You can tell right away that Action Jackson is going to be an awesome movie because both the actors in the first scene were in Lethal Weapon, and one of them (Mary Ellen Trainor, wife of Robert Zemeckis) was also in Die Hard. Then the American terrorist from Die Hard (the one who bet on the Lakers) rappels through the window along with a bunch of other ski-mask-wearing villains and shoots the dude from Lethal Weapon (he's the guy forced to hold the lighter under Mr. Joshua's arm) with a grenade launcher, sending him crashing out another window and plummeting 20 stories like a flaming dude-shaped meteorite until he crashes through the glass roof of a five-star restaurant.
Action Jackson begins as it means to continue: With lots of fire and lots of That Guys, Late Eighties Action Movie Division.
You kind of have to expect that from a Joel Silver movie, though. Back then, he liked to use the same That Guys (and the occasional That Chick) over and over, so if you're a big fan of that period, every movie is like a high school reunion. In Action Jackson, I counted three Predator alums (Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, and Sonny Landham—no Jesse the Body, sorry), four Lethal Weapons (the two from the opening scene, Danny Glover's cop buddy who thinks he's an eighties man, and Al Leong), an incredible six Die Hards (the two in the first scene, Robert Davi, the guy who says "Send in the car," Argyle, and Al Leong again), and a couple of repeats who were also in Commando (Duke, the "Send in the car" guy). As a bonus, there are also two from Weird Science (Grandpa and the raspy-voiced black guy who says "She kicked you in your nuts?"). If you know what the hell I'm talking about, congratulations, you're in your thirties and you have steadily watched the world get less awesome with every passing year. I turned 31 today, so let's all raise our glasses to an era when men were men but you couldn't tell it by the hairstyles.
Action Jackson was one of my favorites from way back when, for obvious reasons. I mean, some guy gets fireballed in the first two minutes, then it cuts to a scene where Biff from Back to the Future is a Detroit cop who can't stop lying to his partner about how much pussy he gets. They nab this pursesnatcher (one of the black guys from Tour of Duty. Don't worry, the other one shows up later) and start telling him about Sergeant Jericho "Action" Jackson, how he was created by NASA to be the first man to walk on the moon without a spacesuit, how some perp he was interrogating gnawed off his own hand like a trapped skunk or marmot, how his father was a sasquatch, etc. Your classic "How badass is this guy?" speech, pioneered by the famous "He can eat things that would make a billygoat puke" monologue from First Blood. So when the pursesnatcher accidentally spills coffee on Action's desk, he faints. It's that kind of movie. One minute a dude is exploding, the next it's Three's Company-style slapstick. It's the typical anything-goes approach of stuntman-turned-director Craig "Stone Cold" Baxley.
Anyway, there may or may not be some plot in here at some point. All we really need to know is that Craig T. Nelson is a big rich jerk and Action Jackson is going to kill him. We know that because Craig T. is cheating on his wife (Sharon Stone in what, as far as I can tell, was her first of at least 36 nude scenes) with Vanity, one of Prince's old protégés. He keeps her happy by making her take her clothes off and shooting heroin into her thighs without looking for a vein or anything. She eventually became a Born Again in real life, so I'm sure she's not real proud of this scene. That or the fact that her stage name was one of the seven deadly sins. Oh well. Better than Sloth, I guess.
So people and property get blown up, Action races a car on foot, Craig T. gets a karate lesson, somebody says "Hi! I'm Mr. Ed!" completely out of context, and Action gets captured by these gay thugs who have a collection of jarred testicles in their cabinet. Then, to make up for that lame Mr. Ed crack, Action shoots the Die Hard guy in the chest with a grenade launcher and says "Barbecue, huh? How do you like your ribs?" But before that, he throws Sonny Landham out a window and into another window on the other side of the alley, which is just the kind of whimsical twist on a classic stunt that makes Baxley the most underrated action director of all time.
Then Action and his assortment of sidekicks crash Craig T.'s party for some wacky violence before Action drives a red sports car into Craig T.'s house, up his surprisingly wide staircase, and right into his bedroom, where they have a kung fu fight. It's nothing special (I'd swear that Craig T.'s leg isn't attached to his body for some of the kicks), but every now and again you remember that there's a sports car parked in a bedroom, which never stops being funny. So after Action splatters Craig T. all over the wall, his captain (Bill Duke, obviously) promotes him to lieutenant, even though he's wanted for murder and has no evidence to clear his name. All he did was drive a sports car into a rich dude's bedroom and shoot him twice in the chest. I guess that's how they roll in Detroit.
This movie was clearly meant to give Carl Weathers an action franchise of his own after more than a decade of sidekickery, but alas, it never happened. The lack of Action Jackson 2: Detroit Muscle pisses me off even more than the lack of Remo Williams 2: The Adventure Continues. But that's life, I guess: one fucking disappointment after another.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Flesh Gordon
Making porn versions of hit movies is at least as popular an American pastime as, say, buying illegal fireworks or being dismissive of intellectualism. We've all got our favorites. Star Whores. Edward Penishands. Shaving Ryan's Privates. The Domimatrix. Laurence of a Labia. The list goes on. But none of them would exist (and I'm pretty sure at least one of them doesn't) if it weren't for Flesh Gordon, a softcore smut sci-fi spoof so far ahead of its time, it came out a full six years before the movie it parodied. This is an ambitious movie that is fully committed to the righteous cause of giving the audiences of 1974 an entirely new way of viewing bush. It's a masterpiece.
Flesh Gordon proclaims its lofty aims right from the opening crawl, which a stentorian narrator reads aloud in case anyone in the audience is either a) illiterate; b) servicing his or her partner orally, thus preventing him or her from seeing the screen; or c) both. It tells the history of superheroes, how they were born during the Great Depression to give the downtrodden masses examples of virtue and strength to guide them through their troubled days. It explains the great debt that the filmmakers (L.A.-based porn-loop producers who'd made a $100,000 windfall from the sale of their first full-length feature, Mona: The Virgin Nymph) owe to the creative geniuses of yesteryear, who'd weaved such a rich tapestry of fantasy and myth for future generations to draw from.
Then we cut to a scene where a sex ray from outer space makes a bunch of people start boning in the street.
Turns out this is happening all over the globe, creating chaos and anarchy. A professor discovers the extraterrestrial origins of the horny happening and declares that his son Flesh Gordon (currently in Tibet playing in the world hockey championships) is the only one who can stop it. We are then introduced to our hero, a big blond bloke who's flying on an airplane with wicker seats. Within minutes, the sex ray engulfs the plane, causing the pilots to leave the cockpit ("Control, you've got two horny sonsabitches up here!") to join the orgy already in progress, which consists of a bunch of naked people rolling around on the floor in the passenger compartment without penetrating each other. As the plane goes down ("Yes! Go down! Go down!" cries frequently nude and perpetually ravished love interest Dale Ardor), Flesh shakes off the sex fever and takes the controls, which break off in his hand. So he grabs Dale and they parachute to safety while she blows him on the way down.
They're met by Dr. Flexi Jerkoff, who has a penis-shaped rocketship that can take them to the source of the sex ray. The cockpit of the cockship has no seats at all, just straps like an old subway car, so Flesh should have been grateful for those wicker chairs on the plane. After a mid-flight threeway that leaves Dale nude until Jerkoff gives her one of his mother's old dresses ("She was buried in it."), they crash-land on the planet Porno, ruled by the sinister and scenery-chewing overactor Wang the Perverted, who cackles a lot and likes to say things like "Seize them, dildos!" After Flesh and Co. survive an encounter with several ferocious Penisauruses (claymation cock-cyclopses that arise from the ground like the sand worms in Beetlejuice), Wang wants to make Dale his virginal bride (he apparently didn't see the beginning of the movie), while the Queen of Darkness wants Flesh for her own. But first, he must survive a brutal battle with three orange-wigged Fifth Element-looking cat-bitches. And here I thought the fifth element was love.
Flesh survives the ordeal and gets taken back to the Queen's flying swan boat, which floats through a night sky filled with animated constellations. After they make sweet, sweet love, Wang shoots the ship down, and Flesh and Jerkoff are given the Pasties of Power by the Queen's ghost. They're silver, glittery nipples that shoot cheesy optical effects. Jerkoff puts them on, and they storm Wang's palace to rescue Dale. Unfortunately, she's already been taken captive by a tribe of underground lesbians ("Oh no! Dykes!" cries Jerkoff in horror.) who try to induct Dale into their Sapphic society with a biracial orgy. When Flesh and Jerkoff show up, the lesbians unleash their guardian, a stop-motion robotbeetlevultureman who is so well animated that you actually forget that you're watching a skin flick for a moment and just get caught up in the action. No sarcasm, we're talking Clash of the Titans caliber effects work here.
Actually, for 1974, all of the effects are really amazing, and with good reason. Many of them were directed by Dennis Muren, who went on to do Star Wars and Jurassic Park and win more Oscars than any other human being currently walking the earth. The effects were so good that, due to there being a dearth of FX-oriented films released in 1974, the producers actually submitted Flesh Gordon to the Academy for consideration in the Best Special Effects category. Unfortunately, the Academy chickened out and opted not to give out an Oscar for special effects that year, instead giving The Poseidon Adventure an honorable mention. Pussies.
Anyway, Flesh and his crew are rescued from the robotbeetlevultureman by Prince Precious, good-natured homosexual and proper heir to the throne of Porno. After the less-than-enlightened view of lesbians on display just moments earlier, I expected the gays to get the same treatment, but oddly, the film is completely accepting of their sexual orientation. I guess in the world of Flesh Gordon, everybody needs to love the cock.
