number of scenes that basically pad out the movie to feature film length, the worst of which is a hokey chase sequence through picture postcard locations of Hong Kong with Van Damme in a yellow jacket cheerily leading them on a merry chase until the two agents fall into the water. You’ve got a love interest American female reporter with big blonde hair and the facial features of a second-rate cheerleader who wants to find out about this Kumite tournament but ends up falling in love with none other than Frank Dux. This leads to a bullshit highpoint where they go out to a candlelight dinner and cut to the next morning, the female is in bed, her body covered by a blanket. She turns and looks to see, as the audience does, a glistening butt shot of Van Damme as he puts on some tight red underpants (something for the ladies, no doubt). You’ve got Van Damme doing the splits, no problem, in slow motion for one contestant he faces and then punching up into the dude’s groin. You’ve got Van Damme screaming “Noooooooooooo!” when his best buddy is creamed by Chong Li and then a trademark Rocky IV montage where he rides a subway train in a moment of melancholy, flash-backing to scenes that happened ten minutes beforehand, and being haunted by the maniacal visage of Chong Li in reflective surfaces. You’ve got the gruelling climactic fight where Chong Li cheats like the scoundrel that he is and temporarily blinds Van Damme with some hidden dust, but thankfully Van Damme had all that blind fighting training even though it takes him ten minutes of eye-popping screaming to remember this fact. And then you’ve got the freeze frame last scene where title cards pop up telling us that this was based on the true story of the real Frank Dux, a retired kumite champion, whose record-breaking stats are helpfully given to us as well.

Bloodsport is very generic as far as martial arts movies go, but it’s a well-made bullshit action flick and a well-oiled Van Damme sticks mostly to doing the splits, no problem, and high kicks to the rib-cage of dozens of stunt people. But if you just want the fight scenes with Stan Bush warbling over the time, trust in YouTube to provide:

Road House (1989)

2009-03-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

Note: I'll be uploading some old Bullshit Movie reviews on this here blog for the sake of completion as well as reminding you all about some Bullshit Classics.

If there's one cinematic cliche I'm crazy about, it is the bar brawl! A fight breaks out between two people in a bar in a movie and somehow that encourages all the other people around them to stop what they're doing and beat each other up as bottles and chairs go flying around the place! Now you're lucky if a movie contains ONE bar brawl, but how about a far-out flick that is FULL OF THEM! I give you Road House, the classic motion picture dedicated to the art of the bar-brawl and the science of the bouncer.

Patrick Swayze plays Dalton, the best 'cooler' in the bar business. Now a 'cooler' is a guy who runs the bouncers in a bar and basically keeps things orderly between the meat-head patrons. He's contacted by a well-meaning bar-owner, played by Kevin Tighe, who describes his place, The Double Deuce, as "the kind of place where they mop up eyeballs off the floor after closing." Now Dalton is quite a character, envisionaged in this film as a modern day Jesus. He knows that his powers are best used where they are most needed, so he hightails his cushy job, gives his car to a homeless bum (thankfully, he had his other car, a BMW, in storage) and drives out to meet his awaited destiny at The Double Deuce. Road House pre-empts the rise of Steven Seagal by a couple of years by offering a hero that is a combination of Eastern Philosophy and Western Kicking-Ass Know-How. We are informed that Swayze has a PhD in Philosophy (When asked what type of philosophy, he responds, "Man's search for faith. That sort of shit."). He practices a morning routine of Tai Chi where he is shirt-less and greased up, making his body glisten in the sunlight. He never uses his lethal powers until he is pushed to, and in a similar fashion to the trademark Seagal characterisation, he is whispered about constantly -- "Hey, who is this guy?, "Hey, this guy is good!", "I heard he ripped a guy's throat out!" and the best one, "Story is, if you fuck with him, he'll seal your fate!" And he embodies what a man was, or should have been, in 1989 - a white Judo-styled shirt (who needs buttons?), tight-ass jeans and a raging blow-dried mullet. The man also has demons, haunted by a past where he killed a guy, and troubled in the present, as his attempts to clean up the Double Deuce are met with resistance by the town bad guy, gangster Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), who runs the town with the mayor and the sheriff in his pocket blah blah.

