As far as I can tell, Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man is a cult classic with a cult of one: me. I don't know anybody else who's even seen this movie, let alone loves it like I do, and all the reviews I've read of it are dismissive bordering on abusive. Hell, even co-star Mickey Rourke disowned the movie, claiming that it made him feel like such a sellout that he retired from acting and spent the next few years in the boxing ring, getting his face pummeled until he looked like a Garbage Pail Kid. Me, I've watched this flick about 20 times since I first caught it on VHS in '91, and it remains an entertainingly baffling viewing experience to this day.
For no discernible reason, HD&TMM takes place in the near future: 1996. It stars two of the greatest examples of squandered potential the eighties had to offer: Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson. Mickey plays Harley Davidson, a kind of holy fool who likes to roll into town on the bike that bears his name, start a whole bunch of trouble, then roll back out again so he can spend the next two, three years philosophizing about God and the universe and shit. He wears an ugly leather motocross suit and a big diamond earring, and he can't shoot for shit. His buddy Marlboro is an ex-rodeo star who can shoot pool and pistols better than anyone alive, so he spends his time getting into barfights with gigantic Native Americans, balling this lady bike cop by the name of Virginia Slim, and duct-taping his ratty old cowboy boots back together.
Together, the two of them cruise back to their old stomping grounds in Burbank, CA, former home of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Harley's got some business to settle with a man-mountain named Jack Daniels, played by ex-WWF star Big John Studd. See, Harley banged Jack's wife (disgraced former Miss America Vanessa Williams) a few years back, so he's gotta let Jack pick him up by the balls and throw him through a few windows to earn Jack's forgiveness. But then there's a new problem: The bar where Harley, Marlboro, and Jack hang out with their pals Old Granddad, a deaf dude named Jose Cuervo, and this other cat (Giancarlo Esposito) who stole Jimi Hendrix's wardrobe and first name is about to get foreclosed unless they can come up with $2.5 million to renew the lease. Seems that ever since they went and put an international airport in Burbank there just ain't no room for decent, hard-working outlaws anymore, so Harley comes up with the idea to rob one of the armored cars belonging to the evil multinational bank that owns the deed.
They do the job alright, but then these blue-eyed yuppy douchebags (led by everyone's third favorite Baldwin, Daniel) show up wearing neck-to-ankle Kevlar-lined leather priest frocks and start blasting away with those fancypants Eurotrash machine guns that have the clips in the back instead of in the front. Our boys get away, but then they discover that the moneybags they stole actually contain a bunch of packages of a new designer narcotic called Crystal Dream, which looks like blue Sterno that's been vacuum-sealed like beef jerky. Turns out the bank pres (Tom Sizemore, playing a character who really ought to have been named Chase Manhattan) has been dealing drugs on the side, so he sends his hit squad out to murder everybody. Then there's a lot of male bonding, some shootouts where people need to get plugged in the head three or four times before they go down, and a pretty awesome helicopter vs. skyscraper climax that I'm pretty sure got jacked by the Wachowskis for The Matrix. Not to mention they totally ganked those priest coats for Reloaded. Maybe I'm not the only one in the cult after all.
What I like about this movie is that I really can't tell what they were going for with it. I suspect that at some point in its development history it was some kind of post-modern Warholian pop-art meta-movie satire using the flotsam and jetsam of our consumerist culture to create a Wild Bunch-style elegy to the 20th Century outlaw as he gets swept under the rug of history by the homogenizing influence of Corporate America. While there's still some irony in the idea that the only rugged individualists left in the world are named after mass-marketed products, I think that's about as far as the satire goes. This is just your standard urban Western/buddy movie, but with a whole shitload of weird touches, like the gunfight that takes place in the airplane graveyard or the fact that the bar has an airplane sticking out of its roof because, as it says in a newspaper headline glimpsed briefly on the wall, "PLANE CRASHES INTO PUB: Pilot Makes Happy Hour." I would actually like to read the original screenplay, because I have a feeling that the pseudo-futuristic world of this movie might have been fleshed out a lot more there than it was in the finished product. Or maybe it was always half-assed and that's just wishful thinking on my part. Either way, this feels like a movie that was based on a comic book or a fantasy novel or something, in that you feel like it's only scratching the surface of a much grander mythology.