So Precious and his band of merry men give Flesh a lift back to Wang's castle in their rocketship, which gets shot down and crushed in the serrated jaws of the castle gate. (Clearly, Flesh should not be allowed to board any kind of craft.) Then there's a cliffhanger intermission where the narrator asks, "Is the Perverted Wang victorious?" Our heroes survive, but a spy steals the Pasties of Power, the only things that can destroy Wang's sex ray. Wang uses one to pleasure a sex slave, but then it gets stuck in her coochie. (I swear to God, this is an important plot point.) While Flesh and Jerkoff shake her up and down, trying to dislodge the pasty, Wang awakens his demon god, a fucking awesome goat-footed stop-motion monster the size of King Kong. He looks fierce but likes to mumble some too-cool-for-school swinger jive in the voice of future Coach star Craig T. Nelson. He kidnaps Dale (obviously), forcing Flesh, Jerkoff, and Precious to blast him with yet another rocketship. The monster falls off of the castle and makes every miniature in the movie explode while naked people run around in front of a rear projection screen. This goes on for like five minutes. This shit must have taken forever. Compare the effort put into these meticulously crafted models, puppets, and matte paintings to the joyless two-chicks-and-three-dicks-in-a-Motel-Six stylings of modern porn. It's like comparing Gone With the Wind to that YouTube video of the fat kid with the fake lightsaber.
This is an amazing movie, not least for a script peppered with gems like "Sir, I have a huge boner!" and "Nice job, Jerkoff!" Honestly, it's not much campier than the real Flash Gordon, and it has better special effects and way more bush. The only thing it's missing is a Queen soundtrack, and I'm sure that's just because the producers never made the band an offer. We can all lament that missed opportunity, but it can't detract from the eternal glory of Flesh Gordon.
By the way, I've never seen Star Whores, but do you think the TIE Fighters are just big flying boobs with wings? Because that's totally the way I would have done it. Oh well. Maybe they could save that for the prequel, The Phantom Man-Ass.
Flesh Gordon proclaims its lofty aims right from the opening crawl, which a stentorian narrator reads aloud in case anyone in the audience is either a) illiterate; b) servicing his or her partner orally, thus preventing him or her from seeing the screen; or c) both. It tells the history of superheroes, how they were born during the Great Depression to give the downtrodden masses examples of virtue and strength to guide them through their troubled days. It explains the great debt that the filmmakers (L.A.-based porn-loop producers who'd made a $100,000 windfall from the sale of their first full-length feature, Mona: The Virgin Nymph) owe to the creative geniuses of yesteryear, who'd weaved such a rich tapestry of fantasy and myth for future generations to draw from.
Then we cut to a scene where a sex ray from outer space makes a bunch of people start boning in the street.
Turns out this is happening all over the globe, creating chaos and anarchy. A professor discovers the extraterrestrial origins of the horny happening and declares that his son Flesh Gordon (currently in Tibet playing in the world hockey championships) is the only one who can stop it. We are then introduced to our hero, a big blond bloke who's flying on an airplane with wicker seats. Within minutes, the sex ray engulfs the plane, causing the pilots to leave the cockpit ("Control, you've got two horny sonsabitches up here!") to join the orgy already in progress, which consists of a bunch of naked people rolling around on the floor in the passenger compartment without penetrating each other. As the plane goes down ("Yes! Go down! Go down!" cries frequently nude and perpetually ravished love interest Dale Ardor), Flesh shakes off the sex fever and takes the controls, which break off in his hand. So he grabs Dale and they parachute to safety while she blows him on the way down.
They're met by Dr. Flexi Jerkoff, who has a penis-shaped rocketship that can take them to the source of the sex ray. The cockpit of the cockship has no seats at all, just straps like an old subway car, so Flesh should have been grateful for those wicker chairs on the plane. After a mid-flight threeway that leaves Dale nude until Jerkoff gives her one of his mother's old dresses ("She was buried in it."), they crash-land on the planet Porno, ruled by the sinister and scenery-chewing overactor Wang the Perverted, who cackles a lot and likes to say things like "Seize them, dildos!" After Flesh and Co. survive an encounter with several ferocious Penisauruses (claymation cock-cyclopses that arise from the ground like the sand worms in Beetlejuice), Wang wants to make Dale his virginal bride (he apparently didn't see the beginning of the movie), while the Queen of Darkness wants Flesh for her own. But first, he must survive a brutal battle with three orange-wigged Fifth Element-looking cat-bitches. And here I thought the fifth element was love.
Flesh survives the ordeal and gets taken back to the Queen's flying swan boat, which floats through a night sky filled with animated constellations. After they make sweet, sweet love, Wang shoots the ship down, and Flesh and Jerkoff are given the Pasties of Power by the Queen's ghost. They're silver, glittery nipples that shoot cheesy optical effects. Jerkoff puts them on, and they storm Wang's palace to rescue Dale. Unfortunately, she's already been taken captive by a tribe of underground lesbians ("Oh no! Dykes!" cries Jerkoff in horror.) who try to induct Dale into their Sapphic society with a biracial orgy. When Flesh and Jerkoff show up, the lesbians unleash their guardian, a stop-motion robotbeetlevultureman who is so well animated that you actually forget that you're watching a skin flick for a moment and just get caught up in the action. No sarcasm, we're talking Clash of the Titans caliber effects work here.
Actually, for 1974, all of the effects are really amazing, and with good reason. Many of them were directed by Dennis Muren, who went on to do Star Wars and Jurassic Park and win more Oscars than any other human being currently walking the earth. The effects were so good that, due to there being a dearth of FX-oriented films released in 1974, the producers actually submitted Flesh Gordon to the Academy for consideration in the Best Special Effects category. Unfortunately, the Academy chickened out and opted not to give out an Oscar for special effects that year, instead giving The Poseidon Adventure an honorable mention. Pussies.
Anyway, Flesh and his crew are rescued from the robotbeetlevultureman by Prince Precious, good-natured homosexual and proper heir to the throne of Porno. After the less-than-enlightened view of lesbians on display just moments earlier, I expected the gays to get the same treatment, but oddly, the film is completely accepting of their sexual orientation. I guess in the world of Flesh Gordon, everybody needs to love the cock.
So Precious and his band of merry men give Flesh a lift back to Wang's castle in their rocketship, which gets shot down and crushed in the serrated jaws of the castle gate. (Clearly, Flesh should not be allowed to board any kind of craft.) Then there's a cliffhanger intermission where the narrator asks, "Is the Perverted Wang victorious?" Our heroes survive, but a spy steals the Pasties of Power, the only things that can destroy Wang's sex ray. Wang uses one to pleasure a sex slave, but then it gets stuck in her coochie. (I swear to God, this is an important plot point.) While Flesh and Jerkoff shake her up and down, trying to dislodge the pasty, Wang awakens his demon god, a fucking awesome goat-footed stop-motion monster the size of King Kong. He looks fierce but likes to mumble some too-cool-for-school swinger jive in the voice of future Coach star Craig T. Nelson. He kidnaps Dale (obviously), forcing Flesh, Jerkoff, and Precious to blast him with yet another rocketship. The monster falls off of the castle and makes every miniature in the movie explode while naked people run around in front of a rear projection screen. This goes on for like five minutes. This shit must have taken forever. Compare the effort put into these meticulously crafted models, puppets, and matte paintings to the joyless two-chicks-and-three-dicks-in-a-Motel-Six stylings of modern porn. It's like comparing Gone With the Wind to that YouTube video of the fat kid with the fake lightsaber.
This is an amazing movie, not least for a script peppered with gems like "Sir, I have a huge boner!" and "Nice job, Jerkoff!" Honestly, it's not much campier than the real Flash Gordon, and it has better special effects and way more bush. The only thing it's missing is a Queen soundtrack, and I'm sure that's just because the producers never made the band an offer. We can all lament that missed opportunity, but it can't detract from the eternal glory of Flesh Gordon.
By the way, I've never seen Star Whores, but do you think the TIE Fighters are just big flying boobs with wings? Because that's totally the way I would have done it. Oh well. Maybe they could save that for the prequel, The Phantom Man-Ass.
Tourist Trap
You ever see a movie when you were a kid and for some reason it gets stuck in your head for the rest of your life? Usually, you don't even remember the whole movie, just one particular scene, or even a single shot. You try to describe it to people, but you lack the context. It's like trying to describe a dream. "There was this, like, hallway. I think it might have been blue. Possibly from the seventies. There may have been a door, as well. Do you know it?"
This is what happened to a certain ladyfriend of mine when we got to talking about movies last weekend. Naturally, the movie that got stuck in her head was a horror movie, because nothing affects a person, particularly a child, more profoundly than mortal terror. A single creepy image, even when trapped in the middle of a preposterous movie, can sink its fangs deep into a person's psyche, injecting slow-release venom whose effects can be felt for a lifetime. When you're a kid, a scary scene is like herpes: you carry that shit around forever, whether you want to or not.
Luckily, this lovely young lady happened to be talking to Mr. Majestyk his-goddamn-self, so when she said "seventies movie where a woman gets wax poured all over her face," I knew just what she was talking about: Tourist Trap, a 1979 drive-in flick that I remembered from Stephen King's non-fiction book on 20th century horror, Danse Macabre. Big Steve called it his favorite bad horror movie, but since this was in the same book where he offhandedly dismissed Planet of the Vampires, Last House on the Left, and Mad Max, I didn't think too much of it. Of course, that didn't stop me from buying Tourist Trap on DVD when I saw it in the used bin earlier this year. When it comes to horror movies, I am nothing if not thorough.
