Frankenstein Conquers The World

What we got here is your basic Japanese giant monster movie. Nothing too special. It begins like so many others have, with some Nazis retrieving Frankenstein's still-beating heart from a mad scientist's castle in Frankfurt and transporting it via submarine to a lab in Hiroshima, where the A-bomb causes it to regenerate into a full-grown monster that spends the next 15 years eating bunny rabbits in the radioactive ruins. Like I said, pretty standard stuff.

I don't want to belabor this review, because if you've seen one giant Frankenstein movie, you've seen 'em all. Some scientists working at a hospital for victims of the Bomb find Frank wandering around, so they bring him back to the lab for study. They helpfully explain that he's a Caucasian, even though he's very clearly played by a lanky Japanese dude. Then they discover that Frank will regenerate any damaged tissue as long as he gets a steady dose of protein. Then, for reasons not fully explained, he starts growing and growing and growing until he's about 50 feet tall. He breaks out of the lab and lives in the mountains, occasionally getting into some mischief, like when he throws a whole tree at a bird and it accidentally crushes some poor dude's log cabin. Oh, Frankie. You lovable scamp.

The problem is, there's this other monster, a real prick named Baragon who looks like a reptilian Labrador puppy with a glowing horn on his snout. He's tunneling all over the countryside, blowing up oil refineries and making Frank take the blame for it. So now the army's trying to kill poor Frank while the Hiroshima scientists are trying to save him. Then him and Baragon finally meet up and have a knock-down, drag-out fight across the Japanese wilderness. It's kind of funny, because Frank is just some dude with a big forehead, so it's extra ridiculous when he jumps on the rubber puppy-lizard's back and starts whaling away. At first, you don't think he has a chance because this Baragon asshole is so much bigger, and he can shoot red lasers out of his mouth, while Frank's just a skinny Japanese guy with no special powers. But that's actually Frank's secret weapon. Since he's not covered in 200 pounds of rubber, he has the mobility and speed to turn the tables on Baragon. Then Frank holds his corpse over his head victoriously and throws him over a cliff into the sea.

Any other movie would end right here, but not Frankenstein Conquers The World. It's got its own agenda. With only four minutes left in the movie, a random giant octopus (you can tell it's a giant octopus because one of the scientists yells, "Look! That's a giant octopus!") climbs out of the ocean to fight Frank. Maybe he was pissed off about Frank chucking that douchebag Baragon into his ocean, or maybe the octopus was really the mastermind behind the whole thing and Baragon was only his henchman. I don't know. The movie wasn't too specific about the octopus' motivations. Anyway, whatever his fuckin' problem is, this octopus is an even bigger prick than the last monster. Frank is already worn out from his battle with Baragon, so he doesn't put up much of a fight when Cocktopus drags him over the cliff to a watery grave. What a fuckin' bummer. Frank goes to all this trouble to clear his good name, and for what? Dammit, I hate that octopus.

Anyway, if you've ever wanted to see a movie where a random giant octopus is introduced in the last four minutes, this (and maybe the deleted scenes from Goonies) is probably your best bet.

White Fire

You can tell you're in for a treat right from the first frame of White Fire, a 1984 Robert Ginty vehicle made a few years after the surprise success of the blowtorchsploitation classic The Exterminator made the hangdog William Sanderson lookalike an unlikely action hero. White Fire opens in media res, with some blue-tinted footage of a family running in slow-mo from some Nazi cocksuckers. Dad grabs a gun and blasts one of them, but then another one hoses him down with a flamethrower, the orange fire blooming bold against the cyan cinematography. Mom goes down in a hail of gunfire on a beach. It seems like the kids, an 11-year-old boy and his little sister, are about to join their parents in death, when out of nowhere a burly lumberjack-looking dude comes up, snaps a Nazi neck, and takes them with him. This intro's mix of artiness and crappiness made me assume White Fire was Italian, as did the presence of Fred Williamson's name in the opening credits. (The Hammer, as I'm sure you know, made more movies in Italy than John Saxon, who made more movies in Italy than anyone else has ever made movies anywhere.) But no, actually it's a Franco-Turkish co-production. The Turkish part becomes clear in the next scene, which arrives with a smash cut to an establishing shot of a bunch of minarets and some onscreen words reading "ISTAMBUL [sic] - 15 YEARS LATER." The French part makes sense later, when all the incest starts happening.

To the accompaniment of the movie's theme song (a moderately awesome cock rock ballad that comes complete with lines like "White Fire! Like a thunderball! Crashing through the wall!"), we're reintroduced to the brother and sister from the first scene, now played by Robert Ginty and some little blond chick. They appear to be diamond thieves, which must be a hard life because it seems to have aged them at least 25 years in the 15 that have passed since we last saw them on that beach. Ginty looks about 40, 45, thanks to a semi-sleazy mustache that makes him look like a theatrical booking agent, the kind who mostly handles puppeteers and exotic dancers who specialize in bursting out of cakes. There is no explanation for why these two presumably European children grew up to become Americans, but I suppose that's movie magic for you.

 Soon, Ginty and Sis get captured by some assholes with unconvincing Italian accents. They escape using the ancient Turkish method of punching everyone a lot. But then Ginty gets cornered, so he picks up a chainsaw, which is what everyone should always do in every situation. "When in doubt, chainsaw that shit," that's my motto. Ginty agrees with me, proceeding to swing the saw around willy nilly and cut open some insert shots of sheep guts and denim. This is when you know it's okay to relax. It's not even 20 minutes into the thing and we already have multiple chainsaw disembowelings. This is the movie letting you know that you're in good hands. White Fire knows you've been hurt before by all those other shitty B-movies that promised the world and then delivered a bunch of scenes of dickheads in brown suits sitting on patio furniture. White Fire apologizes for moving so fast, but when something feels so right, you just have to go for it. Aw fuck it, White Fire's just gonna go ahead and say it: White Fire loves you, girl. White Fire loves you with chainsaws.

Anyway, Ginty and Sis head home, where the burly dude from the intro and his wife are waiting. Ginty and Sis don't bring up the chainsawing. That's just a little private memory between the two of them.

Next we cut to the only guy who possibly made more movies in Italy than Fred Williamson: Gordon Mitchell, a silver-haired character actor who looks like a mildly constipated Skeletor. He's some kind of supervillain/diamond miner or something. Apparently, Sis works for him, though in what capacity I do not know. I'm not 100% sure if she legitimately works for the guy and the whole diamond-stealing thing is just a sideline or if she's going undercover to rip him off. White Fire doesn't waste a lot of time explaining shit. White Fire has a lot on its mind right now. White Fire just needs you to trust it. Can you do that? Can you do that for White Fire? White Fire appreciates you being so understanding. White Fire doesn't deserve a girl like you.

Deep in Gordon Mitchell's mine, an ambiguous ethnic finds the title character: a radioactive diamond the size of a dehumidifier. When touched, it emits a sizzling sound and makes your skin look like the white part on the inside of an orange. So Gordo burns the guy’s face off on the diamond so no one else will know about it. Then he goes and tells some people about it. Unfortunately, these are the same badly accented assholes Ginty had to chainsaw earlier. I don’t understand this dude’s decision-making process.

We're showing signs of some plot here, but don't worry, things are about to get weird. Back at the Ginty household, Sis is swimming around naked for like 20 minutes. Ginty comes to tell her dinner is ready. It gets really uncomfortable when he steals her towel, telling her that if she wasn't his sister dot dot dot. The camera lingers on his face as he gawks at his nude baby sis like this is a normal thing that people do.

Then, even though she just got out of the pool and showered and dried herself off, Sis goes skinny dipping again. This double-dip proves to be her undoing, because the assholes from the Chainsaw Gang show up and shoot a blow dart at her head for some reason, and she dies. Ginty is all broken up about this. He's not only lost his sister, the only family he had left in the world, but he never got to find out if she would let him nail her or not. He's inconsolable. Unlike the Burly Guy, whose wife also died in the raid but you don't see him whining about it, or even mentioning it ever again. Sometimes assholes show up and stab your wife to death. It happens.

So Ginty goes out and gets drunk. A random blond chick helps him home, and that's when a light bulb goes off over Burly Guy 's head: They could get the blonde some plastic surgery so she looks like Sis and then steal the White Fire diamond! It's such an obvious plan that I'm surprised no one thought of it sooner.

For some reason, the blond goes along with this, so then we find ourselves in the unique position of watching a movie that features both plot elements stolen from Vertigo and chainsaw fights. There's a montage of Ginty and the blonde frolicking on the beach as he teaches her how to be his sister. She can't seem to get it right, though. She can't look at him like a sister because every time she looks at his sagging face, she doesn't see a brother, she sees the love of her life. Understandable. After all, what woman wouldn’t fall for a guy who wants to cut her face off and glue his sister’s on there instead? That and riding a unicorn, that’s what every little girl grows up fantasizing about.

Things are getting pretty kinky here, but they get even more so after the blonde goes to some kind of Amazonian New Age plastic surgery cult to get her face fixed. When she returns, she's magically transformed into the same actress who played the sister. Luckily, both characters’ voices seemed to be dubbed by the same person, so the transformation is uncanny.

Sis 2 promptly tries to seduce Ginty with the same boobs he so enjoyed ogling earlier (the Amazons must have copied those, too) but he manages to resist. They just make out a little, which the movie seems to think isn’t creepy beyond belief. I’m betting the screenwriter’s next family gathering was a little awkward.

While all this is going on, our man Fred Williamson enters the picture. He's Sis 2's former pimp and he's looking for his lost merchandise. Every now and then, there's a scene of him torturing somebody for information by pressing their face into a grill or shoving their crotch into a bandsaw. He's a real amiable guy, though. When he plays Russian Roulette with a dude, he applauds the man's bravery for making it through two rounds without cracking. If you absolutely had to get your nutsac sawed in half by a murderous pimp, this is the one you'd want to do it.

So eventually Ginty and Sis 2 recruit a bunch of dudes to rob the mine and steal the White Fire. The funny thing is, the fact that Sis 2 looks exactly like Sis 1 is never a factor in their plan. All they do is show up with some guns and start shooting everyone. It's actually pretty easy, since all the henchmen are helpfully dressed for maximum visibility in bright red jumpsuits borrowed from the wardrobe trailer of V.

Anyway, for some reason Ginty and Co. can't steal the diamond, so they blow it up instead. They give Fred Williamson a handful of smaller diamonds so he'll leave Sis 2 alone, and then our heroes ride off into the sunset. Ginty may not have the White Fire, but he's got his sister back, and this time it's not a crime against nature if he puts his wiener in her. It's like a fairy tale!