If they'd really pushed this fucker into Buckaroo Bonzai levels of self-conscious cult nerdery, it would probably be better known, but as it stands, it's just a quirky action movie that starts with a bike-riding montage set to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive" and ends with Sonny Crocket riding a bucking bronco while dressed up like Roy Rogers. Along the way, there are many incidental pleasures to be had, most notably the breezy buddy banter between the two stars. Rourke and Johnson are two easy-going, naturalistic actors who pretty much bullshit their way through the whole movie on the strength of personal charm and iconic wardrobe choices. Marlboro's always dispensing down-home wisdom such as "Like my old man told me before he left this shitty world, 'Never chase buses or women—you'll always get left behind,'" while Harley is more prone to Zen fripperies like "It's better to be dead and cool than alive and uncool." I particularly enjoy the mid-shootout conversation the boys have about how the bullets for Harley's modified .454 Ruger cost $2.00 apiece, so that when he empties it at the bad guys and doesn't hit shit, he just wasted 12 bucks. "I nailed one and it cost about four and a quarter," Marlboro says as he rolls out of the way of machine gun fire. "Now here they come and they're spending a fortune." That's the kind of stuff I miss in modern action movies, where all anybody ever seems to say anymore is "C'mon!" and "Get down!"
Anyway, if you're looking for a blatant Butch & Sundance ripoff that uses corporate mascots to contrast the dusty highways of America's recent past with the gleaming office complexes of its immediate future, this is probably the only game in town. Also, you get to watch Don Johnson perform the single greatest trick pool shot ever captured on film. And there's this one part where Tom Sizemore speaks Japanese. Shit, what else do you need, man? Go watch this bitch and let's you and me and maybe the Wachowskis start the cult together.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Uncommon Valor
Before John J. Rambo and Colonel James Braddock picked up their M-60s and helicoptered over to Vietnam to bring our boys back home, Uncommon Valor was the first POW movie. The difference between it and First Blood Part II and Missing In Action, though, is that instead of one kinda mumbly muscleman taking out throngs of Cong all by his lonesome, we’ve got a whole team of hardasses ready to head back into the shit to rescue their brothers in arms.
UV stars Gene Hackman as Gene Hackman, as per usual. This time, Gene Hackman happens to be a Marine colonel whose son went MIA in ’73, but it takes him ten years to find the prison camp where he’s being held. This is already a different setup than usual, because most of the time action movies take place over the course of a couple of days. Once Arnold decides an ass needs kicking, he just goes out and kicks it, but this movie shows all the effort that goes into locating the ass and the training that goes into being able to kick it properly.
So what Gene does is he locates all of the members of his son’s old unit (I said unit). It’s a hell of a bunch, too. We got Tim Thomerson as a chopper pilot who didn’t take off his sunglasses for six years after the war ended. In protest, I guess. We don’t really know because these aren’t the type of people who like to talk about their feelings. These are the type of individuals we like to refer to as “men.”
Then there’s Randall “Tex” Cobb of Raising Arizona fame, playing a good guy for the first and last time in his life. He’s a crazy biker convict who wears a grenade around his neck just in case he ever feels like saying “Fuck it” and blowing himself up. My favorite is Fred Ward, the tunnel rat with PTSD who’s good at sneaking around the bush with his face painted green and slitting motherfuckers’ throats. Actually, come to think of it, that kind of character will always be my favorite. I was always more of a Snake Eyes kid than a Duke kid. Weren’t you?
Anyway, there are some other dudes in the unit, but those are my favorites. So Hackman tough-loves these dudes into helping him bust his son out, but they’ve all been civilians for the better part of a decade now, so he’s gotta retrain them. To do that, he recruits a Marine drill sergeant played by a pre-Red Dawn Patrick Swayze. He’s kind of an uptight prick, but you kind of like him anyway because he’s a good shot and he don’t take shit. He gets into a fight with Tex and busts out some kung-fu on him, but then Tex busts out some kung-fu of his own, and just like that, awesomeness ensues. I never knew until right that moment just how badly I wanted to see Randall “Tex” Cobb roundhouse kick Patrick Swayze in the face. Nothing against the Swayz, of whom I’m a big fan, but I just really needed to see that happen for some reason. Thank you, Uncommon Valor, for fulfilling desires I didn’t even know I had.