So, in an effort to help my ladyfriend overcome her childhood fears by ripping the rubber mask from her demons and revealing them as the puffed-up charlatans that they are, I showed her Tourist Trap last night. I figured that confronting the movie that scarred her as a child would cure her of her phobia of dolls and mannequins. There was only one problem with that plan: The movie is actually kind of scary.
Tourist Trap is based on Horror Movie Plot #1: four to eight young people go somewhere they shouldn't, two to zero of them come back. This movie could have been made at any point in the past sixty years and the only thing that would change would be the hairstyles. In this case, five fun-loving, feather-haired friends (including Tanya Roberts, of Charlie's Angels, That 70s Show, and the-waterfall-scene-from-Beastmaster fame) end up at this rinky-dink redneck roadside attraction wax museum out in those scrub-brush hills in California that always make me think of M*A*S*H. The proprietor is a genial hillbilly (played by Old Hollywood beefcake Chuck Connors) who likes to emphasize the first syllable of his words ("I'm gon' go fetch the po-lice.") but who's a little peeved that the new highway took all his business away. (You ever notice how much trouble "the new highway" causes in movies?) So the way he deals with that stress is by wearing freaky rubber masks and pretending to be his dead telekinetic kid brother so he can make wax mannequins out of everybody who visits him. The telekinesis really comes in handy, because he can makes his mannequins move and laugh and jump out at people. It sounds kinda stupid, but I don't know, man, mannequins are just creepy. Particularly these ones. Some of them smile like they're thinking about some sick private joke, and some of them have mouths that flop open unnaturally wide, creating gaping black maws like in that Aphex Twin video. I could see how this movie could totally fuck you up when you're a kid.
It's not very violent or bloody, but it's one of those movies where the killer just won't stop talking. It feels like you're tied up along with his victims, unable to escape as he pours his poison into your ear, feeding you his insane nightmare logic. It's definitely got a little Texas Chainsaw in its DNA. In fact, the torture-porny Paris Hilton House of Wax remake seems to have stolen much more from this movie than it did from the seminal Vincent Price movie it took its name from.
And then Tourist Trap has one of those great seventies endings where somebody survives but they're so emotionally devastated by what happened to them that you almost wish they hadn't. They don't really know how to do these endings anymore. Nowadays, the shocking twist is to have one last ooga-booga jump-scare right before the nü-metal end-credits song kicks in. That just shows the paucity of imagination in a lot of modern horror movies. The worst thing they can think of is dying, but they don't get that there's some shit that's so fucked up that you simply wouldn't want to live through it. Your only recourse would be to make a clean break with reality and escape into dementia, which is where Tourist Trap leaves us.
An interesting bit of trivia about this movie is that it was produced by future straight-to-video kingpin Charles Band, whose company, Full Moon Entertainment, has had a lock on cheesy movies about evil little bastards since the early eighties. This is the man behind, among many others, Troll, Ghoulies, the Puppetmaster series, Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, and The Gingerdead Man, which stars Gary Busey as a psycho who gets trapped in the body of a killer cookie. Clearly, Mr. Band is just as creeped out by the eeriness of dolls, puppets, and mannequins as my ladyfriend, and it's interesting to see that it all began way back in '79 with Tourist Trap. Just think, without this movie, the world may have never been blessed with Ginderdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust. Now that's scary.
And what about my ladyfriend, you ask? Did Tourist Trap cure her of her pediophobia (fear of mannequins)? Let's just say we won't be taking any trips to Madame Tussaud's anytime soon. On the upside, at least she's still talking to me. That's more than can be said for this other ladyfriend that I brought to see House of 1,000 Corpses once. Thanks a lot, Rob Zombie. Cockblocking bastard.
This is what happened to a certain ladyfriend of mine when we got to talking about movies last weekend. Naturally, the movie that got stuck in her head was a horror movie, because nothing affects a person, particularly a child, more profoundly than mortal terror. A single creepy image, even when trapped in the middle of a preposterous movie, can sink its fangs deep into a person's psyche, injecting slow-release venom whose effects can be felt for a lifetime. When you're a kid, a scary scene is like herpes: you carry that shit around forever, whether you want to or not.
Luckily, this lovely young lady happened to be talking to Mr. Majestyk his-goddamn-self, so when she said "seventies movie where a woman gets wax poured all over her face," I knew just what she was talking about: Tourist Trap, a 1979 drive-in flick that I remembered from Stephen King's non-fiction book on 20th century horror, Danse Macabre. Big Steve called it his favorite bad horror movie, but since this was in the same book where he offhandedly dismissed Planet of the Vampires, Last House on the Left, and Mad Max, I didn't think too much of it. Of course, that didn't stop me from buying Tourist Trap on DVD when I saw it in the used bin earlier this year. When it comes to horror movies, I am nothing if not thorough.
So, in an effort to help my ladyfriend overcome her childhood fears by ripping the rubber mask from her demons and revealing them as the puffed-up charlatans that they are, I showed her Tourist Trap last night. I figured that confronting the movie that scarred her as a child would cure her of her phobia of dolls and mannequins. There was only one problem with that plan: The movie is actually kind of scary.
Tourist Trap is based on Horror Movie Plot #1: four to eight young people go somewhere they shouldn't, two to zero of them come back. This movie could have been made at any point in the past sixty years and the only thing that would change would be the hairstyles. In this case, five fun-loving, feather-haired friends (including Tanya Roberts, of Charlie's Angels, That 70s Show, and the-waterfall-scene-from-Beastmaster fame) end up at this rinky-dink redneck roadside attraction wax museum out in those scrub-brush hills in California that always make me think of M*A*S*H. The proprietor is a genial hillbilly (played by Old Hollywood beefcake Chuck Connors) who likes to emphasize the first syllable of his words ("I'm gon' go fetch the po-lice.") but who's a little peeved that the new highway took all his business away. (You ever notice how much trouble "the new highway" causes in movies?) So the way he deals with that stress is by wearing freaky rubber masks and pretending to be his dead telekinetic kid brother so he can make wax mannequins out of everybody who visits him. The telekinesis really comes in handy, because he can makes his mannequins move and laugh and jump out at people. It sounds kinda stupid, but I don't know, man, mannequins are just creepy. Particularly these ones. Some of them smile like they're thinking about some sick private joke, and some of them have mouths that flop open unnaturally wide, creating gaping black maws like in that Aphex Twin video. I could see how this movie could totally fuck you up when you're a kid.
It's not very violent or bloody, but it's one of those movies where the killer just won't stop talking. It feels like you're tied up along with his victims, unable to escape as he pours his poison into your ear, feeding you his insane nightmare logic. It's definitely got a little Texas Chainsaw in its DNA. In fact, the torture-porny Paris Hilton House of Wax remake seems to have stolen much more from this movie than it did from the seminal Vincent Price movie it took its name from.
And then Tourist Trap has one of those great seventies endings where somebody survives but they're so emotionally devastated by what happened to them that you almost wish they hadn't. They don't really know how to do these endings anymore. Nowadays, the shocking twist is to have one last ooga-booga jump-scare right before the nü-metal end-credits song kicks in. That just shows the paucity of imagination in a lot of modern horror movies. The worst thing they can think of is dying, but they don't get that there's some shit that's so fucked up that you simply wouldn't want to live through it. Your only recourse would be to make a clean break with reality and escape into dementia, which is where Tourist Trap leaves us.
An interesting bit of trivia about this movie is that it was produced by future straight-to-video kingpin Charles Band, whose company, Full Moon Entertainment, has had a lock on cheesy movies about evil little bastards since the early eighties. This is the man behind, among many others, Troll, Ghoulies, the Puppetmaster series, Dollman vs. Demonic Toys, and The Gingerdead Man, which stars Gary Busey as a psycho who gets trapped in the body of a killer cookie. Clearly, Mr. Band is just as creeped out by the eeriness of dolls, puppets, and mannequins as my ladyfriend, and it's interesting to see that it all began way back in '79 with Tourist Trap. Just think, without this movie, the world may have never been blessed with Ginderdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust. Now that's scary.
And what about my ladyfriend, you ask? Did Tourist Trap cure her of her pediophobia (fear of mannequins)? Let's just say we won't be taking any trips to Madame Tussaud's anytime soon. On the upside, at least she's still talking to me. That's more than can be said for this other ladyfriend that I brought to see House of 1,000 Corpses once. Thanks a lot, Rob Zombie. Cockblocking bastard.
Day of the Animals
This is what's known as a public service announcement. When a motherfucker stumbles across a movie in which Leslie Neilsen takes off his shirt and wrestles a bear, that motherfucker has a moral obligation to share it with the world.
Day of the Animals is one of those Nature Gone Wild movies that came out in the wake of Jaws. This time, instead of picking just one species, the way Squirm did with worms or Night of the Lepus did with bunnies (What's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?), DotA goes whole-hog (A hog is a kind of animal. That is a pun, if I'm not mistaken.) and has the entire animal kingdom (cougars, bears, hawks, snakes, rats, dogs, spiders, etc.) team up against their greatest foe: Leslie Neilsen.