Tuff Turf

Tuff Turf is an overlooked and underrated teensploitation picture from 1985. As was common in the genre, James Spader plays a cocky rich prick. The difference is, this time he’s the hero.

Spader is this dude who used to live in Connecticut, where he spent his time getting kicked out of prep schools for being too awesome. Then his dad went broke so they moved out to the San Fernando Valley, where guido greasers in headbands and duck’s-ass haircuts earn their reps by sticking up doughy old dudes with switchblades. This is exactly what’s happening in the stylish opening montage, set to an eerie, pulsating Marianne Faithful song. The local toughs (tuffs?) are doing their thing when Spader rides by on his bicycle and breaks up the robbery without even dismounting. He gets away scot-free, except the one Latino in the gang slices the patch on the back of his jean jacket in half with a snapped-off car antenna. There’s no explanation given for why Spader decided to get involved, other than this is the kind of shit he likes to do for fun.

Naturally, this means war, so the rest of the movie is the ever escalating battle between Spader and the leader of the gang, played by Paul Mones, future co-writer of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s surrealist masterpiece, Double Team, the movie that poses the cinematic question: “What the fuck?”

I like this setup, because it’s more interesting than the usual Karate Kid format, where there’s some new wiener in town who gets picked on for no good reason until he finally grows a sac in the third act. Spader is already a badass at the beginning of the movie, and the bad guys have good reason to hate him. He fucked with them before they fucked with him. It’s almost like a Clint Eastwood movie, where a mysterious stranger rides into town and starts pissing off the locals. Spader has that naturally villainous quality about him so he makes a more interesting lead than the usual milquetoast pantywaist they stick in these kinds of movies. It’s really more of an Eric Stoltz part, but I’m glad they went a different way with it. I’d like to see Spader team up with Adam Baldwin’s character from 3:10: The Moment of Truth. They’d run that fucking school like a charity marathon.

I don’t want to give you the impression that this is a particularly original movie or anything. It’s not. All the old standbys are there: the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, the wacky outcast buddy who shows him the ropes, the inevitable locker room scene. The difference is that the girl is actually a pretty good actress (Escape To Witch Mountain's Kim Richards, pulling a Kurt Russell with her jump to adult fare), the wacky friend is Robert Downey Jr., and the locker room scene has Spader getting beat the fuck down with padlocks wrapped in towels. It’s all pretty standard, but there are little touches that set it apart.

A lot of those touches are thanks to the imaginative direction of Fritz Kiersch, a reliable journeyman best known for his first film, Children of the Corn. He gives the film an enhanced sense of atmosphere similar to Paul Brickman’s work in Risky Business. In his review of Tuff Turf, Roger Ebert knocked the film for botching the timing of its set-pieces, but I think he just hadn’t caught the rhythm of the new MTV-inspired editing. Multiple close-ups and slow-mo inserts give a feeling of elongated reality to some scenes, almost like a spaghetti western. Kiersch’s somewhat exaggerated, vaguely surreal style gives the movie a greater impact than it would have with more pedestrian direction. He used this same technique in his next film, Winners Take All, a boilerplate inspirational sports drama that felt a little more weighty than most of its contemporaries.

Did I mention that Tuff Turf is kind of a musical? That’s another thing that sets it apart. The characters don’t all of a sudden start singing, but they’re always attending live shows. There are no less than three bands featured in this movie. In one scene, Spader crashes a snooty country club with Downey Jr. and two new wave chicks, and there’s a smarmy lounge act playing a slick cover of “Twist & Shout” for all the preppies to dance to. Then Spader commandeers the stage to serenade his ladyfriend with a lip-synched piano ballad with lyrics like “I want to feel your face / I want to hear your eyes.” Naturally this wins her over, and even though she’s the girlfriend of the villain (who considers her part of his “turf”), she brings Spader with her to Club Sixties, where there’s a cheesy blue-eyed soul outfit called Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, which has a horn section in matching suits who do synchronized dance moves. While they systematically scrape the black off of Wilson Pickett’s “She’s Looking Good,” she dances all over the tables, hypnotically swinging around her crimped, ass-length blond hair. But the best musical moment comes earlier, when Spader steals a Porsche to go to a punk club to see Downey Jr.’s band, which is fronted by Basketball Diaries author Jim Carroll. While Downey convincingly mimes the drums, Carroll speak-sings his way through a set of angular post-punk and Spader woos his ladyfriend by forcing her to dance with him while the rest of the crowd helps him out by boxing her in with some elaborate choreography.

Actually, the soundtrack is kind of great, if only for Carroll’s incongruously upbeat obituary song, “People Who Died,” which was also used to great effect during the end credits of the Dawn of the Dead remake. Like the movie itself, the music is a little better than it strictly needs to be.

Tuff Turf eventually stops dicking around with musical numbers and heart-to-heart talks with various parental units. Shit gets real when the bad guys attack Spader’s father (veteran character actor Matt Clark), but the cool thing is that Dad is no token victim. He’s actually winning the fight against the three thugs when the cowardly leader pulls out a piece and blasts him a couple of times in strategically off-center places. While Dad is hospitalized, the movie climaxes in a violent battle in the punk club involving guns, axes, and Dobermans. Then it’s happy ending time as our heroes go back to Club Sixties, where Jack Mack and the Heart Attack is ripping through another energetic retro number. Tuff Turf is kind of like that: It didn’t write this song, but it’s gonna play the hell out of it anyway.

The Dark Knight

Don’t freak out or anything, but I don’t really like this movie all that much. I know we all sat down and took a vote and the unanimous decision was that this was the greatest movie ever made, except for maybe—–maybe—–Empire Strikes Back, but then the whole Special Edition debacle kind of split the vote so Dark Knight came out on top by, like, a swillion miles. Then there was another vote about whether people who didn’t like it were either “fucktards” or “douchenozzles,” and that went back and forth a couple times before cooler heads prevailed and we went with “douchetards,” just to make sure all the bases were covered. Then we were gonna vote on which part was the best, so we popped in the DVD, but then we got distracted when it got to the part where Christian Bale says “I’m not wearing hockey pants!” (#21 on AFI’s list of the 100 Most Awesomest Fucking Movie Lines Of All Time, right after “You had me at hello”). Then the one handicapped guy who was there was suddenly able to walk again, so then all the lepers started pressing their open sores to the screen to absorb the movie’s healing light. I also hear it cures racism and brings the passion back to sexless marriages.

So I don’t know if I was born an asshole or if I worked at it my whole life, but either way it worked out fine because The Dark Knight is really just not all that great. I mean, it definitely puts out the vibe of greatness. And there are definitely lots of moments when it’s got the coordinates of greatness locked into its tracking system. But then somebody must have spilled some Mountain Dew into its guidance module or something because it suddenly veers off course, missing greatness altogether and instead landing right in the middle of pretty goodness.

I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what irks me about this movie, which by all rights I should probably love. I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it in the theater, but almost immediately my memory of it soured. I forgot all of the awesome parts and only remembered Christian Bale’s stupid Robert Loggia voice. Through multiple online arguments with various non-douchetards, I realized that the character of Batman is at the heart of my dissatisfaction. I’m a big fan of the Batman comics (or at least I was until the Scottish Dadaist Grant Morrison killed him off in the recent crossover event Final Crisis, possibly the worst-told story ever published in any medium), so I know Batman. And Mr. Bale, sir, you are no Batman. The suit looks dumb, the voice sounds like Corey Feldman in The Lost Boys trying to act grown-up, and the fights are so clumsy that it looks like they filmed the rehearsals. The guy just isn’t badass. He has a few moments, but then he opens his mouth and I just can’t take him seriously. He’s trying waaaaaaaaaaaaay too hard to sound tough, and it's frankly laughable. I can see what the Joker finds so funny about him. I keep expecting him to pull an inhaler out of his utility belt. It’s fucking distracting.

But I am, above all, a reasonable motherfucker, so I decided to give it another chance to see if maybe I was just being a joyless curmudgeon. I know that sometimes one’s recollection of a movie can take on a life of its own that is quite different from the actual viewing experience. Also, if I was to be the only douchetard on a planet of angry Dark Knight fans, I Am Legend-style, then I wanted to restock my ammunition for the lifelong battle that lay ahead of me.

Well, for the first two hours I wondered what the hell my problem was. I still didn’t like Batman, but I enjoyed every scene that he wasn’t in, and I’m counting the scenes where Bale is out of costume. The robbery at the beginning is hardcore, all of the secondary characters are likeable and well cast (particularly Gary Oldman, who so disappears into the role of Jim Gordon that I stopped thinking of him as an actor altogether), and it has fucking Eric Roberts in it, for christ’s sake. This is a dude who has credits like Raptor and Fast Sofa on his résumé. I mean, I like The Wrestler and all, but this is the comeback of the century.

And of course, the Joker is awesome. Heath Ledger totally nailed the character’s use of nihilist humor and unmotivated violence as a means of existential terrorism, and I will forever treasure the shot of him tottering away from the exploding hospital with his weird Crispin Glover/Frankenhooker gait. He also made a surprisingly sexy nurse. Just saying.

However, despite its many strong points, Batman himself is still a problem. For one, there's the fact that Christopher Nolan simply refuses to shoot him like a badass. Instead of using shadows or dramatic angles, he just points the camera at the poor guy in full light so you can see how chintzy the suit is. I used to think that the main reason I didn’t buy his tough guy credentials was because he didn’t do anything in the movie, but on rewatching it, I can see that I was wrong. He fights attack dogs, performs a daring raid on a Hong Kong highrise, jumps out of a perfectly good building, rides a motorcycle with monster truck tires, violates the Joker’s civil rights, and dangles a bunch of cops off a building like a human wind chime. So he does plenty of stuff. The problem is he doesn’t accomplish anything. He’s the most ineffectual hero of all time. He fails to save his childhood sweetheart from a fiery death, lets Harvey Dent get his face CGIed off, can’t protect the mob witness, gets his secret identity uncovered by a nerdy accountant (who really should have been played by a bigger actor, since the name “Mister Reese” is clearly code for the Riddler), and has to take the rap for the murders committed by Two-Face, which, consisting as they do entirely of mobsters and dirty cops, constitute the only progress for the side of law and order in the whole movie. Even those attack dogs kick his ass—twice. True, he saves those people on the ferries (Most obvious trap ever, by the way. When someone like the Joker warns you about the bridges and tunnels and there’s only one other way out of town, maybe you should be a little suspicious) and he catches the Scarecrow, but come on, that guy’s a has-been, a washed-up holdover from the last movie. It’d be like if the only person Jason killed in Friday the 13th Part 2 was that one survivor from the first movie. I recognize that maybe the filmmakers were attempting to make some kind of statement about the futility of vigilantism, but I don’t buy it. If you’re trying to subvert the superhero paradigm, you can’t show the protagonist fucking up for two and a half hours and then end the movie with a money shot of him riding off like a conquering hero while Gary Oldman delivers a soulful but uncharacteristically poetic monologue about how fucking awesome he is. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. When you try, it’s called vomit.