Another hidden desire of mine was to hear Robert Stack say “Fuck you” in his awesome Ultra Magnus voice. Stack is playing this millionaire who’s financing the operation because his son’s a POW, too. The main thing his money buys, besides weapons, is a full-scale mock-up of the prison camp so the boys can practice the rescue mission. There’s one awesome part where one of the guys chainsaws a wooden target that’s supposed to be a guard, but unfortunately, the chainsaw does not figure into the actual mission because the CIA comes along and bollockses up the whole thing, so they have to improvise. Everything works out okay, though. The whole ending is pretty sweet, with all kinds of shit blowing up and motherfuckers dying in a blaze of glory, but what makes it all work is the set-up. You actually like all these dudes, and you believe that they all like each other, so when one of them sacrifices himself for the greater good, you feel it. You don’t get that in a lot of these team movies, where you can really only tell the characters apart if they happen to use a novelty weapon like a crossbow or something.
Anyway, Uncommon Valor isn’t as ridiculously over-the-top and jingoistic as the POW movies that came later in the Reagan era, when the thinking seemed to be that now that all the hippies had cut their hair and bought Saabs we could go back to Nam and win this fucking thing for the Gipper and whatnot. UV is still pretty fucking patriotic (Hackman gives a big speech before the final battle that’ll make you wanna jerk off with the American flag) but it’s a little more down-to-earth and realistic. I recommend it if you like movies where bamboo shacks blow up like they were made out of C-4 and men with bullet wounds in their shoulders scream out each others’ names. Which I'm pretty sure you do, since you’re not a total pussy.
UV stars Gene Hackman as Gene Hackman, as per usual. This time, Gene Hackman happens to be a Marine colonel whose son went MIA in ’73, but it takes him ten years to find the prison camp where he’s being held. This is already a different setup than usual, because most of the time action movies take place over the course of a couple of days. Once Arnold decides an ass needs kicking, he just goes out and kicks it, but this movie shows all the effort that goes into locating the ass and the training that goes into being able to kick it properly.
So what Gene does is he locates all of the members of his son’s old unit (I said unit). It’s a hell of a bunch, too. We got Tim Thomerson as a chopper pilot who didn’t take off his sunglasses for six years after the war ended. In protest, I guess. We don’t really know because these aren’t the type of people who like to talk about their feelings. These are the type of individuals we like to refer to as “men.”
Then there’s Randall “Tex” Cobb of Raising Arizona fame, playing a good guy for the first and last time in his life. He’s a crazy biker convict who wears a grenade around his neck just in case he ever feels like saying “Fuck it” and blowing himself up. My favorite is Fred Ward, the tunnel rat with PTSD who’s good at sneaking around the bush with his face painted green and slitting motherfuckers’ throats. Actually, come to think of it, that kind of character will always be my favorite. I was always more of a Snake Eyes kid than a Duke kid. Weren’t you?
Anyway, there are some other dudes in the unit, but those are my favorites. So Hackman tough-loves these dudes into helping him bust his son out, but they’ve all been civilians for the better part of a decade now, so he’s gotta retrain them. To do that, he recruits a Marine drill sergeant played by a pre-Red Dawn Patrick Swayze. He’s kind of an uptight prick, but you kind of like him anyway because he’s a good shot and he don’t take shit. He gets into a fight with Tex and busts out some kung-fu on him, but then Tex busts out some kung-fu of his own, and just like that, awesomeness ensues. I never knew until right that moment just how badly I wanted to see Randall “Tex” Cobb roundhouse kick Patrick Swayze in the face. Nothing against the Swayz, of whom I’m a big fan, but I just really needed to see that happen for some reason. Thank you, Uncommon Valor, for fulfilling desires I didn’t even know I had.