Well, technically, Leslie Neilsen is just one of the many human-type beings that get animalized in this prime slice of drive-in schlock. The actual star is Christopher George, an actor known for being the guy in B-movies (Pieces, Grizzly, Graduation Day, etc.) who looks like the hero but never actually accomplishes anything heroic. The most egregious example is in The Exterminator, where he plays a detective who's supposed to be tracking down a flamethrower-wielding vigilante, but instead he takes his ladyfriend to an outdoor jazz festival and then promptly disappears from the movie entirely. Whatever your B-movie is selling, be it man-eating bears, chainsaw murders, or scumbag immolations, Christopher George is a dude fully committed to not distracting from it in any way.
In DotA, he plays a park ranger who has the bad luck of leading a group of tenderfoots into the High Sierras on the day that the ultraviolet rays pouring through the recently discovered hole in the ozone layer cause all the animals to go nuts and start attacking motherfuckers left and right. The first attack is pretty classic. They're all tucked into their sleeping bags around the campfire, when all of a sudden, this wolf jumps out of nowhere and starts gnawing on this chick's face. The way he goes after her, you'd think she'd just be a pile of red gristle, but after the wolf gets scared off, all she's got are a few minor scratches. What a lame-ass wolf. Maybe he's the runt of the wolf pack, and all the other wolves were always making fun of him because he'd never eaten anyone before. So then they peer-pressure him into attacking the chick in the sleeping bag as his initiation into the wolfgang (See what I did there?), but he chickens out at the last minute. I bet he got an earful when he went back to the pack with his tail between his legs. If wolves wore pants, he'd definitely be getting a wedgie for that shameful display.
Luckily, some vultures are on hand to finish the job when Christopher George (in the first of many bad calls he makes throughout the movie) sends the chick and her husband down the mountain to get help. She gets all pissy because she wants to stop and rest, so her man is like, "Fine! Stay here and get your eyes pecked out why don't you!" And she does. I hope he's got room on his mantle for the 1979 Husband of the Year trophy.
Meanwhile, back with the rest of the crew, the animals are mounting a unified assault, led by a steely-eyed hawk. Panthers attack from all sides, proving that the humans' defenses are useless. Their sole aim must be to incite terror, because they do little more than inflict some flesh wounds before they disappear into the darkness again.
This is when the movie starts getting good, and it's all thanks to Leslie Neilsen. He plays an alpha male advertising executive who likes to call everybody by condescending nicknames like "hotshot" or "kemosabe." He thinks Christopher George is a douchebag who couldn't find his way out of wet paper bag with scissors in his hand. Which may be true, but that's no excuse for what a magnificent asshole Leslie Neilsen is in this movie. Seriously, if there were an Asshole Hall of Fame, this guy would get his induction plaque handed to him by Don Rickles.
So this world-class asshole stages a coup in which he leads a few of the campers off in a different direction. Then he takes his shirt off and goes completely berserk out of nowhere. One second he's just a bossy prick, and the next, he's smacking old ladies and punching children. He kills a guy with a stick and tries to rape the guy's wife. "I killed a man for you! You're mine!" he yells, shaking her around by her upper arms. Then it starts pouring rain and he throws his arms wide in a crucifixion pose and starts yelling at God. Then he rejects morality in favor of the law of the jungle. "You see what you want, you take. YOU TAKE IT!" he hollers. Then a bear shows up, and his response is to engage it in hand-to-claw combat, which doesn't work out so good for him, in my opinion.
This is one of the greatest examples of overacting I have ever seen. Ever. It is awe-inspiring. It proves that Leslie Neilsen was always a comedian. It just took the Zucker Brothers to point it out to him. And the best part is, he didn't even change his acting style when he turned to comedy. It's just that the world discovered irony in the late seventies and suddenly realized that he'd been hilarious for decades. Of course, then he went and blew it by actually trying to be funny. You're missing the point, Leslie. We can get goofy double-takes from anybody. But dead-serious dramatic line readings like "My father who art in heaven, you've made a jackass out of me for years!" require a professional.
Taken as a whole, Day of the Animals is no big deal. But you should see if you can find that scene on YouTube. It'll be bandwidth well spent.
Day of the Animals is one of those Nature Gone Wild movies that came out in the wake of Jaws. This time, instead of picking just one species, the way Squirm did with worms or Night of the Lepus did with bunnies (What's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?), DotA goes whole-hog (A hog is a kind of animal. That is a pun, if I'm not mistaken.) and has the entire animal kingdom (cougars, bears, hawks, snakes, rats, dogs, spiders, etc.) team up against their greatest foe: Leslie Neilsen.
Well, technically, Leslie Neilsen is just one of the many human-type beings that get animalized in this prime slice of drive-in schlock. The actual star is Christopher George, an actor known for being the guy in B-movies (Pieces, Grizzly, Graduation Day, etc.) who looks like the hero but never actually accomplishes anything heroic. The most egregious example is in The Exterminator, where he plays a detective who's supposed to be tracking down a flamethrower-wielding vigilante, but instead he takes his ladyfriend to an outdoor jazz festival and then promptly disappears from the movie entirely. Whatever your B-movie is selling, be it man-eating bears, chainsaw murders, or scumbag immolations, Christopher George is a dude fully committed to not distracting from it in any way.
In DotA, he plays a park ranger who has the bad luck of leading a group of tenderfoots into the High Sierras on the day that the ultraviolet rays pouring through the recently discovered hole in the ozone layer cause all the animals to go nuts and start attacking motherfuckers left and right. The first attack is pretty classic. They're all tucked into their sleeping bags around the campfire, when all of a sudden, this wolf jumps out of nowhere and starts gnawing on this chick's face. The way he goes after her, you'd think she'd just be a pile of red gristle, but after the wolf gets scared off, all she's got are a few minor scratches. What a lame-ass wolf. Maybe he's the runt of the wolf pack, and all the other wolves were always making fun of him because he'd never eaten anyone before. So then they peer-pressure him into attacking the chick in the sleeping bag as his initiation into the wolfgang (See what I did there?), but he chickens out at the last minute. I bet he got an earful when he went back to the pack with his tail between his legs. If wolves wore pants, he'd definitely be getting a wedgie for that shameful display.
Luckily, some vultures are on hand to finish the job when Christopher George (in the first of many bad calls he makes throughout the movie) sends the chick and her husband down the mountain to get help. She gets all pissy because she wants to stop and rest, so her man is like, "Fine! Stay here and get your eyes pecked out why don't you!" And she does. I hope he's got room on his mantle for the 1979 Husband of the Year trophy.
Meanwhile, back with the rest of the crew, the animals are mounting a unified assault, led by a steely-eyed hawk. Panthers attack from all sides, proving that the humans' defenses are useless. Their sole aim must be to incite terror, because they do little more than inflict some flesh wounds before they disappear into the darkness again.
This is when the movie starts getting good, and it's all thanks to Leslie Neilsen. He plays an alpha male advertising executive who likes to call everybody by condescending nicknames like "hotshot" or "kemosabe." He thinks Christopher George is a douchebag who couldn't find his way out of wet paper bag with scissors in his hand. Which may be true, but that's no excuse for what a magnificent asshole Leslie Neilsen is in this movie. Seriously, if there were an Asshole Hall of Fame, this guy would get his induction plaque handed to him by Don Rickles.
So this world-class asshole stages a coup in which he leads a few of the campers off in a different direction. Then he takes his shirt off and goes completely berserk out of nowhere. One second he's just a bossy prick, and the next, he's smacking old ladies and punching children. He kills a guy with a stick and tries to rape the guy's wife. "I killed a man for you! You're mine!" he yells, shaking her around by her upper arms. Then it starts pouring rain and he throws his arms wide in a crucifixion pose and starts yelling at God. Then he rejects morality in favor of the law of the jungle. "You see what you want, you take. YOU TAKE IT!" he hollers. Then a bear shows up, and his response is to engage it in hand-to-claw combat, which doesn't work out so good for him, in my opinion.
This is one of the greatest examples of overacting I have ever seen. Ever. It is awe-inspiring. It proves that Leslie Neilsen was always a comedian. It just took the Zucker Brothers to point it out to him. And the best part is, he didn't even change his acting style when he turned to comedy. It's just that the world discovered irony in the late seventies and suddenly realized that he'd been hilarious for decades. Of course, then he went and blew it by actually trying to be funny. You're missing the point, Leslie. We can get goofy double-takes from anybody. But dead-serious dramatic line readings like "My father who art in heaven, you've made a jackass out of me for years!" require a professional.
Taken as a whole, Day of the Animals is no big deal. But you should see if you can find that scene on YouTube. It'll be bandwidth well spent.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Cop
This is one of those movies that I saw the trailer for a million times on HBO as a kid but never actually got around to watching. Which is weird, because this is the kind of shit I ate up back then: sleazy L.A. cop movies full of perverts and saxophone music. About the only thing I remember from the trailer was James Woods looking fucking badass pumping a shotgun. A good shotgun-pumping has been known to improve any movie (I'd watch Driving Miss Daisy if someone assured me that at some point Morgan Freeman racks a Mossberg one-handed) but in Cop, it figures into one of the greatest movie endings of all time. You know how most movies will build to a climax, but then stick around for a few extra minutes while the characters walk through a parking lot full of ambulances, maybe repeating some dialogue from earlier in the movie in a different context? It's like the post-coital cigarette, giving you a chance to relax after the big explosion/orgasm. Cop doesn't play that shit. It's not gonna cuddle with you afterward and ask you if you had a good time. Fuck that. When it's done, it's fucking done. It just wipes its dick off on the curtains and bounces the fuck out. It probably won't even call you tomorrow. Cop is kind of a prick like that.