And that’s really my problem with the movie. It violates the #1 rule of storytelling: Show, don’t tell. It’s constantly telling me things that it fails to illustrate. It tells me that Harvey Dent was considered duplicitous by his colleagues in the police department, yet fails to show him being anything other than sincere and well-meaning. It tells me that Batman is a meaningful symbol of justice to the people of Gotham City, yet fails to show him doing anything for them besides blowing up their cars and trashing their streets. (In fact, we never see the citizens of Gotham at all, and we especially don’t see any of the poor neighborhoods where a self-appointed guardian angel might do the most good. All we see are glistening office towers and pillared government buildings, but what’s the state of the ghetto that the escaped Arkham Asylum inmates burned down in Batman Begins? How do its residents feel about Batman’s crime-busting efforts? Has he made an appreciable difference in their quality of life? Do they feel safer, or would they rather be left in peace with their cheap recreational drugs?) It tells me that Dent has some kind of obsession with the capriciousness of fate, yet he seems to have a Type-A take-charge personality that leaves little to chance. It tells me that the Joker is a seat-of-his-pants engine of chaos rather than a planner, yet he concocts absurdly intricate schemes incorporating intimate knowledge of the response times of various law enforcement divisions, hospital evacuation procedures, and the Gotham City municipal school bus schedule. It tells me that Maggie Gylenhaal is beautiful, yet Wally Pfister’s harsh lighting leaves her looking like Pumpkinhead in a dress. There always seems to be a disconnect between what I’m seeing and what I’m hearing.

Basically, I’m saying that the movie bites off more than it can chew, so it takes shortcuts. It brings up interesting notions like the ethics of privacy invasion, the expediency of dictatorships, and the occasional necessity of shielding inconvenient truths from the public, but immediately drops them after its ham-fisted, flagrantly schematic screenplay has paid them off with a line or two of dialogue, usually delivered by Michael Caine, who has made a career of sewing silk purses out of sows’ ears. However, this ideological confusion is not readily apparent until the unnecessarily protracted ending. Bottom line, if the movie had stopped after the Joker blew up Maggie Gyllenhaal (spoiler), I would not be a douchetard today. It would have left the movie at the perfect length, at the perfect pace, and with the perfect Empire-style downbeat set-up for the more triumphant Jedi-style trilogy capper, The Dark Knight 2: Knight Moves, in which they would replace Heath Ledger with Jake Gylenhaal because he’s the only actor the public would accept, what with him basically being the guy’s ex-girlfriend and all.

But instead it goes on for 40 more minutes, and that’s when all of the chinks in its Kevlar open up and let its true sloppiness spill out. Two-Face is too interesting of a character to fob off on the end of a movie, especially when his corruption seems to be the entire point of the Joker’s Jigsaw-like morality play. The climax, despite its gratuitous length, feels rushed, because it’s trying to cram an entire sequel’s worth of character arc into the third act of a movie that already had a perfect ending: Batman has lost the love of his life and is forced to see the limitations of his ideals, which sets up a movie-length confrontation between a pushed-to-the-edge hero and Two-Face, a fallen angel who represents the dark side of the vigilante coin. I rarely fault a movie for having too much ambition, but I feel that The Dark Knight’s overbusy and thematically muddled endgame squanders most of the goodwill that its first three quarters engendered. For its opening two hours, I wondered why I’d disliked the movie, but its final 40 minutes reminded me. They took a tightly paced and ruthlessly plotted battle of wits and turned it into a confusing mess of half-baked ideas. Sort of like this review, which started out debating the merits of the word “douchenozzle” and ended up bandying about phrases like “flagrantly schematic” and “thematically muddled.”

In the end, I don’t really dislike The Dark Knight anymore. I regard it as an ambitious failure, like communism or Crystal Pepsi. But that’s just one douchetard’s opinion. Take it for what it’s worth.

JCVD

Remember that part at the end of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey where Wyld Stallyns are about to perform for a sold-out crowd and they suddenly realize that they still don't know how to play their instruments? So what they do is, they hop into their time machine, and when they pop back up onstage a second later, they've both got ZZ Top beards and they're like, "Whoa, that was a most excellent 18 months of intensive guitar training with Eddie Van Halen." I think the same thing happened to Jean-Claude Van Damme right before shooting started on JCVD, only with acting. I think he suddenly realized that he didn't have the chops to pull off a movie that involved more emoting than kicking, so he broke his old Timecop temporal displacement device out of mothballs and went back to the fifties to take some Method classes with Brando.

Actually, I don't think even that would be enough to explain the thespianic transformation Jean-Claude underwent for this film. I think he must have pulled an Excellent Adventure and traveled throughout the seventies, assembling all of its best actors. He kidnapped De Niro from the set of Taxi Driver, snatched Pacino from Godfather II, gave Hackman the Vulcan neck pinch on The Conversation, and had just enough room left over to stuff Dustin Hoffman into the time machine in his Ratso Rizzo costume. Then they had all kinds of crazy fish-out-of-water adventures in the present day (You should have seen the look on De Niro's face when he accidentally caught Meet the Fockers on cable) while Van Damme finally, after more than 20 years in Hollywood, learned that there's more to the art of screen acting than making your eyes get all buggy and cross-eyed while yelling "Nuuuh!" in your weird, flat Belgian accent. He learned that you can't just imitate the bells and whistles of human emotions; you have to feel them deep inside, because if you don't, the audience never will. And I'm also thinking that he taught all these great actors a thing or two in return and, in doing so, accidentally changed film history for the better. Just think, without Jean-Claude's influence, Pacino's legendary kickboxing sequence in Dog Day Afternoon would never have existed.

Granted, there are probably a few non-time-travel-related factors that may have contributed to the effectiveness of Van Damme's performance in JCVD. For one, he's playing himself. It's the role he was born to play. For two, most of the dialogue is in French, his native tongue. But that doesn't fully explain it, either. I've seen plenty of jackasses try to play themselves and fail miserably, and Jean-Claude's even pretty damn good in his few English-speaking scenes in JCVD. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more the time machine thing is the only explanation that makes any sense. The only other thing I can think of is that he's secretly been this good all along, and that, my friends, is too mind-blowing to contemplate.

Okay, here's the deal: JCVD is the new Jean-Claude Van Damme movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as Jean-Claude Van Damme. The first scene is amazing. All the other reviews are gonna tell you about it, so I will, too. It's one long tracking shot, Touch of Evil-style, in which the camera follows Jean-Claude around a warehouse full of bad guys. In a single unbroken take, he engages in hand-to-hand combat, shoots a bunch of people, throws a grenade, and evades a flamethrower. It's well-choreographed and shot, with an awesome funky but melancholy soul song playing, but the funny part is that it's not very well executed. Punches miss by about a foot, and the timing is always a little bit off. It's all very subtle, until the scenery starts falling down, and you realize that you're on the set of Van Damme's latest straight-to-video opus, directed by some punk HK music video director with asymmetrical hair who doesn't have Jean-Claude's commitment to excellence. From the first scene, the Muscles From Brussels is characterized as a man who feels that he is capable of much more than world is offering him. He needs a mission, a calling, a raison d'être, and for his sins, JCVD gives him one.

After this straightforward opener, the structure of the movie gets all Tarantino-y, as the story is broken up into out-of-order chapters with pretentious titles like "The Answer Before The Question." It's kind of cool because you have to work a little harder than usual to piece together the story, but I'm not sure if the story itself requires it. It's pretty simple: Jean-Claude is in the middle of an expensive child custody case, but when he goes into a Belgian bank to transfer funds to his lawyer, he gets caught up in a hostage crisis of which the cops think he's the mastermind. Then he has to find out if he really does have a hero inside of him or if he's just a full-of-shit actor whose best years are behind him (and they really weren't all that great anyway).

I wish I could tell you more about the movie, but I kind of had a hard time following it. It's not really the movie's fault, though. It's just that I saw it at the Angelika, where Jean-Claude himself was supposed to appear for a Q&A, only he cancelled because, I shit you not, his puppy was in a coma in Thailand. How fucking sensitive is that? Can't you just imagine Jean-Claude sitting by the puppy's bedside, holding his paw and whispering, "Dun dew eet, ma fren. Dun go indo da lide." (Side note: "Thailand Puppy Coma" should be a Melvins song.)

Anyway, the Angelika is one of them there arthouses, which I'm all for, except that the Angelika sucks. The theaters are so long and skinny that it feels like you're watching a screen the size of a postcard through a paper towel tube. And the print of JCVD I saw had white subtitles, which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that the cinematography is all blown-out and sun-blasted. It looks really cool, except that there are glints and sheens and splashes of white everywhere, making a lot of the dialogue illegible. You're trying to follow along, but you can only read half the words, so it's like "No, Jean…do it…gun here…police will…understand?"

This won't be a problem on DVD, though, so home viewers willl be able to fully enjoy the script, which is witty and self-referential without ever losing sight of the drama, particularly in this one scene where Jean-Claude suddenly levitates up above the set of the movie and, hanging amidst the lights in the rafters, proceeds to give an unedited five-minute monologue directly to camera. I didn't catch a big chunk of it, but he talks about his childhood and his marriages and his drug problem and his dreams. He promises to be the hero he always wanted to be, the one he pretended to be for so long that he forgot who he really was. He even starts breaking down and crying a little. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. Not a single person in a theater full of hipster douchebags let out so much as a giggle while this man, this washed-up has-been who was a joke even in his prime, laid it all out on the line. I couldn't even understand half of what he was saying, but the emotion, man. The emotion came through loud and clear. Jean-Claude was never my favorite action hero, but he won me over with this speech. I don't think any other tough guy could have bared his soul so nakedly. Seagal might have tried, but I don't think he would have let his guard down like this. There really was no bullshit in Jean-Claude's speech at all. This was the beating, yearning heart of Van Damme, the one muscle he never got to exercise in any of his other films. I never thought I'd say this, but I wanted to give that sweaty, bulging bastard a big fucking hug right then and there.

Then I remembered that YouTube clip where he got a boner live on a Brazilian dance show and I thought better of it.