Another hidden desire of mine was to hear Robert Stack say “Fuck you” in his awesome Ultra Magnus voice. Stack is playing this millionaire who’s financing the operation because his son’s a POW, too. The main thing his money buys, besides weapons, is a full-scale mock-up of the prison camp so the boys can practice the rescue mission. There’s one awesome part where one of the guys chainsaws a wooden target that’s supposed to be a guard, but unfortunately, the chainsaw does not figure into the actual mission because the CIA comes along and bollockses up the whole thing, so they have to improvise. Everything works out okay, though. The whole ending is pretty sweet, with all kinds of shit blowing up and motherfuckers dying in a blaze of glory, but what makes it all work is the set-up. You actually like all these dudes, and you believe that they all like each other, so when one of them sacrifices himself for the greater good, you feel it. You don’t get that in a lot of these team movies, where you can really only tell the characters apart if they happen to use a novelty weapon like a crossbow or something.
Anyway, Uncommon Valor isn’t as ridiculously over-the-top and jingoistic as the POW movies that came later in the Reagan era, when the thinking seemed to be that now that all the hippies had cut their hair and bought Saabs we could go back to Nam and win this fucking thing for the Gipper and whatnot. UV is still pretty fucking patriotic (Hackman gives a big speech before the final battle that’ll make you wanna jerk off with the American flag) but it’s a little more down-to-earth and realistic. I recommend it if you like movies where bamboo shacks blow up like they were made out of C-4 and men with bullet wounds in their shoulders scream out each others’ names. Which I'm pretty sure you do, since you’re not a total pussy.
Battle Warrior
I’m a sucker for these old Thai action movies, even though they burn me again and again. I’m not talking about the new stuff like Ong-Bak or The Protector even The Bodyguard. I’m talking about the backyard action movies they made in the eighties and nineties. Produced strictly for the domestic market, these flicks were only meant to be seen by Thai people who didn’t mind lousy production values as long as they got to see movies in their own language for a change. They were never intended to be watched by American audiences who are accustomed to having luxuries like “lighting” and “sets” in their movies. Most of these flicks are real dogs, with way too many cornball comic-relief scenes and way too little action, but some of them are a lot of fun if you can get your threshold for basic filmmaking competence down to Ted V. Mikels levels.
Battle Warrior tells the story of this guy who gets kidnapped by this other guy and these other guys who want to rescue him. These old Thai movies don’t spend a lot of time cluing you in on who the characters are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s more like, “There’s this plot that needs to happen if we’re ever gonna get to the kicking, and since we’re the only ones here, let’s get to it.” In this case, it’s all about this anthropologist guy who finds the Golden Stone, which is an ancient tablet detailing the origins of all these Southeast Asian tribes. It’s supposedly worth a billion baht (the subtitles say “dollars,” but I’m not buying it) so he stashes it at the bottom of a river before he gets captured by this backwoods warlord and his posse. Then the dude’s daughter gets all these random guys together to venture into the jungle to save him. Are they soldiers? Mercenaries? Friends of the family? I don’t know. They’re just the dudes the story happens to happen to.
Movies like Battle Warrior point out the importance of costuming, in that they don't have any. Everybody is just wearing regular-ass clothes, so you don’t get any of the visual clues that a good (or even serviceable) costume will give you. A dude wearing an army uniform is probably a soldier, but a dude wearing a T-shirt and sneakers could be just about anything. It really affects a movie’s believability when its band of badasses are all dressed like unemployed tomato pickers. This gives a lot of older Thai movies the feel of a school project where your classmate is supposed to be Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird but he’s just wearing his older brother’s dress shirt tucked into his jeans. The best example of this phenomenon is Spirited Killer, in which a vengeful kung-fu demon comes back from the grave wearing a windbreaker and Reeboks.
Anyway, the scene where the team gets assembled lets you know that the incomprehensible tedium of these expository scenes will be worth it in the long run, because it explains the many perils with which our heroes’ journey into the warlord’s territory will be fraught. First, they’ll have to get past the Black Goblins, a savage tribe of scary blowdarting motherfuckers who wear black facepaint and speak fluent Ewok. Then they’ll have to defeat the warlord’s first line of defense: a zombie. (“A zombie?” says the guy in the ugly T-shirt. “Yes. A bloodsucking zombie,” replies the other guy in the ugly T-shirt.) No explanation is ever given as to how this warlord got his own zombie. Some dudes are just lucky, I guess.