But that's what I like about it. Cop is an impolite, inconsiderate, cynical, antisocial movie for like-minded motherfuckers. It's a not exactly groundbreaking combination of a Dirty Harry-style rogue cop movie and a The Wire-style police procedural. Woods plays the title character, Joe Cop, who's a fast-talking, chain-smoking, workaholic sex addict. So yeah, he's James Woods, but with a gun. He works homicide in the neighborhood he grew up in, so he knows the streets inside and out and has little patience for his clock-punching colleagues who aren't as smart or as dedicated as he is. The first scene shows him scurrying around the cop-shop, doing everybody else's job for them. Then he gets all giddy because he gets a call for a 187, so he goes out to West Hollywood and kicks down a door. (Actually, he tries to kick down the door but it doesn't work. I've been waiting my whole life to see that in a movie. You ever try to kick down a fucking door? It's not as easy as it looks.) He finds a young woman's body hanging upside down over her bed, covered in blood. It's actually pretty fucking creepy, and it even kind of freaks out Sgt. Cop, who must have seen this kind of thing a million times. That doesn't stop him from doing his job, though, and we get the first of many scenes where we see Cop quietly examining the evidence and drawing conclusions. It's nice to see actual copwork in a movie called Cop.
Then we see Cop's human side when he goes home and tells his eight-year-old daughter a bedtime story about a drag queen he busted who used to run B&E's on doctor's offices on Sunset. She eats it up ("Tell me how you caught the scumbag, Daddy!"), but Mrs. Cop is not so thrilled. She thinks he's poisoning their daughter with his sick worldview, but he thinks he's preparing her for the world. He has this incredible speech about how innocence kills, and he wants his little girl to grow up knowing about the way things really are. The wife ain't having it, though, because she believes in unicorns and happy endings and shit, so Cop is actually psyched when he gets a call about an armed robbery suspect and has to get back to work. So he brings along his old buddy (vintage That Guy Charles Durning) and ends up blowing away the perp in front of the guy's date. Not two seconds after gunning a man down in the street, he's smooth-talking this chick and offering her a ride home. And she accepts! Fully half of this movie is Cop running around boning every broad he sees. He's characterized as an adrenaline junkie, looking for a fight or a fuck, whichever comes first.
What's kind of weird, though, is that although Cop is a total womanizer, he also has a real pet peeve about violence against women. I kept waiting for him to say that his dad used to beat his mom or something, but they never really explain it. But then again, why the fuck do you need a reason to be anti violence against women? Did your mom have to have been murdered when you were a kid for that particular topic to really piss you off? Then again, Cop is based on a novel by James Ellroy, whose mother really was murdered when he was a kid, so I guess I'll shut up now.
Anyway, long story short, Cop discovers that there's a serial killer on the loose, only nobody believes him, so he starts breaking into people's apartments and playing Russian Roulette with motherfuckers to get information. There's a genius segment in the middle of the movie where he picks up this feminist chick (Leslie Ann Warren, a.k.a. The Poor Man's Susan Sarandon) and convinces her that he's Mr. Sensitive while she lays out her sob story. The whole time, he says all the right things, but just from the look on his face you know that he's rolling his eyes on the inside. I'm telling you, this Cop guy's a prick, but it all feeds into that speech he made earlier. This feminist chick had some really bad shit happen to her, but instead of toughening her up, it made her turn inward and create a bunch of fantasies and delusions about white knights and fairy tales, shit that Cop finds pathetic and dangerous. But he still wants to get laid, so he plays along. It's kind of a brilliant scene because Cop is both funny and reprehensible at the same time, and he does it all with a crocodile smile and some pregnant pauses. It's some great capital-A Acting from Mr. Woods, whom I hear has one of the biggest dicks and highest IQs in Hollywood. Not sure what that has to do with anything, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.
It also has something to do with the plot (the scene, not James Woods' dick), which, in retrospect, is kind of haphazard and unconvincing, as most plots are if you really think about them. But that's not the point. The point is watching James Woods rip through this movie like a uranium-tipped bullet, never stopping, never swerving, never looking back, never giving a fuck about what he destroys on his path to his target. And once he hits it, boom, the movie's over. It does its dirty, sinful business and gets the fuck out. I appreciate that. I enjoy a long, drawn-out love-making session with the candles and the lotion and the fuzzy handcuffs as much as the next guy, but sometimes a rough and sticky quickie is even better.
I just hope Cop still respects me in the morning.
But that's what I like about it. Cop is an impolite, inconsiderate, cynical, antisocial movie for like-minded motherfuckers. It's a not exactly groundbreaking combination of a Dirty Harry-style rogue cop movie and a The Wire-style police procedural. Woods plays the title character, Joe Cop, who's a fast-talking, chain-smoking, workaholic sex addict. So yeah, he's James Woods, but with a gun. He works homicide in the neighborhood he grew up in, so he knows the streets inside and out and has little patience for his clock-punching colleagues who aren't as smart or as dedicated as he is. The first scene shows him scurrying around the cop-shop, doing everybody else's job for them. Then he gets all giddy because he gets a call for a 187, so he goes out to West Hollywood and kicks down a door. (Actually, he tries to kick down the door but it doesn't work. I've been waiting my whole life to see that in a movie. You ever try to kick down a fucking door? It's not as easy as it looks.) He finds a young woman's body hanging upside down over her bed, covered in blood. It's actually pretty fucking creepy, and it even kind of freaks out Sgt. Cop, who must have seen this kind of thing a million times. That doesn't stop him from doing his job, though, and we get the first of many scenes where we see Cop quietly examining the evidence and drawing conclusions. It's nice to see actual copwork in a movie called Cop.
Then we see Cop's human side when he goes home and tells his eight-year-old daughter a bedtime story about a drag queen he busted who used to run B&E's on doctor's offices on Sunset. She eats it up ("Tell me how you caught the scumbag, Daddy!"), but Mrs. Cop is not so thrilled. She thinks he's poisoning their daughter with his sick worldview, but he thinks he's preparing her for the world. He has this incredible speech about how innocence kills, and he wants his little girl to grow up knowing about the way things really are. The wife ain't having it, though, because she believes in unicorns and happy endings and shit, so Cop is actually psyched when he gets a call about an armed robbery suspect and has to get back to work. So he brings along his old buddy (vintage That Guy Charles Durning) and ends up blowing away the perp in front of the guy's date. Not two seconds after gunning a man down in the street, he's smooth-talking this chick and offering her a ride home. And she accepts! Fully half of this movie is Cop running around boning every broad he sees. He's characterized as an adrenaline junkie, looking for a fight or a fuck, whichever comes first.
What's kind of weird, though, is that although Cop is a total womanizer, he also has a real pet peeve about violence against women. I kept waiting for him to say that his dad used to beat his mom or something, but they never really explain it. But then again, why the fuck do you need a reason to be anti violence against women? Did your mom have to have been murdered when you were a kid for that particular topic to really piss you off? Then again, Cop is based on a novel by James Ellroy, whose mother really was murdered when he was a kid, so I guess I'll shut up now.
Anyway, long story short, Cop discovers that there's a serial killer on the loose, only nobody believes him, so he starts breaking into people's apartments and playing Russian Roulette with motherfuckers to get information. There's a genius segment in the middle of the movie where he picks up this feminist chick (Leslie Ann Warren, a.k.a. The Poor Man's Susan Sarandon) and convinces her that he's Mr. Sensitive while she lays out her sob story. The whole time, he says all the right things, but just from the look on his face you know that he's rolling his eyes on the inside. I'm telling you, this Cop guy's a prick, but it all feeds into that speech he made earlier. This feminist chick had some really bad shit happen to her, but instead of toughening her up, it made her turn inward and create a bunch of fantasies and delusions about white knights and fairy tales, shit that Cop finds pathetic and dangerous. But he still wants to get laid, so he plays along. It's kind of a brilliant scene because Cop is both funny and reprehensible at the same time, and he does it all with a crocodile smile and some pregnant pauses. It's some great capital-A Acting from Mr. Woods, whom I hear has one of the biggest dicks and highest IQs in Hollywood. Not sure what that has to do with anything, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.
It also has something to do with the plot (the scene, not James Woods' dick), which, in retrospect, is kind of haphazard and unconvincing, as most plots are if you really think about them. But that's not the point. The point is watching James Woods rip through this movie like a uranium-tipped bullet, never stopping, never swerving, never looking back, never giving a fuck about what he destroys on his path to his target. And once he hits it, boom, the movie's over. It does its dirty, sinful business and gets the fuck out. I appreciate that. I enjoy a long, drawn-out love-making session with the candles and the lotion and the fuzzy handcuffs as much as the next guy, but sometimes a rough and sticky quickie is even better.
I just hope Cop still respects me in the morning.
Bloodfist II
As you may recall, Bloodfist was a cookie-cutter tournament/revenge flick in the Bloodsport/Kickboxer mold. Bloodfist II: Blood Fistier is more of an Enter the Dragon thing. It mostly takes place on this island fortress in the South Pacific, run by a dude named Dr. Su who has his own army of goons in orange pajamas. Su's deal is he had this wussy scientist with a phony German accent (not quite as bad as the gay Nazi in 9 Deaths of the Ninja, but worse than the white slaver from Raw Force, if that helps) create an undetectable steroid that makes motherfuckers super strong and impervious to pain. To test out the formula, Su kidnaps all of these champion fighters in a variety of disciplines, from boxing to karate to Greco-Roman wrestling, and makes them fight his souped-up henchman.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Bloodfist II gets the Truth In Advertising Award for 1990 because the very first shot is a close-up of a boxing glove dripping with blood. Take that, The Squid and the Whale. Then the camera pulls back, showing a very sweaty Don "The Dragon" Wilson, looking more like a Eurasian Dean Cain than ever. He looks slightly more badass than he did in BF1 but still not all that impressive. He's not very big or muscular or anything. It's amazing that this regular-looking guy was light heavyweight kickboxing champion of the world for 12 straight years. His arms aren't even very well defined. Then again, I guess he's a kickboxer, not a punchboxer, so fuck arms. Arms are for gaylords.