Produced by action movie master Joel Silver, Road House delivers everything a 17 year old male ever wanted in a movie: ass-kicking, table-splitting, throat-ripping, shotgun-clacking, monster truck demolition derby, flying exploding cars, a striptease by a blonde with big boobs, a fat guy in a CAT trucker's cap getting punched in his overhanging gut, a blues bar band fronted by a blind guy, and balls-to-the-walls-and-every-inch-of-the-blood-stained-floors action! It has also has a few things for the ladies - y'know, the bits where the movie drags - taken to this flick by their drop-kick boyfriends: their favourite Dirty Dancer getting up out of bed nude with a trademark Richard Gere butt-shot, a romantic interest with a Doctor played by the tall, leggy, blonde Kelly Lynch, who falls for Dalton after stitching a knife wound and hearing his profound thoughts like "pain don't hurt" and "nobody wins a fight". Of course, out on the town, Kelly Lynch lets down her hair and takes off her glasses (she's not just brains, but a bimbo with brains!) and succumbs to the Swayze on the second date where discussion over her uncle turns into an air-borne penetration in the course of two minutes! And there's something also for the more sexually-confused male members of the audience when all the beef-cake shots of Swayze climax in a mud-slopping, fist fight between him and the main bad guy henchman, Jimmy, who seeths threateningly to Swayze, "I used to fuck guys like you in prison!" Did I say this movie was awesome? No? This movie is awesome. And I haven't even discussed the highlight of Sam Elliott playing Swayze's mentor/buddy who helps him stomp bad guys, looking like he's been sleeping in a ditch for three days and uttering in his gravelly cowboy voice great lines like, "I'll get all the sleep I need when I'm dead."

Road House, the last of the drive-in, mullets and muscles, T & A action flicks of the 1980s, and yet the beginning of the genre's interest in being quasi-philosophical and profound. And when was the last time you saw a film directed by a guy named Rowdy Herrington?

DALTON: [Patrick Swayze]: "All you have to do is follow three simple rules. One, never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. Two, take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary. And three, be nice."

Point Break (1991)

2009-03-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

Note: sometimes on Bullshit Movies we also use the word “bullshit” as a positive attribute. Like the slang way you might say a film is "so bullshit" as a way of describing how awesome it is.

Let’s just say it right now: Point Break is a modern classic. Like Top Gun, it was a hit at the cinemas upon release but its status as a piece of film has increased over time, and also like Top Gun, it can be appreciated both ironically and sincerely by jocks and cineastes alike. I’ve seen quotes from the film scribbled on the insides of cafe toilet walls (“Lawyers don’t surf” and “Back off, Warchild. Seriously” could be seen in the male toilets at Cafe 130s in Leederville) and it’s been referenced openly in Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz and subtly in David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (there is a Pointe Break retirement home in the film). During the week, my ladyfriend Danica brought up her favourite moment in the film: the scene where Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, plays a drug dealer surfer who accidently gets his foot blown off in an FBI raid on his gang’s home and the resulting sweaty close-up of him screaming, which we agreed was pretty hilarious. Friends and acquaintances in high school would quote heavily from the film such as the scene where Warchild’s gang has ex-footballer turned FBI agent turned undercover surfer Keanu Reeves is surrounded on the beach and Keanu is playing it cool, saying “this is the part where you locals gang up on a yuppie wannabe like me” and we cut to Kiedis sing-scatting the line, “But that would be just a waste of time!” My friend Greg used to do a great impression of that moment. And then other kids on the schoolyard would speak emphatically about how awesome the scene was during the FBI raid where Keanu is attacked by a blonde naked surfer chick who was taking a shower when the door is kicked in and is thereby naked throughout the whole sequence. And then you have my sister Sarah who announced while I began to re-watch Point Break on DVD that “it’s the hottest that Keanu has ever looked in a movie,” which she said as the opening credits began with a rain-slicked Keanu firing a shotgun at paper targets while the director Kathryn Bigelow intercuts sun-lit, wave-heavy, slow-motion surfing footage, a winning combination that Sergei Eisenstein must have only dreamed about when theorising about the concept of montage back in the former Soviet Union.

For those who haven’t seen Point Break, it basically concerns a fresh-faced “blue-flamer” FBI agent from Quantico named Johnny Utah (Reeves) who is transferred to the L.A. division and partnered up with Pappas (Gary Busey), a pot-bellied wild card who has a theory that a quartet of successful bank-robbers called “The Ex-Presidents” who wear rubber masks of Presidents (Nixon, Reagan, Johnson, Carter) during their heists are actually surfers. Or as he helpfully says in the scene that was used in the trailers a lot, “The Ex-Presidents are SURFERS!” So Johnny Utah begins to surf and brings his surfboard into the squadroom which pisses off their angry chief John C. McGinley playing a variation of the role he would perfect in Scrubs.

“Have you boys achieved anything today?” McGinley yells.
“I caught my first tube... sir,” says Keanu.