Tony Jaa gets above-the-title credit on the DVD cover, but pay that no mind. Ong-Bak was, is, and always will be Jaa’s first starring role, so any movie from before 2003 that tries to tell you otherwise is lying to you. He does have a decent-sized role as the warlord’s right-hand man, and he also did some of the fight choreography with his mentor, Panna Rittikrai, the Harvey Weinstein of Thai action cinema. But aside from a few flips and spinkicks, he doesn’t get to do much. It’s not that his fights are bad, but they’re just not jaw-dropping like his later work.
The cinematography can also be a problem, particularly in the Black Goblin ambush. It seems that the crew didn’t bring any lights into the jungle with them, so scenes are shot with whatever sunlight manages to filter down through the dense canopy overhead. A lot of times you're just looking at a bunch of black blobs sort of oozing around each other. Then there’s the fact that I suspect the movie was shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and then stretched out to 1.85:1 for the DVD, which makes everybody look squashed. All this makes it a little hard to tell what’s going on sometimes, but that's okay because the music informs you that it's all very exciting. They use the old Kung Fu Theatre method of stealing music from other movies. In this case, they heavily sample the Die Hard score, specifically the cue that builds to the iconic moment when McClane jumps off the roof tied to the firehose. It's really tense, suspenseful music, but they'll use it for a boring scene of some dudes tromping through the jungle, which is really surreal. It's really distracting when you're trying to pay attention but all you're thinking is "Blow the roof!" "But Karl's up there!"
But then the zombie shows up (he’s another dude in sneakers and sweatpants, but he has some gooey shit smeared on his face so I guess his story checks out) and everything is awesome. He starts gutting people with his bare hands and getting shot a million times and hacked in the neck with a machete, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. Then they discover his only weakness: grenades. Before they splatter him all over the jungle, I think he manages to kill a bunch of the good guys, but it’s hard to say since the only ones I could tell apart were the leader (they gave him a bandanna to make him look more official) and the big white guy named Smith who came along for reasons unknown. On the DVD, they show him holding this gigantic quadruple-barreled machine gun. It looks sort of like a giant black licorice whip. I love oversized novelty weapons, so I was really looking forward to it, but I don’t think it ever shows up in the movie. Buyer beware.
Then the climax is full of kung fu and shootouts and a surprising amount of explosions. It’s nothing to get worked up over, but there’s a certain amount of tension involved because you don’t trust that these guys really know what they’re doing. They got explosives going off just a few feet from all these dudes in sweatpants, and it looks seriously unsafe. Somebody could get hurt real easy.
I guess that’s kind of the appeal of these movies. They look like something you and your buddies could do, only they’ve got a bunch of shit blowing up and people flipping through the air 16 times and landing on their heads. You really shouldn’t try this shit at home, but try telling Thailand that.
Battle Warrior tells the story of this guy who gets kidnapped by this other guy and these other guys who want to rescue him. These old Thai movies don’t spend a lot of time cluing you in on who the characters are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. It’s more like, “There’s this plot that needs to happen if we’re ever gonna get to the kicking, and since we’re the only ones here, let’s get to it.” In this case, it’s all about this anthropologist guy who finds the Golden Stone, which is an ancient tablet detailing the origins of all these Southeast Asian tribes. It’s supposedly worth a billion baht (the subtitles say “dollars,” but I’m not buying it) so he stashes it at the bottom of a river before he gets captured by this backwoods warlord and his posse. Then the dude’s daughter gets all these random guys together to venture into the jungle to save him. Are they soldiers? Mercenaries? Friends of the family? I don’t know. They’re just the dudes the story happens to happen to.
Movies like Battle Warrior point out the importance of costuming, in that they don't have any. Everybody is just wearing regular-ass clothes, so you don’t get any of the visual clues that a good (or even serviceable) costume will give you. A dude wearing an army uniform is probably a soldier, but a dude wearing a T-shirt and sneakers could be just about anything. It really affects a movie’s believability when its band of badasses are all dressed like unemployed tomato pickers. This gives a lot of older Thai movies the feel of a school project where your classmate is supposed to be Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird but he’s just wearing his older brother’s dress shirt tucked into his jeans. The best example of this phenomenon is Spirited Killer, in which a vengeful kung-fu demon comes back from the grave wearing a windbreaker and Reeboks.