This is a movie that gets right to the good stuff. The very first scene is a kickboxing match. Don (apparently playing the same character as the first one, although the events of that film are never mentioned) is fighting this mustached chump who won't go down, no matter how many times Don kicks him. I've been trying to figure out if he got dosed with Dr. Su's steroid, but I don't see how that's possible, since it won't be invented for another three years, according to the timeline I gleaned from the opening credits montage of newspaper clippings. Either way, this dickrag won't stay down, until Don jumpkicks him in the neck and kills him. Everybody else acts like this shit happens all the time, but Don feels so terrible about it that he vows never to fight again.
And so he devotes his life to non-violence, growing a long ponytail and teaching at-risk kids to deal with their anger issues through positive activities like gardening and basket-weaving. After winning the love of a blind kindergarten teacher, he is eventually rewarded for his charity work and pacifist agenda by Readers Digest, who publish a cover story about him entitled "A Warrior's Peace: How A Champion Fighter Kicked The Kicking Habit." The final scene shows him quietly nursing an injured fawn back to health and releasing it into the wild, where it is reunited with its mother.
Nah, I'm just fucking with you. He doesn't do any of that shit. He just starts whoring and doesn't stop for three years until his old cornerman calls him up from Manila and says he's gotten himself into debt with Dr. Su, so he needs Don to come help him out. So Don hops on the next plane to the Philippines. He isn't in town for five minutes before badly dressed henchmen are coming out of the woodwork. Wherever he goes, there's another dude in a flannel shirt and jeans, just dying to let Don kick him in the head. The movie's about 15 minutes long at this point, and only three or four of them didn't have fighting in them. And of those three or four, one of them had tits. So already you gotta appreciate where this movie's head is at.
Then one of the bad guys gets the bright idea to not engage the world-champion kickboxer in foot-to-face combat, so he pulls a gun instead. Don gets captured and thrown on a boat with a bunch of other badasses, most of whom are played by real-life fighting experts, except for this one dude who looks like Freddy Mercury who's played by the original Deathstalker. Real all-star cast on this one.
Most of these dudes aren't actors, and that's why I like them. Their line readings are pretty flat, but they seem like real people, because they are. It makes you kind of give a shit when they start getting killed off.
So they go out to Dr. Su's island, and Don escapes and runs around for a while, kicking every henchman he meets. Then he finds out that his old cornerman has betrayed him and set him up, and he gets recaptured. Then the movie does this amazing thing where it skips the dreaded Part Where It Drags In The Middle. I don't know why more movies don't do this. There's almost always that section around the 45, 50 minute mark where the characters are sitting around, talking about what just happened and trying to predict what's gonna happen. Maybe one of them tells a story from their childhood that elucidates their motivation in the third act. Maybe the male and female leads finally get over their initial antagonism and share some smoochies in a storage closet. Or maybe, if you're really lucky, there'll be a montage in which the hero's long, dark night of the soul is illustrated through shots of him walking down the street with his hands in his pockets or standing on a small bridge, watching the ripples in the water below, thus mentally preparing himself for the battle ahead. Mostly, though, the Part Where It Drags In The Middle is just the movie trying to stretch itself out to 90 minutes by any means necessary.
That's why Bloodfist II is such a model of narrative economy. It just cuts that part out completely, then fills in the missing time with more fights. It goes from the fight where Don gets captured straight to the big showdown, which means that the concluding 35 minutes of the movie (approximately 40% of the total running time) is all fighting. Thank you, Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures, for respecting my intelligence.
The fights are pretty damned good, too, because of all the different styles involved. The first one has a heavyweight boxer hammering the ribcage of a beefy goon in red pants, but come on, dude, boxing is for pussies. Kicking is where it's at. He gets his ass handed to him, then Dr. Su gives him the thumbs-down and has him speared to death in front of the others.
Next up is Deathstalker, who's playing an Army hand-to-hand combat instructor. I like this character. I'm not sure he actually talks at all, but he says all there is to say with his cocky body language and well-timed Skoal spitting. His moves are precise and elegant, which pleases the crowd, so Dr. Su lets him off with just a broken arm. The great part about that is, after he escapes at the end of the movie (Spoiler), he takes on all these goons literally one-handed.
Then the next guy is a balding Greco-Roman wrestler who just sits in the middle of the ring and blocks every move his opponent tries. I've never seen this style of fighting on film before, and it reminded me of the fact that the dudes who always win in the Ultimate Fighting and whatnot are the grapplers. You can have fists of steel, but they're not gonna help you if somebody puts his knee on your neck and doesn't let up until you pass out. This guy actually wins his fight with a devastating series of nut punches, but Dr. Su is a jerk and has him speared anyway. Sore fuckin' loser, you ask me.
Then some karate dude gets easily dispatched, and then this lanky, saggy-faced white tae kwon do master wins his fight. I love seeing tall white guys do kung fu, because their feet are so huge. It looks like they could take somebody's head off with their big, bony ankles.
This displeases Dr. Su, so he sends in Don's old friend, who's all hopped up on go-juice. Then Don himself jumps in, and the remaining good guys escape and run around knocking over furniture and kicking ass. Don himself takes out Dr. Su by kicking him off of a balcony right in front of his daughter. Boy, I'll tell you, life ain't easy for a dude named Su.
Then all the surviving good guys cluster around Dr. Su's corpse. They look down at it pensively for a moment, like it's a shoe somebody left on the sidewalk and they're trying to figure out how the fuck somebody leaves behind a shoe, I mean, wouldn't you notice you only had one shoe on? The fuck? Then they just walk away. And that's end of the movie. Thanks for coming everybody, you've been a great crowd, we're Bloodfist II, check out the merch table, goodnight!
And that's how you make a shitty low-budget action movie: You get the fuck in and you get the fuck out. That's the Tao of Roger Corman.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Bloodfist II gets the Truth In Advertising Award for 1990 because the very first shot is a close-up of a boxing glove dripping with blood. Take that, The Squid and the Whale. Then the camera pulls back, showing a very sweaty Don "The Dragon" Wilson, looking more like a Eurasian Dean Cain than ever. He looks slightly more badass than he did in BF1 but still not all that impressive. He's not very big or muscular or anything. It's amazing that this regular-looking guy was light heavyweight kickboxing champion of the world for 12 straight years. His arms aren't even very well defined. Then again, I guess he's a kickboxer, not a punchboxer, so fuck arms. Arms are for gaylords.
This is a movie that gets right to the good stuff. The very first scene is a kickboxing match. Don (apparently playing the same character as the first one, although the events of that film are never mentioned) is fighting this mustached chump who won't go down, no matter how many times Don kicks him. I've been trying to figure out if he got dosed with Dr. Su's steroid, but I don't see how that's possible, since it won't be invented for another three years, according to the timeline I gleaned from the opening credits montage of newspaper clippings. Either way, this dickrag won't stay down, until Don jumpkicks him in the neck and kills him. Everybody else acts like this shit happens all the time, but Don feels so terrible about it that he vows never to fight again.
And so he devotes his life to non-violence, growing a long ponytail and teaching at-risk kids to deal with their anger issues through positive activities like gardening and basket-weaving. After winning the love of a blind kindergarten teacher, he is eventually rewarded for his charity work and pacifist agenda by Readers Digest, who publish a cover story about him entitled "A Warrior's Peace: How A Champion Fighter Kicked The Kicking Habit." The final scene shows him quietly nursing an injured fawn back to health and releasing it into the wild, where it is reunited with its mother.
Nah, I'm just fucking with you. He doesn't do any of that shit. He just starts whoring and doesn't stop for three years until his old cornerman calls him up from Manila and says he's gotten himself into debt with Dr. Su, so he needs Don to come help him out. So Don hops on the next plane to the Philippines. He isn't in town for five minutes before badly dressed henchmen are coming out of the woodwork. Wherever he goes, there's another dude in a flannel shirt and jeans, just dying to let Don kick him in the head. The movie's about 15 minutes long at this point, and only three or four of them didn't have fighting in them. And of those three or four, one of them had tits. So already you gotta appreciate where this movie's head is at.
Then one of the bad guys gets the bright idea to not engage the world-champion kickboxer in foot-to-face combat, so he pulls a gun instead. Don gets captured and thrown on a boat with a bunch of other badasses, most of whom are played by real-life fighting experts, except for this one dude who looks like Freddy Mercury who's played by the original Deathstalker. Real all-star cast on this one.
Most of these dudes aren't actors, and that's why I like them. Their line readings are pretty flat, but they seem like real people, because they are. It makes you kind of give a shit when they start getting killed off.
So they go out to Dr. Su's island, and Don escapes and runs around for a while, kicking every henchman he meets. Then he finds out that his old cornerman has betrayed him and set him up, and he gets recaptured. Then the movie does this amazing thing where it skips the dreaded Part Where It Drags In The Middle. I don't know why more movies don't do this. There's almost always that section around the 45, 50 minute mark where the characters are sitting around, talking about what just happened and trying to predict what's gonna happen. Maybe one of them tells a story from their childhood that elucidates their motivation in the third act. Maybe the male and female leads finally get over their initial antagonism and share some smoochies in a storage closet. Or maybe, if you're really lucky, there'll be a montage in which the hero's long, dark night of the soul is illustrated through shots of him walking down the street with his hands in his pockets or standing on a small bridge, watching the ripples in the water below, thus mentally preparing himself for the battle ahead. Mostly, though, the Part Where It Drags In The Middle is just the movie trying to stretch itself out to 90 minutes by any means necessary.