Anyway, you should all definitely see JCVD. If enough of us check it out, there is every reason to believe that Van Damme's action contemporaries will follow suit and step their game up. He's proved with this film that everyone, no matter how seemingly talentless and ridiculously accented, has hidden depths. Personally, I'm holding out for a remake of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries starring Chuck Norris as an elderly martial artist reliving the many, many asses he's kicked over the course of his life and the effect they've had on him. Or maybe even Seagal Satyricon. The point is, if Jean-Claude can do it, so can they. C'mon, guys. Let's see a little hustle out there.

P.S. How bullshit is it that the marketing department didn't use "Stock up on penicillin, because on November 7, America will catch JCVD" as the tagline on the poster? I really do have to think of everything, don't I?

Brain Smasher: A Love Story

Brain Smasher: A Love Story is easily the second best bouncer movie ever made. If you have to ask what that first best is, I don’t know, man, I think you might be on the wrong page.

But that’s not its biggest achievement. Let’s be frank, there haven’t been all that many bouncer movies. It’s not that crowded a field. The same cannot be said for Albert Pyun movies, however. As of the writing of this sentence, he has directed 46 motion pictures. I can’t verify that number past that, though, because by the time I get to the end of this paragraph he might have knocked out a few more Nemesis sequels or something. I can’t keep going back to IMDB every two seconds. You’re just gonna have to take my word for it that this dude has made more or less a metric shit-ton of movies. And Brain Smasher is his best one.

Okay, fine. It’s the best one I’ve seen. Full disclosure: I have not seen even a quarter of the total Pyun filmography. I do have somewhat of a life. I have a job. Friends. Family. I go out on dates sometimes. Really. It’s a rich tapestry, the life of me. You’d be amazed.

So while I was out there trying to lay my hands on some ladyparts, it’s entirely possible that Pyun managed to squeak a masterpiece by me. Maybe Vicious Lips has a lot to say about the fragility of the human condition. Maybe Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor is that one movie that comes along every now and again that teaches you how to love again. I’m not discounting the possibility. Right now, right this second, there’s a mammal running around with a duck bill, laying eggs. Anything can happen.

So maybe being the best Albert Pyun movie out of the six or seven I’ve seen is not that big an accomplishment. But I liked it anyway. If you don’t dig loveable underachievers, you shouldn’t be watching Albert Pyun movies in the first place.

Right away, you can tell that Brain Smasher is a little different than the average Pyun movie because there don’t appear to be any cyborgs in it. Cyborgs are to Albert Pyun as big-breasted women are to Russ Meyer. I can neither verify nor deny that Pyun once lived in a house full of cyborgs in a polyamorous relationship, however. That’s where the analogy starts falling apart.

What Brain Smasher is about instead of cyborgs is this dude named Ed, a.k.a. the Brain Smasher. Ed’s a bouncer at a club in Portland, Oregon, and he’s proud of the fact that decent, hard-partying folk can have a good time in peace as long as his two fists are around. That’s what I like about Ed. He takes his work seriously and he honestly believes he makes a difference. He doesn’t get all philosophical about it like that other bouncer in that other movie. He’s more pragmatic.

He’s even got an honest-to-God origin story. Seems that when Ed was a young man, he was in a club that didn’t have a bouncer, and he took a beer bottle to the face that left him scarred. He vowed then and there that no one else would ever have their mellow harshed the way his mellow was harshed that night. It’s like if Batman’s parents got killed in the moshpit at CBGB’s. It’s not a job. It’s a calling. Someday, he’ll probably take on a young ward who also got hit with a bottle one time, and he will teach him everything he knows about smashing brains. Then someday he’ll retire and pass on the mantel of Brain Smasher to the next generation. Maybe there’ll even be a Brain Smashess or something. There’s no telling who might be inspired by this noble smasher of brains.

One more thing about Ed: He’s played by Andrew Dice Clay. Right away that’s gonna make a bunch of you not take him seriously, just because he’s a grown man who once upon a time asked other grown men to call him the Diceman. I always liked Dice, though. I was like 11 or 12 when he was a big stand-up, so his potty-mouth tough guy schtick was right up my alley. The only tape I had at the time was N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton, so I was and am a big fan of profanity. If you were talking about fucking somebody or something, I was listening. (Note to the kids: a "tape" or “cassette” or occasionally "cassingle" was what people used to listen to music on before it was beamed directly into your cerebral cortex by the sentient Lawnmower Man-style computer program known as will.i.am) Then Dice started making movies, and shit, I liked those, too. His starring debut, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, is an underrated gem in the Hudson Hawk vein, and it introduced the world to the action stylings of one Renny Harlin, the wacky Scandinavian who proved that Finland’s national flower is the explosion. The problem with Dice, though, is that he was too good at being a pig. People really believed that he spent every minute of his life making bitches make him sandwiches. They didn’t get that it was a character he was playing, like Pee Wee Herman or Sarah Palin. So when it was time to branch out into other characters, it was like Big Bird trying to play a CIA agent or a lawyer or, I don’t know, anything that’s not a giant transsexual bird or whatever the hell he is. I think this hurt the Diceman’s feelings, so it added a subtle layer of sensitivity to his performances. You can see a nice guy under all that bluster, wondering why no one ever noticed that his filthy nursery rhymes were a cry for help.

That’s why he fits the character of Ed perfectly, and not just because he has prior bouncing experience from Pretty In Pink. Ed is a real stand-up guy, a brave, selfless white knight, but everybody thinks he's just a crude bruiser, simply because he punches people in the forehead for a living and wears a jacket that says his retarded nickname on the back. Both Ed and Dice want to show people that there’s more to them than meets the eye.

Ed’s predicament is mirrored by that of his love interest, played by Teri Hatcher. Everybody thinks she’s a ditz because she’s a model. So when she has to protect this ancient red lotus that gives the person who eats its petals infinite power, nobody takes her seriously.

The people who want the lotus are these Chinese monks in Phantom of the Opera masks who get really pissed off when people call them ninjas, because ninjas are Japanese. See, everybody in the movie is wrestling with public perception issues. This is a very deep movie about punching, in my opinion.

So what happens is that Teri is running from these not-ninjas and takes refuge in Ed’s club. Naturally, Ed protects her, because that’s what Ed does. Then they’re on the run, and I don’t want to give too much away, but they may possibly start to kind of like each other a little bit. Sure, this is a contractually mandated romance, but there are some little touches along the way that make it work. There’s a part where Ed brings her to his apartment and she realizes that he has a calendar that she’s in. She tries to show him her page and he stops her. He doesn’t need to see her in a bikini to like her. Then there’s a point where he decides that he’s in over his head but then when she storms off, he ends up helping her behind her back. Then he catches up with her in a bar, and he’s like, “Maybe I should stick around. If anything happens, there’s no bouncer…”

I like the idea of the bouncer as a symbol of safety and order in a chaotic and dangerous world. It’s ridiculous but kind of true. A lot of times I like to go to the bar on Mondays. Most of the time, it’s really quiet so you can get a good conversation going, but it’s also when the crazies come out. I mean, if you’re the type of person who’s going to get fucked up on a Monday, you’re probably the type of person who’s going to get really fucked up on a Monday. And while I like to rubberneck at the ranting racists who try to explain to the Mexican barback why he’s the exception, and the off-duty truckers who’ve been drinking since 2:30 and are willing to fight you because you played “Beth” instead of “Strutter,” and the shoeless junkies who are trying to steal your bag from under the bar, I’d really rather somebody dealt with them before they hurt somebody and/or jack my iPod. That’s where the bouncer comes in. They’re out there every night protecting your good time, because sometimes a good time is the only good thing you have.

You know what I mean? That’s what this movie is about. Fuckin’ heroes.

Anyway, Brain Smasher moves along at a nice clip. There are a bunch of good brawls, some excellent backflips from the not-ninjas, some entertainingly arch dialogue(“Do you think I want to be a kung-fu thug forever?”), and two great cameos from B-movie vets Brion James and Tim Thomerson as the asshole detectives who don’t believe in ninjas. Then at the end there’s a nice twist where Teri has to rescue Ed instead of the other way around. She could just walk away with the lotus but she pretty much loves the big lug at this point so she risks it all for him. Then there’s some punching and some kissing, and then credits. Way to stick the landing this time, Pyun.

By the way, I like to imagine that “Pyun” is pronounced like the sound effect of a bullet ricocheting off a rock in an old western. And like those bullets, Pyun doesn’t always hit what he’s aiming for, but at least he makes an entertaining sound when he misses.

OBSCURE MOVIES I HAVE FOR SALE

In addition to writing awesome reviews of movies, I also sell awesome DVD-Rs of movies. These flicks are not available on any legitimate DVD (at least in this country) which makes them fair game. If you see something you like, drop me a line at mleroux99@gmail.com. Some of these prints are in better shape than others, so if there are any weird quirks (no subtitles, minor strobe effect, random Greek subtitles that can't be turned off, somewhat out-of-sync audio, widescreen that won't play right on a square old TV, too dark to see a goddamn thing, made in Indonesia, starring Christopher Mitchum, etc.) I'll let you know ahead of time so you know what you're getting. I'm always acquiring more stock, so if there's something you want that's not here, ask me about it.

The movies cost five bucks each, plus three bucks shipping and handling, and they all come with a case and custom-made cover, or possibly a cover that someone else made that I custom-printed-out-at-work. If you order more than one, I can cut you a break on shipping. If you have any questions, leave me a comment or email me.