Anyway, the scene where the team gets assembled lets you know that the incomprehensible tedium of these expository scenes will be worth it in the long run, because it explains the many perils with which our heroes’ journey into the warlord’s territory will be fraught. First, they’ll have to get past the Black Goblins, a savage tribe of scary blowdarting motherfuckers who wear black facepaint and speak fluent Ewok. Then they’ll have to defeat the warlord’s first line of defense: a zombie. (“A zombie?” says the guy in the ugly T-shirt. “Yes. A bloodsucking zombie,” replies the other guy in the ugly T-shirt.) No explanation is ever given as to how this warlord got his own zombie. Some dudes are just lucky, I guess.
Tony Jaa gets above-the-title credit on the DVD cover, but pay that no mind. Ong-Bak was, is, and always will be Jaa’s first starring role, so any movie from before 2003 that tries to tell you otherwise is lying to you. He does have a decent-sized role as the warlord’s right-hand man, and he also did some of the fight choreography with his mentor, Panna Rittikrai, the Harvey Weinstein of Thai action cinema. But aside from a few flips and spinkicks, he doesn’t get to do much. It’s not that his fights are bad, but they’re just not jaw-dropping like his later work.
The cinematography can also be a problem, particularly in the Black Goblin ambush. It seems that the crew didn’t bring any lights into the jungle with them, so scenes are shot with whatever sunlight manages to filter down through the dense canopy overhead. A lot of times you're just looking at a bunch of black blobs sort of oozing around each other. Then there’s the fact that I suspect the movie was shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio and then stretched out to 1.85:1 for the DVD, which makes everybody look squashed. All this makes it a little hard to tell what’s going on sometimes, but that's okay because the music informs you that it's all very exciting. They use the old Kung Fu Theatre method of stealing music from other movies. In this case, they heavily sample the Die Hard score, specifically the cue that builds to the iconic moment when McClane jumps off the roof tied to the firehose. It's really tense, suspenseful music, but they'll use it for a boring scene of some dudes tromping through the jungle, which is really surreal. It's really distracting when you're trying to pay attention but all you're thinking is "Blow the roof!" "But Karl's up there!"
But then the zombie shows up (he’s another dude in sneakers and sweatpants, but he has some gooey shit smeared on his face so I guess his story checks out) and everything is awesome. He starts gutting people with his bare hands and getting shot a million times and hacked in the neck with a machete, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. Then they discover his only weakness: grenades. Before they splatter him all over the jungle, I think he manages to kill a bunch of the good guys, but it’s hard to say since the only ones I could tell apart were the leader (they gave him a bandanna to make him look more official) and the big white guy named Smith who came along for reasons unknown. On the DVD, they show him holding this gigantic quadruple-barreled machine gun. It looks sort of like a giant black licorice whip. I love oversized novelty weapons, so I was really looking forward to it, but I don’t think it ever shows up in the movie. Buyer beware.
Then the climax is full of kung fu and shootouts and a surprising amount of explosions. It’s nothing to get worked up over, but there’s a certain amount of tension involved because you don’t trust that these guys really know what they’re doing. They got explosives going off just a few feet from all these dudes in sweatpants, and it looks seriously unsafe. Somebody could get hurt real easy.
I guess that’s kind of the appeal of these movies. They look like something you and your buddies could do, only they’ve got a bunch of shit blowing up and people flipping through the air 16 times and landing on their heads. You really shouldn’t try this shit at home, but try telling Thailand that.
The Impossible Kid
A few years ago, I had what could only be described as a spiritual experience. I am speaking, of course, of the first time I saw For Y’r Height Only, arguably one of the three or four finest Filipino James Bond rip-offs ever made starring a midget. That midget was named Weng Weng, and I was instantly charmed by his plucky spirit, his easy way with the ladies, and his formidable testicle-attacking abilities. This was a man on a mission: a mission to punish the nutsac wherever he found it. The nutsac, as you know, has no conscience, no morals, no shame—but by God, Weng Weng would teach it fear.
For Y’r Height Only is probably the best bad movie ever made. It’s stuffed so full of ridiculousness that I nearly gave myself an embolism trying to write a review of it a few years ago. It is as absurd and transcendental a B-movie experience as can be had on this tired Earth of ours.