That's why Bloodfist II is such a model of narrative economy. It just cuts that part out completely, then fills in the missing time with more fights. It goes from the fight where Don gets captured straight to the big showdown, which means that the concluding 35 minutes of the movie (approximately 40% of the total running time) is all fighting. Thank you, Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures, for respecting my intelligence.
The fights are pretty damned good, too, because of all the different styles involved. The first one has a heavyweight boxer hammering the ribcage of a beefy goon in red pants, but come on, dude, boxing is for pussies. Kicking is where it's at. He gets his ass handed to him, then Dr. Su gives him the thumbs-down and has him speared to death in front of the others.
Next up is Deathstalker, who's playing an Army hand-to-hand combat instructor. I like this character. I'm not sure he actually talks at all, but he says all there is to say with his cocky body language and well-timed Skoal spitting. His moves are precise and elegant, which pleases the crowd, so Dr. Su lets him off with just a broken arm. The great part about that is, after he escapes at the end of the movie (Spoiler), he takes on all these goons literally one-handed.
Then the next guy is a balding Greco-Roman wrestler who just sits in the middle of the ring and blocks every move his opponent tries. I've never seen this style of fighting on film before, and it reminded me of the fact that the dudes who always win in the Ultimate Fighting and whatnot are the grapplers. You can have fists of steel, but they're not gonna help you if somebody puts his knee on your neck and doesn't let up until you pass out. This guy actually wins his fight with a devastating series of nut punches, but Dr. Su is a jerk and has him speared anyway. Sore fuckin' loser, you ask me.
Then some karate dude gets easily dispatched, and then this lanky, saggy-faced white tae kwon do master wins his fight. I love seeing tall white guys do kung fu, because their feet are so huge. It looks like they could take somebody's head off with their big, bony ankles.
This displeases Dr. Su, so he sends in Don's old friend, who's all hopped up on go-juice. Then Don himself jumps in, and the remaining good guys escape and run around knocking over furniture and kicking ass. Don himself takes out Dr. Su by kicking him off of a balcony right in front of his daughter. Boy, I'll tell you, life ain't easy for a dude named Su.
Then all the surviving good guys cluster around Dr. Su's corpse. They look down at it pensively for a moment, like it's a shoe somebody left on the sidewalk and they're trying to figure out how the fuck somebody leaves behind a shoe, I mean, wouldn't you notice you only had one shoe on? The fuck? Then they just walk away. And that's end of the movie. Thanks for coming everybody, you've been a great crowd, we're Bloodfist II, check out the merch table, goodnight!
And that's how you make a shitty low-budget action movie: You get the fuck in and you get the fuck out. That's the Tao of Roger Corman.
Rad
Ladies and gentlemen, my DVD collection has a new crown jewel. It used to be my Australian copy of Death Wish 2, which, unlike the Region 1 release, is widescreen and doesn't have the pubes fuzzed out during the nasty parts. Yeah, Aussie Death Wish 2 had a good run at the top, but now there's a new sheriff in town, and his name is Rad.
I don't have to tell you that Rad is a stone-cold classic, but due to its anti-corporate message, its official DVD release has been suppressed, if not by the Man, then by someone in his employ. But for every injustice there is a hero, and that hero's name is RAD-ON-DVD, the Amazon vendor who's selling a gorgeous anamorphic hi-def transfer of this seminal slice of Americana. They say you can't put a price on freedom, but I say you can: $11.99, plus $2.98 shipping and handling.
The deal is, Rad is the BMX version of every movie ever made. It's about this poor local boy named Cru who's only good at one thing: riding his bike long past the age when he really oughtta have a car, or at least a friend with a car. So when this big corporation comes to town and offers a hundred grand to the rider who can win the monster mamma-jamma race known as Helltrack, it's Cru's chance to prove himself. But will he be able to overcome the corrupt system that wants to keep the little guy down? The eight or nine glorious power ballads on the soundtrack sure seem to think so.
Telling the story of Rad is sort of like telling the story of Jesus. Everybody knows it, it's been passed down through the generations, so what's the point? What understanding can I bring to this timeless tale that hasn't already been done to death by countless scholars, philosophers, and poets? Well, just like Mel Gibson proved with that scene in The Passion of the Christ where Jesus invents the table, you can always bring a new angle to an old story. We always knew that Jesus died for our sins, made wine out of water, took a beating like a man, all that shit. But did you know that he also revolutionized the way people eat dinner? No, of course you didn't. Only Mel Gibson knew that. And that's the job of the artist: To make old shit new again.
With that in mind, I would like to call attention to an overlooked facet of Rad lore: the skull scene. See, about halfway through Rad's perfectly paced 91-minute running time, Cru has hit a bit of a snag. He's managed to qualify for Helltrack, but the lisping fat-cat organizer is afraid that Cru's natural talent might upstage Bart Taylor, the Aryan prettyboy he's got in his pocket. So just like every other filthy capitalist pig who gets beaten fair and square on a level playing field, he changes the rules of the game to state that only riders with sponsors can compete. Cru doesn't have a sponsor ("I ride for me," he declares in a spine-tingling display of Nietzschean self-reliance) so what does he do? Does he go home and cry about it? Hell no. (He does that later.) He says fuck it, I'm gonna be my own goddamn sponsor. So he starts his own company, Rad Racing, and gets all of his friends and classmates to come together to print up some T-shirts with his awesome logo on them.
Here's where the skull scene happens. All the 28-year-old teenagers have gathered in the high school Home Ec room to volunteer for T-shirt duty, and one of them walks up to Cru's new girlfriend (played brilliantly by future Full House star Lori Loughlin and her shoulder pads), puts a human skull on her desk, and says "Thank you." This character is never seen again. This puzzling scene raises a lot of questions. What does the skull symbolize? Who is this character? And perhaps most baffling of all, what is he thanking her for?
Obviously, stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham is not going to give you any straight answers. After all, the success of any great work of art lies in its ambiguity. But I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb when I say that the skull scene is a reference to another classic drama, William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Oft considered the best work of Western literature by those who haven't seen Rad, Hamlet features a scene in which Hamlet, prince of Denmark, has come upon the exhumed corpse of his old friend and court jester Yorrick. Hamlet holds the deceased comedian's skull aloft and laments the impermanent nature of human accomplishment. Yorrick spent his time on earth making people laugh, but now all of his merrymaking has been forgotten, and all that he was has been reduced to a crumbling pile of bones. Is this what Needham is saying all of Cru's efforts will amount to? Even if he manages to win Helltrack and astound the multitudes with his bicycling acumen, he, like all of us, will eventually die, and his two-wheeled deeds, no matter how gravity-defying, will be scattered like so much dust in the ever-swirling winds of time.
Dude, what a fucking bummer.
But as anyone who saw Smokey and the Bandit can attest, Needham is not a filmmaker content to parrot the ideas of others. His work is too textured for that. I believe that the skull scene in Rad is not a mere appropriation of Hamlet's morbid fatalism, but a refutation of it. My proof for this theory lies in the mysterious skull-bearer's cryptic display of gratitude. I believe that by leaving the skull behind and thanking Lori Laughlin (an Ophelia substitute due to her association with water throughout the film), he is acting as a Hamlet surrogate and abandoning Shakespeare's nihilism in favor of the can-do spirit represented by Cru and his team of supporters. This scene, even more so than the infamous "bicycle boogie" set-piece, is the heart and soul of Rad. I believe that Needham is saying that while we may all be destined for the grave, our actions, if they are pure of intent and unswerving in execution, will live on forever in the memories of those they inspired. Not only is this scene joyous and life-affirming on an emotional level, it also places Rad firmly in the context of literary history.
Or maybe they just had a skull lying around on set that day.
Though the mystery of the skull scene will continue to arouse debate long after we've all met our respective dates with destiny, there's no mystery about Rad's many other awesome moments. Its opening credits sequence alone is worth the price of admission. Two BMX riders perform balletic freestyle maneuvers worthy of Cirque de Soleil, and they do it sporting mullets so severely delineated that they resemble coonskin caps. Then we cut to a single line of dialogue ("Let's rock this sucker.") before we see Cru BMX his way through his morning paper route, thus characterizing him as a resourceful free-thinker with strong ties to the community. Then there's a dialogue scene, and then Cru has to race a mustached motorcycle cop through a lumber yard. Then there's another dialogue scene where Cru's mom Adrian Balboa says he can't pursue his dreams because he needs to take the SATs, which, like Haley's Comet, only come around once in a century, so if he misses them, it'll be a lifetime of demeaning manual labor for him.
Then the professional bike riders come to town. The evil ones are top-ranked Bart Taylor and his twin henchmen, Xamot and Tomax, who like to dress up in Buck Rogers disco outfits and perform creepy threesome-inspired dirty dancing routines with their shared groupie. But then Cru catches the eye of the world's only female BMXer, and they go out on the dancefloor on their bikes to perform the sexiest goddamn mating ritual you've ever seen. While Real Life's synth ballad "Send Me An Angel" plays and the crowd claps along, they sublimate their mutual lust into their bicycles, sensually pumping their pedals and manipulating their machines into all the positions they long to twist each other into. It is a moving and invigorating display of eroticism that has yet to be equaled in American cinema.