1. KILLDOZER
2. HORROR AT 37,000 FEET
3. PROJECT: METALBEAST
4. AEROBICIDE
5. BARBARIANS
6. NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE
7. THE MUTILATOR
8. TURKISH STAR WARS
9. 3 DEV ADAM
10. CHUD II: BUD THE CHUD
11. GRIM PRAIRIE TALES
12. KILL ZONE
13. DESERT KICKBOXER
14. SAVATE
15. BEYOND FORGIVENESS
16. OPERATION: GOLDEN PHOENIX
17. D’WILD WILD WENG
18. THE IMPOSSIBLE KID
19. HIT LIST
20. THE FINAL CONFLICT
21. THE DOUBLE O KID
22. COCAINE WARS
23. MOONRUNNERS
24. BOBBI JO & THE OUTLAW
25. RETURN TO MACON COUNTY
26. DEATH CAR ON THE FREEWAY
27. OUTRAGE
28. CITY KILLER
29. BROTHERLY LOVE
30. STEELE JUSTICE
31. STAND ALONE
32. MALONE
33. NINJA III: THE DOMINATION
34. WILD THING
35. 3:10: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
36. EXTERMINATOR 2
37. THE LAST SHARK (A.K.A. GREAT WHITE)
38. MS. 45
39. AVENGING FORCE
40. ENEMY TERRITORY
41. UNDER COVER
42. MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH
43. SHIVERS
44. THE ABOMINATION
45. THE GAMMA PEOPLE
46. THE LAST RUN
47. HICKEY & BOGGS
48. KISS AND THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK
49. FIGHTING MAD
50. WHITE LINE FEVER
51. MR. NO LEGS
52. GANG WARS
53. BRUTE FORCE
54. UNHOLY ROLLERS
55. DRIVE IN
56. THE GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE
57. SAVAGE HARVEST/ROAR (Double Feature)
58. THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL
59. ELVIRA MTV HALLOWEEN SPECIALS
60. A FISTFUL OF FINGERS
61. SHREDDER ORPHEUS
62. AMERICA 3000
63. DEATH CHEATERS
64. THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA
65. INNOCENT PREY
66. NEXT OF KIN (THE AUSTRALIAN ONE)
67. THE COMIC
68. SNAKE-EATER III: HIS LAW
69. SONNY BOY
70. WHEN NATURE CALLS
71. KARATE COP
72. KARATE COPS
73. BEYOND EVIL
74. BACK IN ACTION
75. MARTIAL LAW
76. SPACE RAIDERS
77. GET CRAZY
78. CHAINED HEAT
79. SCHLOCK
80. DEATH CHASE
81. MOONTRAP
82. THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
83. MEGAFORCE
84. RAD
85. THE SQUEEZE
86. THE PERFECT WEAPON
87. ROBBERY
88. WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE...
89. DOMINION
90. FEAR IS THE KEY
91. MISTER DIGITAL
92. HOMEBODIES
93. SHANKS
94. DAMNATION ALLEY
95. KILL OR BE KILLED
96. BLOOD BEACH
97. RAGE TO KILL
98. CODENAME: VENGEANCE
99. TIME RIDER
100. THE KEEP
101. COHEN & TATE
102. JACK'S BACK
103. THE ISLAND (THE ONE WITH MICHEAL CAINE AND THE PIRATES)
104. RAWHEAD REX
105. BLOOD RAGE
106. MUTANT HUNT
107. HARD GORE
108. DEATH WARMED UP
109. HUNTER'S BLOOD
110. HORRIBLE (A.K.A. ABSURD, ROSSO SANGUE, ANTHROPOPHAGUS 2)
111. CREATURE
112. ATTACK OF THE BEAST CREATURES
113. NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980 BIGFOOT MOVIE)
114. LUNCHMEAT
115. BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER (A.K.A. NIGHT WARNING)
116. SHE
117. CITY LIMITS
118. MCBAIN
119. HANDS OF STEEL
120. LIGHT BLAST
121. ARENA
122. NEON CITY
123. NICE GIRLS DON'T EXPLODE
124. STEEL FRONTIER
125. CRASH AND BURN
126. CHINA O'BRIEN
127. CHINA O'BRIEN 2
128. DEMOLITION HIGH
129. CORPSE EATERS/TAKE AN EASY RIDE (DOUBLE FEATURE)
130. SAVAGE!
131. SAVAGE SISTERS
132. THE BERMUDA DEPTHS
133. DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (ORIGINAL TV MOVIE)
134. IMPULSE
135. GHOST TOWN
136. BEAKS: THE MOVIE
137. BARBARIAN QUEEN 2
138. BLADES
139. BLOOD FRENZY
140. BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW
141. BRAIN SMASHER: A LOVE STORY
142. RADIOACTIVE DREAMS
143. CAGE
144. CAGE 2
145. THE CALIFORNIA KID
146. CANNIBAL GIRLS
147. CELLAR DWELLER
148. CHERRY 2000
149. CRASH! (NOT THE CRONENBERG OR HAGGIS ONES)
150. CREATURE
151. DARK AGE
152. DEAD LINE
153. DEADLY PREY
154. DEADLY FORCE
155. NIGHT TRAP
156. DEATH VALLEY
157. DEF-CON 4
158. THE AFTERMATH
159. DEFIANCE
160. DIRTY DINGUS MAGEE
161. BAD RONALD
162. ENTHIRAN
163. FAREWELL, TERMINATOR
164. FATAL GAMES
165. FIGHTING BACK
166. FORCED ENTRY
167. WATER POWER
168. GATE II
169. GIALLO A VENEZIA
170. GLEAMING THE CUBE
171. GOBLIN
172. PHANTOM BROTHER
173. GODZILLA 1985 (JAPANESE VERSION)
174. GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE
175. HIGH ROAD TO CHINA
176. HUMONGOUS
177. I'LL NEVER DIE ALONE
178. INTREPIDOS PUNKS
179. LIQUID SKY
180. MAD MUTILATOR
181. DEVIL STORY
182. MULTIPLE MANIACS
183. MUTILATIONS
184. NEW YEAR'S EVIL
185. HOSPITAL MASSACRE
186. NIGHT VISITOR
187. OBLIVION
188. OBLIVION 2: BACKLASH
189. OUT OF CONTENTION
190. OUT OF THE DARK
191. TOBE HOOPER'S NIGHT TERRORS
192. PHANTOM RAIDERS
193. POOR WHITE TRASH II
194. PRISON
195. PSYCHO FROM TEXAS
196. LET'S GET HARRY
197. NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER 2
198. NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER 3
199. THE RANSOM
200. WAR PARTY
201. THE RIFT
202. THE SEA SERPENT
203. RITUALS
204. ROBOWAR
205. ROCKTOBER BLOOD
206. SAVAGE INTRUDER
207. SCANNERS 2 & 3 (DOUBLE FEATURE)
208. SCREAM FOR HELP
209. SCREAMTIME
210. SFX RETALIATOR
211. SHAKMA
212. SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 2
213. SLEDGEHAMMER (NOT THE TV SHOW)
214. THE STABILIZER
215. THE INTRUDER
216. STRIKE COMMANDO
217. STUNTS
218. SUPERSONIC MAN
219. T.A.G.: THE ASSASSINATION GAME
220. TENTACLES
221. THE BOOGENS
222. THE CARPENTER
223. THE CHALLENGE
224. THE POWER
225. THE PREY
226. BERSERKER
227. THE SLAYER
228. THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
229. TRAPPED (TV MOVIE)
230. TRAPPED
231. DYING ROOM ONLY
232. TUFF TURF
233. SPLIT IMAGE
234. UNMASKED PART 25
235. WITHOUT WARNING
236. YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE
237. YOUNG WARRIORS
238. THE ZERO BOYS
239. NO HOLDS BARRED
240. TICKS
241. R.O.T.O.R.
242. KILLER ELEPHANTS ON A KUNG FU RAMPAGE
243. BRUCE LEE VS. GAY POWER
244. THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN
245. FIRSTBORN
246. OUT OF BOUNDS

Wrestlemaniac

Is it just me, or is there a whole new stratum of horror movies out there these days? They’re straight-to-video, but unlike the straight-to-video of old, they actually look like they might be halfway decent. They’ve got professional covers and decent photography and an overall level of competence that we’ve never seen in the straight-to-video market.

I mean, usually these things are just tax write-offs, you know? The production company knows that they can get X amount of money by selling their movie to Blockbuster, who just wants to fill up their shelves with as much recent product as possible, since no one ever looks past the New Release section. So as long as the production company spends less than X amount on the movie, they’re guaranteed a profit even if no one ever sees it. With that kind of business model, there isn’t a lot of incentive to make these things watchable. They just need a concept that’ll look good on the box. Alien Vampires. Vampire Predators. Predator Zombies. Zombie Aliens. You know what I’m talking about. They’re just sitting there on the shelf, trying to pretend like they star Gary Busey when everybody knows they could only afford to shoot with him for one day. They don’t even look bad enough to be fun. They just look tired and desperate and world-weary, like old strippers who don’t even care if you look at them anymore.

But now we’ve got this new breed of straight-to-video. I think it all started with the After Dark series. You know, it was a film festival of eight horror movies that nobody would have seen separately, but together, they looked like a good package deal. It worked with the Spice Girls, so why not horror movies? Personally, I feel like a bad horror fan because I haven’t seen a single one of these things. They tried to make them out to be like Horrorpalooza or some shit, but I wasn’t fooled. I know straight-to-video horror movies when I see ’em. I wasn’t gonna let any goddamn marketing department trick me into paying to see them in a theater like they were real movies. I don’t care how many Suicide Girls with tattooed titties were in the audience.

So then these things came to DVD where they should have been in the first place, and I guess the studios saw that there was some money to be made feeding cheap (but not cheap-looking) horror movies to a limited but devoted audience, because now they’ve all got their own horror imprints that have words like "Extreme" or "Raw" in their names. They usually brag about their movies being unrated, which technically just means that they never bothered to send them to the MPAA, since straight-to-video movies don’t have to be rated. It’s like Sprite bragging about being decaffeinated.

I don’t know how I feel about this trend. Sure, I’m glad that there are a lot more horror movies out there and that they don’t have the kinds of restrictions that theatrical horror movies have. But I also think we’re losing something. To me, it takes some of the fun out of it when even straight-to-video horror movies look slick. I mean, with the digital tools available today, there’s no reason for a movie to look like crap. Everything can be color-corrected and tweaked and desaturated to death until your little B horror movie looks like Bad Boys II. It seems weird for me to argue for incompetence as a stylistic choice, but the fact of the matter is, half of what made low-budget seventies and early eighties horror scary was that it looked and sounded like shit. The photography was dirty, the meat-cleaver editing was jarring, and the score sounded like it was recorded in some porn addict’s basement. It made everything unpredictable. You never knew what the fuck was going to happen, because you didn’t know what kind of amateur lunatic was behind the camera. You felt like you just might be in the hands of a madman. Or at the very least, an Italian cokehead. But when everything looks nice and professional, you feel safe. You know that it’s just some well-adjusted 32-year-old film school grad who’s been first-ADing for a while, but he found some commercial producers with some foreign backing who wanted to break into features so they gave him the shot to direct because they thought his script was marketable. I’m serious. Listen to the commentary on any of these things and they make the whole process sound about as sordid as opening up a Lenscrafters franchise.

Anyway, this is a lot of baggage to dump on top of Wrestlemaniac, which is the story of a bunch of idiots who get murdered by a luchadore in a Mexican ghost town. I don’t have to explain the deal with Mexican wrestlers, who have kind of replaced midgets as the new cinematic code for absurdity. If you’ve never seen a real Mexican wrestling movie, you kind of owe it to yourself. My favorite parts are when the luchadore is just doing normal shit, like reading a book or enjoying a candlelit dinner with his ladyfriend, but he’s still got the mask on and nobody thinks that’s weird.