What is fantastic about the film is the combination of elements. Keanu was working his way to leading man status at the time and still using his Bill & Ted “dude” voice, which is oddly compelling, particularly in comically dramatic scenes like where he starts yelling at Pappas to get him mad and motivated. You’ve got Busey in fine form, playing the wigged out comic relief doomed partner (much like the Jeff Daniels part in the later Keanu action flick, Speed), and he still sticks to the script and hadn’t turned into a parody of himself just yet. Then you have the bad guy, Bodhi, a character essayed by Patrick Swayze with beach blonde Kurt Cobain look and utilising the Warrior Poet ambience he brought to the movie Roadhouse. Yes, as Keanu becomes embroiled in the world of surfing, learning what the little dude who sold him a board said, which was that “surfing is the source, it’ll change your life”, he learns that the new buddies he plays beach football with and has wild parties with tin drum fires on the beach are actually a threat to the public (similar to what happens in The Lost Boys but with vampires instead of surfers). While there is a female love interest provided by Lori Petty (who I am still unsure about as actress, mainly because she played one of the most annoying characters ever in A League Of Their Own), the main romantic tension comes from the push-and-pull of Keanu falling under Swayze’s spell, attempting to resist his philosophical pursuit of “The Ride” and his “100% Pure Adrenaline” lifestyle. From The Book of Bodhi: “If you want the ultimate, you’ve got to be willing to pay the ultimate price. It’s not tragic to die doing what you live.” Once both their ulterior identities are revealed to each other, the movie commences a cat and mouse game of mind-fucking that involves jumping out of a plane without knowing if your parachute is properly packed or robbing a bank without a mask.

Kathryn Bigelow directed Point Break after the success of her rad low-budget contemporary vampire western flick, Near Dark. She began an association with James Cameron, which also led to a marriage that didn’t last, who produced Point Break (and also apparently rewrote the script) and her next film, Strange Days. She brings a great, advertising-influenced visual eye to the film including the impressive car-chase foot-chase sequence in the middle of the film, which kind of rips off Raising Arizona while providing a great visual metaphor for the law’s impotence and love’s frustration when Johnny Utah fires off his gun into the air as he can’t bring himself to kill the masked Bodhi. It’s the early 1990s as well so all the surfers look like they are caught between looking like extras in a Guns N Roses music video and preparing to audition for the arrival of Grunge. However, nothing can compare to the enigmatic showdown at the end where Hollywood places one Australian actor (Peter Phelps) in what looks like a Canadian location and a sign that says, “Bells Beach” to convince us that the film is happening in Australia, even though the cops at the end sound like New Zealanders on helium. Still, gotta love that “Fifty Year Storm” and Keanu telling Swayze “You gotta go down. It’s gotta be this way” while Swayze says stuff like “You can’t keep me locked up in a cage!” It’s a brilliantly goofy ending that updates the High Noon convention of throwing one’s badge away with an existential image of the sublime as Swayze hits the mammoth waves that he has been waiting his whole life to ride.

However, if you were worried that Hollywood might mess up a good thing with an unnecessary remake of Point Break, not to worry, they’ve gone old-school and decided upon an unnecessary sequel: Point Break Indo, which is to be directed by Speed’s Jan De Bont and that won’t feature Swayze or Reeves or even a tanned Tom Sizemore complaining about his shit surfer hairstyle. I think with that film we might be using "bullshit" in the negative sense...

Bullshit Nostalgia: Enter The Ninja (1981)

2009-02-24T06:12:00.001-08:00

When I was a little tyke Channel 10 had an Action Movie themed week of movies. If I remember correctly Predator was on Sunday night, Robocop might have been in there, Death Before Dishonour and this, Enter The Ninja on a Friday night. I watched this when I was young basically based on the thrill of seeing a white ninja and a black ninja have a sword fight. There was a vivid scene where The White Ninja (yes, played by Italian white guy, Franco Nero) was slashed across the thigh, the red of the blood burning itself on my celluloid memories. I don't remember it being as an action packed as the trailer makes out. However, thankfully being somewhat older I can appreciate the casting of Sho Kosugi, the awesome martial arts star who was in the incredible Pray For Death, a VHS classic of its kind.

Why this is trailer is a classic is obvious. One, it's a CannonFilms trailer, the company of Globus/Golan, the Israeli super-producing team of the 1980s and CannonFilms trailers are always classic. Secondly, because ninjas haven't been run into the ground as a 'cool' concept, you have breathless, excitable narrators espousing about "the oldest and ultimate martial art!" Thirdly, I like it when heroes pull straight their jackets after making a quip and before they hit a guy.