Then there's another dialogue scene, then it's back on the bikes so Cru can learn how to do backflips. Then there's some more dialogue. Then he qualifies for Helltrack by taking all these shortcuts that all of the corporate-sponsored riders are too institutionalized to notice. Little more than trained monkeys plastered with advertisements, they are powerless against an independent thinker like Cru.
Then there's some more dialogue, and Cru goes bike-frolicking in the fields with his girl. Then there's some more dialogue where the evil businessmen try to disqualify Cru from the competition. Luckily, the whole goddamn town knows who Cru is from his paper route, so they raise the money to get him back in business. This scene is an uplifting celebration of local activism as the seemingly disenfranchised townsfolk pool their resources to anoint Cru their avatar who in their stead will slay the mighty dragon known as Big Business.
Then it's time for Helltrack, a four-lap gauntlet of athletic prowess and shameless product placement. Cru's intuitive riding style lets him take an early lead, but he is soon torpedoed by Xamot (or maybe it was Tomax) so that Bart Taylor can win the race and protect their team's precious endorsement deals. But Bart proves himself to be more than a capitalist running dog when he takes his own teammates out of the race so that he can face Cru fair and square. It's clear that Bart has never faced such a worthy adversary, and he finds the taste of competition far more enticing than the color of money. Cru emerges victorious, costing Bart his sponsorship, but that's okay because he always has a place on the Rad Racing team. Bart's conversion from corporate lackey to revolutionary is Cru's ultimate triumph, for even though he races only for himself, his true legacy will be represented by all those his feats have inspired.
To be rad, or not to be rad? That is the question. And I think we all know the answer.
I don't have to tell you that Rad is a stone-cold classic, but due to its anti-corporate message, its official DVD release has been suppressed, if not by the Man, then by someone in his employ. But for every injustice there is a hero, and that hero's name is RAD-ON-DVD, the Amazon vendor who's selling a gorgeous anamorphic hi-def transfer of this seminal slice of Americana. They say you can't put a price on freedom, but I say you can: $11.99, plus $2.98 shipping and handling.
The deal is, Rad is the BMX version of every movie ever made. It's about this poor local boy named Cru who's only good at one thing: riding his bike long past the age when he really oughtta have a car, or at least a friend with a car. So when this big corporation comes to town and offers a hundred grand to the rider who can win the monster mamma-jamma race known as Helltrack, it's Cru's chance to prove himself. But will he be able to overcome the corrupt system that wants to keep the little guy down? The eight or nine glorious power ballads on the soundtrack sure seem to think so.
Telling the story of Rad is sort of like telling the story of Jesus. Everybody knows it, it's been passed down through the generations, so what's the point? What understanding can I bring to this timeless tale that hasn't already been done to death by countless scholars, philosophers, and poets? Well, just like Mel Gibson proved with that scene in The Passion of the Christ where Jesus invents the table, you can always bring a new angle to an old story. We always knew that Jesus died for our sins, made wine out of water, took a beating like a man, all that shit. But did you know that he also revolutionized the way people eat dinner? No, of course you didn't. Only Mel Gibson knew that. And that's the job of the artist: To make old shit new again.
With that in mind, I would like to call attention to an overlooked facet of Rad lore: the skull scene. See, about halfway through Rad's perfectly paced 91-minute running time, Cru has hit a bit of a snag. He's managed to qualify for Helltrack, but the lisping fat-cat organizer is afraid that Cru's natural talent might upstage Bart Taylor, the Aryan prettyboy he's got in his pocket. So just like every other filthy capitalist pig who gets beaten fair and square on a level playing field, he changes the rules of the game to state that only riders with sponsors can compete. Cru doesn't have a sponsor ("I ride for me," he declares in a spine-tingling display of Nietzschean self-reliance) so what does he do? Does he go home and cry about it? Hell no. (He does that later.) He says fuck it, I'm gonna be my own goddamn sponsor. So he starts his own company, Rad Racing, and gets all of his friends and classmates to come together to print up some T-shirts with his awesome logo on them.
Here's where the skull scene happens. All the 28-year-old teenagers have gathered in the high school Home Ec room to volunteer for T-shirt duty, and one of them walks up to Cru's new girlfriend (played brilliantly by future Full House star Lori Loughlin and her shoulder pads), puts a human skull on her desk, and says "Thank you." This character is never seen again. This puzzling scene raises a lot of questions. What does the skull symbolize? Who is this character? And perhaps most baffling of all, what is he thanking her for?
Obviously, stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham is not going to give you any straight answers. After all, the success of any great work of art lies in its ambiguity. But I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb when I say that the skull scene is a reference to another classic drama, William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Oft considered the best work of Western literature by those who haven't seen Rad, Hamlet features a scene in which Hamlet, prince of Denmark, has come upon the exhumed corpse of his old friend and court jester Yorrick. Hamlet holds the deceased comedian's skull aloft and laments the impermanent nature of human accomplishment. Yorrick spent his time on earth making people laugh, but now all of his merrymaking has been forgotten, and all that he was has been reduced to a crumbling pile of bones. Is this what Needham is saying all of Cru's efforts will amount to? Even if he manages to win Helltrack and astound the multitudes with his bicycling acumen, he, like all of us, will eventually die, and his two-wheeled deeds, no matter how gravity-defying, will be scattered like so much dust in the ever-swirling winds of time.
Dude, what a fucking bummer.
But as anyone who saw Smokey and the Bandit can attest, Needham is not a filmmaker content to parrot the ideas of others. His work is too textured for that. I believe that the skull scene in Rad is not a mere appropriation of Hamlet's morbid fatalism, but a refutation of it. My proof for this theory lies in the mysterious skull-bearer's cryptic display of gratitude. I believe that by leaving the skull behind and thanking Lori Laughlin (an Ophelia substitute due to her association with water throughout the film), he is acting as a Hamlet surrogate and abandoning Shakespeare's nihilism in favor of the can-do spirit represented by Cru and his team of supporters. This scene, even more so than the infamous "bicycle boogie" set-piece, is the heart and soul of Rad. I believe that Needham is saying that while we may all be destined for the grave, our actions, if they are pure of intent and unswerving in execution, will live on forever in the memories of those they inspired. Not only is this scene joyous and life-affirming on an emotional level, it also places Rad firmly in the context of literary history.
Or maybe they just had a skull lying around on set that day.
Though the mystery of the skull scene will continue to arouse debate long after we've all met our respective dates with destiny, there's no mystery about Rad's many other awesome moments. Its opening credits sequence alone is worth the price of admission. Two BMX riders perform balletic freestyle maneuvers worthy of Cirque de Soleil, and they do it sporting mullets so severely delineated that they resemble coonskin caps. Then we cut to a single line of dialogue ("Let's rock this sucker.") before we see Cru BMX his way through his morning paper route, thus characterizing him as a resourceful free-thinker with strong ties to the community. Then there's a dialogue scene, and then Cru has to race a mustached motorcycle cop through a lumber yard. Then there's another dialogue scene where Cru's mom Adrian Balboa says he can't pursue his dreams because he needs to take the SATs, which, like Haley's Comet, only come around once in a century, so if he misses them, it'll be a lifetime of demeaning manual labor for him.
Then the professional bike riders come to town. The evil ones are top-ranked Bart Taylor and his twin henchmen, Xamot and Tomax, who like to dress up in Buck Rogers disco outfits and perform creepy threesome-inspired dirty dancing routines with their shared groupie. But then Cru catches the eye of the world's only female BMXer, and they go out on the dancefloor on their bikes to perform the sexiest goddamn mating ritual you've ever seen. While Real Life's synth ballad "Send Me An Angel" plays and the crowd claps along, they sublimate their mutual lust into their bicycles, sensually pumping their pedals and manipulating their machines into all the positions they long to twist each other into. It is a moving and invigorating display of eroticism that has yet to be equaled in American cinema.
Then there's another dialogue scene, then it's back on the bikes so Cru can learn how to do backflips. Then there's some more dialogue. Then he qualifies for Helltrack by taking all these shortcuts that all of the corporate-sponsored riders are too institutionalized to notice. Little more than trained monkeys plastered with advertisements, they are powerless against an independent thinker like Cru.
Then there's some more dialogue, and Cru goes bike-frolicking in the fields with his girl. Then there's some more dialogue where the evil businessmen try to disqualify Cru from the competition. Luckily, the whole goddamn town knows who Cru is from his paper route, so they raise the money to get him back in business. This scene is an uplifting celebration of local activism as the seemingly disenfranchised townsfolk pool their resources to anoint Cru their avatar who in their stead will slay the mighty dragon known as Big Business.
Then it's time for Helltrack, a four-lap gauntlet of athletic prowess and shameless product placement. Cru's intuitive riding style lets him take an early lead, but he is soon torpedoed by Xamot (or maybe it was Tomax) so that Bart Taylor can win the race and protect their team's precious endorsement deals. But Bart proves himself to be more than a capitalist running dog when he takes his own teammates out of the race so that he can face Cru fair and square. It's clear that Bart has never faced such a worthy adversary, and he finds the taste of competition far more enticing than the color of money. Cru emerges victorious, costing Bart his sponsorship, but that's okay because he always has a place on the Rad Racing team. Bart's conversion from corporate lackey to revolutionary is Cru's ultimate triumph, for even though he races only for himself, his true legacy will be represented by all those his feats have inspired.
To be rad, or not to be rad? That is the question. And I think we all know the answer.
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