Anyway, it’s only gringos (such as the assholes who made Wrestlemaniac) who think luchadores are funny. In Mexico, they’re folk heroes who stand up for the common man. They fight corruption and injustice, as well as Martians. They give hope to the hopeless and provide generations of Mexican children with positive role models. So it’s kind of a dick move to take all that noble history and turn it into a cheesy slasher movie. It’s like making a killer Superman movie.

Aw, who am I kidding? This is a brilliant idea. The execution is only adequate, but it’s still a brilliant idea. What it’s about is this van full of total douchebags who are driving down to Mexico to make a porno. I don’t know why they couldn’t just shoot it in Pasadena or something, but I’m sure there were some real good reasons. Union problems, maybe. The jizzmoppers local wanted too much money.

Now, right away you know you’re in trouble, because these characters are annoying as balls. Everything they say is self-consciously vulgar and mean-spirited, and yeah, it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but since when did "tongue-in-cheek" mean "cringe-inducing"? Shit, the very first line of dialogue is about the mythical sex move known as the Dirty Sanchez. Way to ruin that term, movie. That’s almost as bad as when American Pie blew up milf’s spot.

The only guy who’s even kind of likeable is the fat Mexican-American cameraman, who’s played by the dude they hired because Hugo from Lost was already booked. He’s the one who knows all about the Mexican ghost town of La Sangre de Dios, where legend has it that a luchadore named El Mascarado was imprisoned after he went crazy 40 years ago and started killing his opponents in the ring.

Part of the problem with this beginning part is that, like those Mexican restaurants all over New York that are run by Chinese people, there are no actual Mexicans in it. The porn douches go to a rundown gas station where the attendant claims to be Mexican, but he’s played by the white mongoloid-looking dude who was in House of 1000 Corpses. And they don’t even try to make him look, dress, or act Mexican. In fact, the only Mexican in the whole movie is El Mascarado himself, who’s played by the original Rey Mysterio (not the one in the WWE, who’s actually this guy’s nephew). He’s an older dude, so he’s got the classic Mexican wrestler build, all chest and gut. I have no complaints about Rey Mysterio whatsoever. He’s a mean motherfucker, and he looks great stomping on people and throwing them through breakaway furniture. But while he’s an awful lot of Mexican, he’s still not enough Mexican to allow this movie to fully exploit its premise. I mean, how many killer Mexican wrestler movies is the universe going to allow? Not many, I’m saying. Possibly just this one. That’s a big responsibility, movie, and I’m sorry to say, you fumbled it. You’re just not Mexican enough. You’re a Chexican chimichanga: tasty, but not authentic.

But all is not lost. Once the horror kicks in, I liked Wrestlemaniac quite a bit. It sort of reminded me of the obscure Spanish film Who Can Kill A Child? (Answer: A dude with a machine gun. He can kill the fuck out a child) in that a lot of it takes place in this deserted village in broad daylight. Personally, I like daytime horror movies because they remove the audience’s subconscious belief that dawn brings safety. When some maniac is stalking you in the middle of the afternoon, you’re pretty much fucked. I also like the Scooby Doo aspect of it, with this group of young people in an awesome custom van (my favorite character in the movie) going to a spooky place and investigating a local legend. Granted, Scooby Doo never had any lesbian scenes, but we all know the subtext was there.

And like I said, having a Mexican wrestler play Jason is a brilliant idea. El Mascarado’s specialty is beating people to a pulp and then ripping their faces off with his bare hands. It’s like removing a luchadore’s mask after he’s defeated, which is the ultimate humiliation. As the fat guy tells us, if a luchadore’s face is revealed to the public, he must retire in disgrace. So that’s how the fat guy figures out El Mascarado’s weakness: You gotta rip his mask off. Easier said than done, but at least there are some rules to this shit.

Speaking of the fat guy, he grew on me as the movie progressed. I think it was when he said that the reason he knew how to navigate around the ghost town, uncover secrets, and solve the mystery was that he was a veteran Dungeons & Dragons player. I mean, it kinda makes sense. If nothing else, D&D teaches you to pay attention to your surroundings and use the information you gain to solve the problems that you face, which is all important if you want to live through a horror movie. I have an ex-girlfriend who’s going to be very happy to learn that all those years tossing around 20-sided dice weren’t just providing her with a nonstop supply of crush-stricken troglodorks drooling over her (admittedly drool-worthy) rack; they were also teaching her valuable anti-luchadore survival skills.

Anyway, the beginning of the movie definitely leans too far into the winky-winky comedy realm, but by the end, they’ve got the balance right. It’s not completely straight-faced, but it’s serious enough that you can actually get into the story unironically. The face-rippings are nice and gross, and there’s a satisfying scene where the most annoying character in the movie gets tossed around like a sack of peat moss, then has his teeth knocked out on a stone ledge, Profondo Rosso-style. I do think there could have been more kills, more wrestling, and more wrestling-related gore, like heads getting clotheslined off and legs getting figure-four-leglocked into bloody splinters. But I have to give it to the director for his clean, efficient style. There’s no nu-horror twitchiness to the cinematography or editing. This guy has studied his Carpenter. He’s got the smooth, gliding Steadicam down, which lets him build suspense, establish geography, and, you know, let the audience see what the fuck is going on. And he throws in at least seven completely gratuitous ass-cam shots. That’s what Joe Bob Briggs would call "doing things the drive-in way."

I was especially impressed to learn that they were supposed to film the movie in an insane asylum, but then the day before the shoot, they lost the location, so they moved to a fake Mexican ghost town outside of L.A. two days later and rewrote the script on the fly. All things considered, they pulled it together pretty well. So maybe I was jumping the gun earlier when I complained about how these new straight-to-video horror movies are too professional. I guess there’s still a bunch of half-assery going on behind the scenes, even when the finished product ends up looking like a commercial for an allergy medication.

Kiltro

One of my great failings as a human being is that I’ve never been much of a world traveler. But that’s okay, because who needs to actually go to far-off places when you can just watch kung fu movies?

Lately, I’ve been big into exploring what I call the Kung Fu of Many Nations. In addition to the standard Chinese and Japanese kung fu, I’ve seen French kung fu, German kung fu, Thai kung fu, Russian kung fu, Vietnamese kung fu, Australian kung fu, Indonesian kung fu, Italian kung fu, Filipino kung fu, and Korean kung fu. And if Mexican wrestling movies count as kung fu, then by God, I have seen Mexican kung fu. I honestly believe that there is only one thing that has the power to bring humanity together as a global family, and that is the universal language of motherfuckers getting kicked in the head.

The thing I love about kung fu movies from non-kung fu producing nations is the sheer chutzpah of it all. Making a kung fu movie is not a simple task. You need a lot of people with a lot of highly specific skills and enormous balls. And when you’re from somewhere that doesn’t really have much of a filmmaking infrastructure in place, it’s even harder. But that doesn’t stop some really dedicated, very insane people from putting their very lives on the line to get their feet in the door of international ass-kicking. And that’s what I love about today’s movie.

Kiltro is the very first Chilean kung fu movie I’ve ever seen, though I gather there are a few that came before and after it, all starring this same dude, Marko Zaror. He’s an award-winning stuntman (he got the Taurus for Best Overall Stunt for rolling down that cliff in The Rundown) who seems to have been building his own stunt school down in Chile for most of the decade. Based on Kiltro, I’m going to watch every single movie this guy makes until he pulls a Jackie Chan and starts making CGI comedies co-starring Jennifer Love Hewitt’s cleavage. I’m not saying that Chile is the new Thailand (the stunts are nowhere near as jaw-dropping, but give them time), but they’ve got a scrappy, don’t-give-a-fuck kind of energy that really appeals to me.

Since this is my first Chilean kung fu movie, I don’t know if they all start out with a robed dwarf hanging out in a cave, but this one sure does. We also get some mystical narration about how love is the source of hate and anger and all of mankind’s worst instincts. Then, to illustrate some of those instincts, it cuts right to one of those soul-killing neon-lit dance clubs full of people who were taught how to dress by Seth Green’s character in Can’t Hardly Wait. It’s truly terrifying. If this is the kind of shit that love causes, man, count me out.

There, we meet our hero, Zami. He’s a big goofy dude who likes to wear hoodies and raver pants that are so big on him that he looks like he’s melting. He also has the most unfortunate haircut I’ve ever seen on an action star who wasn’t Brian Bosworth. It’s this long, greasy WWF-looking mullet with the ends dyed bright red. But don’t worry, it’s all part of his character development. Although you are not expected to think he’s cool at this point in the movie, he does have sort of an Aztec nobility in his facial structure, with a big, proud, prominent nose. (I am tres français in that I believe that the nose is the soul of the face.) Combined with a beefy athleticism that makes you think that he probably smells like sweat every single second of his life, you right away believe that this character is capable of more than he’s currently displaying.

Which is good, because what he’s doing in that night club is staring angrily at this foxy Korean chick who’s dancing with a fratty-lookin’ douche named The Maniac. Zami challenges him to a fight the next day and knocks him the fuck out with one kick. It’s a sloppy little capoeira bout that takes place in some godforsaken post-urban wasteland. This fight is the movie’s great fake-out, because it’s so small and low-key that it gives no hint of the superpowered insanity to come.

See, what happened was, two years earlier, Zami rescued this girl Kim from some rapists, and he’s been in love with her ever since. But she won’t give him the time of day, probably because he keeps kicking the crap out of every guy who even looks at her. Even when he beats up every student in her father’s dojo with his own brand of clumsy but brutal street fighting, she isn’t interested. Her father tells him that he’s wasting his potential, especially since Zami’s father was a great martial artist (this comes as news to Zami).

So what we seem to have here is a teen wish-fulfillment movie where a loser has one special but seemingly useless skill (beating the living shit out of people) but nobody takes him seriously, especially the beautiful but quirky girl that he’s in love with. He’s like Ducky from Pretty In Pink if Ducky knew kung fu (Ducky totally should have known kung fu). So far, so corny. But the weird thing is, this shit actually works on its own terms. Maybe it’s because the movie takes place in the slums of Santiago, where there’s garbage in the streets and graffiti on every wall. It makes you give more of a shit about this dude’s problems than you would if he lived in some John Hughesian upper-middle-class wonderland. The excellent location work grounds the clichéd story in an exotic but down-to-earth reality.

So Zami’s friend is sick of seeing him moping around like a little bitch, so he brings him to see this Arab dude, who tells him a story of a guy whose love for a woman turned into possession, which then turned into fear. (This is what we used to call a "theme" in my college literature classes.) Zami says that he’s not afraid, so the Arab says, "Then you know what to do."

I didn’t think that was very helpful advice, but it turns out that Zami actually does know what to do. He goes right to the shop where Kim works and apologizes for beating up all of her boyfriends. Then he says the most romantic line that has ever been uttered in a kung fu movie (and possibly in any movie ever): "Every kick I’ve thrown has been for you." This chick’s heart must be made of adamantium or some shit for it not to melt right there. She should have been like, "You had me at ’kick.’" But no, instead, she tells him that she’s started dating The Maniac, and, in a stroke of total genius, the guitar-and-drums intro of David Bowie’s "Modern Love" kicks in and there’s one continuous tracking shot as Zami punch-dances out his despair by sprinting through the streets. I don’t know how this movie could afford the rights to this song, but I’d like to think that Bowie lowered his usual rate for this production because of his commitment to the advancement of the Kung Fu of Many Nations. If that’s the case, then B-Movie of the Day salutes you, David Bowie. If not, well, "Golden Years" is a pretty awesome song. You’ll always have that.

Then Count Dracula shows up with his posse of Flock of Seagulls vampires. Count Dracula is a tall bearded man with a cape and a rattail who likes to slice people up with his cane-sword. We’ve seen that before plenty of times, but as a bonus, he also likes to gouge out their gizzards with the claw handle of the cane, making great gouts of CGI squirt out. I didn’t realize that Chilean people bled zeroes and ones, but that just shows my ignorance.

Turns out that Count Dracula is this dude who is seeking revenge on all of the members of this mystical kung fu sect because one of them (Kim’s dad) stole his wife (Kim’s mom, deceased) from him many years ago. He’s the son-in-law of that advice-giving Arab dude (the cast is a real melting pot of South Americans, Asians, and Middle Easterners. Plus Count Dracula, who I believe is Romanian, if I’m not mistaken). So Count Dracula fucking destroys all of the students in Kim’s dad’s dojo (I don’t think Kim’s dad is a very good sensei. He seems like a cool guy, but I’m saying) and beats the shit out of Zami. Luckily, the dwarf from the beginning of the movie shows up and takes Zami and Kim back to his cave by the beach, but he can’t stop Count Dracula from kidnapping Kim’s dad and hanging him from the ceiling of his warehouse by hooks in his back, Ichi the Killer style. (No hot grease, though.)

Meanwhile, the dwarf, looking like a miniature little Charlton Heston, explains the whole deal to Zami and sends him to the north to get trained by this other sect member who may or may not really be Zami’s estranged father. Who knows? Always in motion is the future. When Zami asks why Yoda Moses can’t just kick Count Dracula’s ass himself, he says the best line in the movie: "Look at me. I’m old and I’m a dwarf." Which is a pretty good excuse for getting out of fighting Count Dracula, if you ask me. I’m gonna have to remember that one.

So Zami goes off on his quest. I don’t know how this movie managed to go from Golden State to Bulletproof Monk inside of five minutes, but it found a way, and I applaud it for that.

After Zami travels through some incredibly beautiful Chilean sunsets (it’s almost cheating to put a sunset in your movie), he finds his drunk maybe-dad, and there’s a lengthy training sequence out in a phony desert that looks like the set of Three Amigos. He takes some sort of hallucinogenic to temporarily wipe his memory clean, and there’s some pretty good cosmic hoodoo, mostly Buddhist-derived, with a little Native American mysticism throw in. It’s hard to do these kinds of scenes without making me think of On Deadly Ground, where Steven Seagal goes on a vision quest and fights his spirit bear, but I don’t blame Kiltro. That’s just what happens when you walk in the shadow of giants.

Anyway, Zami learns how to tap into his Z-state, which allows him to act without thought. That gives him super humongous ass-kicking powers, which come in handy because Count Dracula has finally gotten his shit together and kidnapped Kim.

So Zami paints himself up like the Ultimate Warrior and goes on the warpath. And that’s when the kung fu starts in earnest. He’s a big guy, six foot or so, but he can do crazy triple-kicks and full-air flips with no wires. I saw the training footage of this fight, and this dude is the real deal. He’s no Tony Jaa, but for his size, he’s pretty incredible. He takes out about a hundred guys in an alley, knocking some of them 20 feet through the air. He’s also got a blade on his heel that lets him cut like 50 throats in a row, filling the air with digital plasma. It’s kind of weird to think of the mopey bastard in the hoodie from the beginning of the movie chopping motherfuckers’ heads off without a second thought, but I guess that’s what the Z-state does for you. It’s like spiritual Red Bull.

Then there’s the final showdown with Count Dracula, accompanied by epic spaghetti western guitars that were clearly influenced by Robert Rodriguez’s Mariachi Trilogy. It’s a welcome change from the Zamfir music that was playing during the training montage, but really, even that wasn’t so bad. I like the music in this movie. It mostly sounds like real people playing real instruments, not some Casio shit like you usually get in low-budget action flicks.

Anyway, this is an excellent movie with a lot of heart, and it gets a big boost from some really incredible Chilean scenery. We get to see a lot of Chile, from the slums to the mountains, and it really is a gorgeous place. I don’t know why more movies don’t get shot in Chile. In fact, I don’t know anything about Chile. I’m just a spoiled American who spends all his time watching DVDs. Jesus Christ, I’m wasting my life. What a pathetic individual I am. In fact, fuck this blog. I’m gonna go do something with my time on this earth. See y’all in the Z-state.

The Sword and the Sorceror

Does it make me a bad person that I love rip-offs? Show me the most blatantly mercenary cash-in on a popular trend and I’ll show you a fun night at the movies. The thing I love about them is that they take whatever formula was created by the progenitor of the trend and boil it down to its most superficial elements. For example, what made the original Matrix such a great movie was the whole concept of a virtual reality world where anything was possible, even gravity-defying kung fu. But all the people who ripped it off saw was the pretty people flipping around on wires, so for the next six or seven years, we got dozens of movies where people could do crazy Matrix shit for no real reason besides the fact that it looked cool. They copied the trappings, but not the point behind them.

In that sense, many rip-offs are more efficient entertainment delivery systems than the movies that inspired them. So even though Halloween is a far better movie than any of the Friday the 13th movies, I still watch the latter more often than the former. Sometimes you just don’t want to deal with piddly details like craft and suspense and storytelling competence. You just want to skip to the good stuff.

Granted, it usually takes a few years for me to get over the initial outrage I feel at the unoriginality of it all, but that’s cool. Fine cheese must be aged, anyway.

Which brings us to The Sword and the Sorcerer, as blatant a Conan rip-off as you’re likely to find. Conan the Barbarian was made by John Milius, the gun-toting right wing maniac (this is meant as an observation, not a criticism) who also directed the Cold War classic Red Dawn. He was so sick of the namby-pambiness of his hippie peers that he made a movie glorifying the concept of "Might makes right." It was an ode to a simpler, more primal, and, to Milius’ way of thinking, more noble world.

So there was all this other shit going on in Conan, but all the people who copied it saw was a muscley dude, some swordplay, and a bunch of wenches in furry underpants with their titties hanging out. So that’s what we get in The Sword and the Sorcerer and its ilk. On the Conan rip-off scale, I’d say it’s nowhere near as good as The Beastmaster, but its way better than The Dungeonmaster. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The movie begins with some evil dudes in robes entering a paper mache cave. Then this Grace Jones-looking broad starts chanting and writhing, and the whole time, you’re wondering when the blue lasers are going to show up. The eighties were all about blue lasers.

But instead, they throw you a curveball by having rubber faces appear in the dirt. Then some kind of glop demon arises out of a pool of mud. He’s played by Richard Moll of Night Court fame, who was also in The Dungeonmaster. In that one, he was your standard evil sorcerer, but in this one, he’s a much more complex character. He’s an evil sorcerer with the face of a gargoyle.

So the deal is that this evil king Cromwell wants to use the Glop Demon’s black magic to take over a neighboring kingdom. To prove that he has the power to do so, El Gloppo uses his mind to rip the Grace Jones chick’s heart out and make it fly across the room into his outstretched hand. It’s a complete perversion of the Jedi mind trick. He might as well be using it to look under chicks’ skirts. (In the movie’s defense, his fingernails glow orange when he does this. This is a completely new twist on the classic blue laser optical effect, so maybe it’s not fair to call this movie a rip-off. Orange and blue are two completely different colors, after all.)

Anyway, the king is played by the low-rent Rutger Hauer knockoff who was also the head villain in the Chuck Norris classic Invasion USA. In that one, he shot a guy in the balls six or seven times to prove how evil he was. In this one, he does it by betraying the Glop Demon after he uses his magic to wipe out the king’s enemies with an ill-defined plague. Cromwell stabs him with a dagger, so Ol’ Gloppy jumps off a cliff. I don’t know, I think maybe this Cromwell guy is kind of a jerk. Maybe you just have to get to know him.

Anyway, the king of the country that Cromwell is invading doesn’t know about this shit because it’s olden times and text messaging hadn’t been invented yet. Sup king? Wear u @? Were all dead. Chk u later, k? That would have saved the king a lot of trouble, but what are you gonna do? So while his kingdom is being invaded, he’s just hanging out in a fake gray beard with his gray-wigged wife. I don’t understand why they couldn’t just hire legitimately old people to play these parts, but I wasn’t there on the set that day so I don’t know what kind of compromises had to be made in order to bring the singular vision of director Albert Pyun (Dollman, Kickboxer 2 and 4) to the screen.

But then the king’s melty-faced son shows up with the news, so the rest of the family flee. The younger prince, Talon, gets to carry the family sword, which is this ridiculous thing that has three full-sized parallel blades. It looks just like a much larger version of the knife hand that the villain screws onto his stump at the end of Enter the Dragon. All that steel must make it weigh about 80 pounds, but the extra weight is worth it because the two side blades can shoot out and impale people so hard that they fly backward about ten feet. It looks like there’s some sort of rudimentary rocket propulsion going on in there, which is an incredible feat of engineering, if you think about it. I wondered what they used for fuel? It’s a shame that this technology has been lost to the ages.

Anyway, even with his triple-bladed rocket sword, Talon can’t save his mom and dad from getting decapitated by Cromwell and his goons, so he flees and grows up to be your standard wandering sword-for-hire in a gigantic fur pimp coat. Then he returns home with his band of warriors, one of whom is played by the bald dude from Murphy Brown. Remember when the worst thing going on in this country was Dan Quayle’s beef with television’s depiction of unwed moms? Man, I miss the nineties sometimes.

So Talon goes to the tavern and learns that there’s an uprising against Cromwell, led by his father’s adviser’s son, whom the people regard as the rightful heir to the throne. This is where you realize that you don’t know what the fuck Talon thinks he’s doing. Since he’s actually the rightful heir, you’d think he’d want to get that shit cleared up. Or at least help out the rebellion somehow. Or some shit. I don’t know. But instead, he just gets drunk until the rebellion leader gets captured. Then Talon has to rescue this hot brunette from a bunch of rapists by beating them up with a turkey leg. She turns out to be the sister of the rebellion leader, so she tries to hire him to rescue her brother. But Talon doesn’t want money. Talon wants pussy. So the chick agrees to screw him in exchange for his services. But the catch is, he’s got to do the job first. Typical. Sure, he rescued her from those rapists, but what has he done for her lately?

Seriously, though, what the fuck is going on with this Talon dude? When he comes back home, he says he has "unfinished business" to take care of (movie code for "revenge") but then all he wants is to bone this wench. It’s like nobody showed him the beginning of the movie, so he doesn’t know that he’s a prince. He really just thinks he’s in town to get laid. Then he finally comes face to face with Cromwell, and a handy flashback reminds him of what the fuck he’s supposed to be doing. But even then, he doesn’t even reveal himself to be the real prince at the end of the movie. He just screws the chick and lets her brother be the king so he can ride off and continue to be an irresponsible lout. Way to piss away your father’s legacy, dude. Conan would never do that. Hell, even Ator the Flying Eagle wouldn’t pull that shit.

But that’s the kind of dude we’re dealing with here: a total chump. Talon keeps getting captured, forcing all of the other characters in the movie to rescue him. Luckily, everywhere he goes, people recognize him and talk about how they owe him for that time he saved their asses. I think they had to put these parts in because, otherwise, there’s very little evidence of his badass credentials in the movie. You never even get to see him chop someone into four parts with his three-bladed sword. I mean, it was pretty cool when he got crucified and then yanked out the spikes with his bare hands, but still. You need to earn this hero shit, Talon. You don’t just get it by default because you’ve got a wacky novelty sword.

There really isn’t much else to say about this movie. There’s a twist involving the Glop Demon that you’d have to be a total fucking douchebag not to see coming (no disrespect to any total fucking douchebags who might be reading this), a cameo by the dude who gets chopped up in the propeller in Raiders of the Lost Ark (this time, he gets his face sanded off by pedal-operated grindstone, but the funny part is, he keeps working the pedal even as he’s getting murderated. That’s dedication for you.), and your textbook topless harem scene (prior to this, the movie had been noticeably light on boobage).

Basically, you get what you’d expect out of a movie called The Sword and the Sorcerer. Namely, a) a sword; and b) a sorcerer. Its story checks out. Unlike that movie The Squid and the Whale, which, unless my interpretation is way off, wasn’t really about squids and whales at all. Maybe they’re saving that for the sequel, where the dickhead divorced dude gets eaten by a whale, so his son has to team up with a giant squid to rescue him. I’m not sure what that has to do with The Sword and the Sorcerer, but I’m just saying. The Squid and the Whale 2: This Time There’s Actually a Squid and a Whale would rule.

Anyway, if you like Conan rip-offs, you could do worse. Deathstalker, for instance. How the fuck do you stalk death? Does that mean you’re suicidal or that you’re so the opposite of suicidal that you’re actually trying to hunt and kill death itself? I don’t get it, man. The movie should have been called Dudechopper, because that’s all the hero does. I don’t mind a rip-off; it’s the dishonesty I can’t stand.

Sukiyaki Western: Django

Dude, I could tell you all about this movie, but I think you’re still just gonna have to see it for yourself. What it is is your basic spaghetti western homage directed by Takashi Miike (pronounced "mee-kay," I’m told), the insanely prolific sicko behind such cinematic mind-fucks as Audition and Ichi the Killer. Right there, that oughtta tell you that you’re in for some seriously weird shit. This is the guy who made somebody’s claymation uvula sing in The Happiness of the Katakuris. And that’s the closest thing he’s ever made to a movie that normal people could watch. To quote Peter Weller in the criminally underrated Shakedown, he is "new to the planet."

But it gets weirder. Not only is Sukiyaki Western: Django a Japanese western (as if you couldn’t tell from the title), but it’s a Japanese western that’s performed in the most heavily accented English you’ve ever heard in your life. They sound like Japanese hair metal band Loudness singing Oh-whoah! Lock and loll clazy ni-i-ight! I could only catch every third or fourth word, but that’s okay. Miike helpfully color-coded the movie so you could understand it visually.

See, people are gonna call this your standard Fistful of Dollars plot, where a mysterious stranger strolls into a town that is completely controlled by two warring gangs and proceeds to play both sides against the middle. Other, snootier people are going to call it the Yojimbo plot, because it came first and it’s the same movie, only with a ronin instead of a gunfighter. But I’m gonna take it all the way back to the beginning and call it the Red Harvest plot, since that’s the Dashiell Hammett book that they’re all based on. So there.

Anyway, I only bring this up to show that even when you can’t understand a word the characters are saying, you still know what’s going on because it’s such a timeless story. And besides, one gang wears red and the other wears white, so you can always tell who’s on what side. They all dress like gay post-apocalyptic anime motocross Furious Five members, but the white side is run by this glam nancyboy swordsman who only longs for a worthy opponent, while the red side is controlled by a complete moron thug pistolero who likes to take naps in the middle of battles. (He’s got the best line in the movie. After he splatters this dude’s blood all over the dude’s wife’s face, he says, "My favorite color. It looks goooood on you.") They’re both good villains, but the white guy is far more impressive. He’s able to shoot people from miles away by aiming into the wind so that his bullets take about 10 seconds to curve around and hit their target. Very cool.

So into this town rides this shadowy dude who’s quick on the draw and that’s about it. Not only does he have no character development whatsoever, but he has the worst accent in the movie. Honestly, I think that’s why they hired him. Just to fuck with you.

Did I mention that Quentin Tarantino plays two parts in this movie (well, two and a half if you count the flashbacks)? And that he also speaks with a heavy Japanese accent? He plays a badass gunfighter at the very beginning that you think is going to be the narrator who bookends the movie, sort of a tall-tale thing, except that he never comes back at the end. That negates the entire purpose of having bookends. If you only had one bookend, all of your books would tip over and fall onto the floor. But Miike doesn’t give a shit about your books. Let ’em fall, he says. Fuck your books. That’s the kind of dude we’re dealing with here. A goddamn anarchist.

Quentin (I call him Quentin because we’re old friends from all those DVD special features I watched) does shoot at least six people, though, splattering one of them all over an obviously fake painted backdrop of a sunset. And he does it all while tossing around a bloody rattlesnake egg that he stole from a CGI hawk (Technical note: This movie uses the vintage "hawk scream" sound effect more often than any movie since Steven Seagal’s classic directorial debut, On Deadly Ground). He looks like he’s having a fucking ball. Then he comes back at the halfway point, wearing about thirty pounds of latex as this ancient arms dealer in a clanky clockwork wheelchair. Quentin’s pseudo-Shatnerian acting style is almost always distracting, but this is without a doubt his best performance since From Dusk Til Dawn. There’s one part where, with just a look, he conveys a real sense of loss under all that makeup, and it’s actually kind of affecting. You’re like, Shit, Quentin, I didn’t know you had it in you. It’s a good moment because, for once, he doesn’t just seem like Quentin Tarantino. He seems like a real dude having a real emotion. Good job, man. Now can you please stop fucking around with shit like this and give us that four-hour war movie with Adam Sandler and Arnold Schwarzeneggar that you’ve been threatening to unleash on us since the late nineties? Please put down the bong and pick up the laptop. Do it for the children.

(Ed. note: Obviously this reference is woefully outdated, but I kept it for historical-type purposes.)

Anyway, this movie is full of crazy shit. There’s a scene where a hot chick who looks exactly like What’s-Her-Face from Lost (No, not just because they’re both Asian. God, I can’t believe you would even say something like that. That’s fucked up, man. I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.) does a weird interpretive dance, then lays down on the floor and pulls a foot-long string of jingle bells out of her throat. There’s one character who gets beat up and bullied by his own split personality, and another who gets his balls shot off so he becomes a crazy leaping eunuch. There’s a completely out-of-left field shot of a red-and-white mottled fetus growing out of a rose. Not to mention it’s the only movie ever where the title appears on giant CGI tofu. (This is almost as protein-rich a title card as Ichi the Killer, where the movie’s name gets spelled out in the main character’s cumshot.)

Despite the randomness, Sukiyaki Western still functions as a proper action movie, with lots of well-choreographed fistfights and shootouts. A lot of dynamite gets tossed around, and obviously, there’s one of those Civil War gatling guns that you have to crank like an old-timey movie camera. It also goes without saying that this gatling gun is stored in a coffin. You knew that because the word "Django" is in the title. For the uninitiated, Django was an old spaghetti western about a dude who dragged around a gatling gun in a coffin. It was so popular that the ever-imitative Italians made about a thousand rip-offs with the word "Django" in the title, even though only one of them (Django Returns) had anything to do with the original. "Django" kind of became code for "bad-ass western." So you can see that Miike is consciously playing with cinematic myth here. He even has a Japanese cover of the classic Django theme song over the end credits.

The movie’s main joke is that people with speaking parts can get shot about a million times before they die, while non-speaking extras go down easily and by the dozen. Miike brings this so far that it becomes like a Family Guy joke. It goes on so long that it’s funny, but then it goes too far and stops being funny, but then it keeps going until it becomes funny again. Then it goes on so much longer that you’re not sure it’s even supposed to be funny anymore, but then it goes on so much longer than that that it becomes even funnier than it was in the first place. Like the puking scene in Team America times 9/11 times a thousand.

Anyway, you should totally check this one out. It has a lot in common with Miike’s yakuza movies, in that the pace vacillates between rapid-fire sensory overload and lugubrious banality. (If you don’t know what "lugubrious" means, it means "mournful." If you did know, you’re a lot smarter than I was until about 9:30 last night when I looked it up.) It’s a lot easier to take than most of those movies, though, since he isn’t really going for the throat with the shock tactics like he usually does. The female characters (including the absolute hottest grandma in film history) don’t exactly get off easy, but at least they get to keep their nipples this time. For a space mutant like Takashi Miike, this might as well be Pretty Woman.