I had long heard tales of Weng Weng’s other adventures as the indomitable Agent 00, but I never dreamed of actually seeing them myself. Then I discovered a duped copy of it online for $2.50, and lo, there was joy across the land. It just goes to show that B-movies never die. Orson Welles’ original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons is lost forever, but if you want to see a 30-year-old Filipino midget movie, all you gotta do is ask the right people.
It’s called The Impossible Kid, and on the poster underneath the title, it says: Agent 00 is back! No gimmicks… All is true… Don’t laugh and turn him down. He is a tiny dangerous man! How fucking amazing is that? What can I even add to that? My meticulously modulated snark could only tarnish its glory.
Anyway, this time out Weng is an Interpol agent working in Manila, but he still wears the same safari-style white leisure suit. He’s trying to stop this terrorist organization that’s attempting to extort a billion Filipino pesos out the country’s leading industrialists. The leader of the group calls himself Cobra, and he hides his face with a KKK hood made out of an old tubesock. He says he’ll kill a rich man every day until he gets his money, and only Weng Weng can stop him. This is a much more streamlined and down-to-earth case for Agent 00. If FYHO was a Roger Moore adventure, full of gimmicky gadgets, corny one-liners, and a string of mannequin-like female co-stars, The Impossible Kid is lean-and-mean Sean Connery. Aside from an awesome miniature motorcycle and a few smoke bombs, Weng has to get by with his fists and his wits alone. Even though he gets the chance to pole vault, paraglide, and walk a tightrope, this movie is really a showcase for Weng’s kung-fu skills. He’s got a pretty great fight in a dojo where he has to fend off a bunch of karate killers before taking down a lady assassin. He’s also a force to be reckoned with in a gunfight, since he never misses and his opponents are always aiming over his head. He even gets to use a full-size machine gun this time, so he’s even deadlier. His action scenes are both hilarious and well choreographed. Sure, it’s funny to watch the little bastard decimate a bunch of regular-sized dudes, but you have to admit that he’s got some decent moves. I bet he could kick my ass.
I appreciate this meat-and-potatoes approach, but I still think For Y’r Height Only is better. That one was so packed full of amazing shit—from Weng’s tiny jetpack to the Filipino hoodlums who were dubbed to sound like Prohibition-era gangsters—that it would have been incredible even if it had starred a full-size superspy. The Impossible Kid plays it so straight that it would be kind of boring without Weng. There are a lot of scenes where guys in ugly blazers and ascots sit around arguing with the chief of police and shit like that. The upside of that is that this a much more competent movie than FYHO, in that the plot more or less makes sense and characters don’t just disappear for no reason, but since when did anybody want competence in a Filipino midget movie?
Still, saying that a movie doesn’t measure up to For Y’r Height Only is like saying that getting laid isn’t as good as winning the lottery. Just seeing Weng Weng back in action made me feel like I had a million microscopic teddy bears having a picnic in my soul—especially when I heard the theme song. It’s an honest-to-god blaxploitation power ballad with a soul diva just singing her fucking guts out about how badass Weng is and how much she wants to fuck him. The song builds to an epic crescendo as her mad dwarf lust causes her to totally lose her shit and wail, "I love you Weng WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENG!!!!!!" (I can’t verify this, since I haven’t seen any footage of the recording session, but I assume that she was so overwhelmed by emotion that she dropped to her knees Patti LaBelle-style and started ripping her clothes off, tears streaming down her face in apocalyptic ecstasy.) If anyone has any leads as to how I can get this amazing work of songwriting on my iPod, please let me know because I’ll never be complete without it.
According to IMDB, Weng Weng also starred in a western called D’Wild Wild Weng. As God is my witness, I will not rest until I have seen that movie and written an overlong, rambling review of it. That is my promise to you. I don't care how long it takes. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my man Weng, it’s that nothing’s impossible, kid.
For Y’r Height Only is probably the best bad movie ever made. It’s stuffed so full of ridiculousness that I nearly gave myself an embolism trying to write a review of it a few years ago. It is as absurd and transcendental a B-movie experience as can be had on this tired Earth of ours.
I had long heard tales of Weng Weng’s other adventures as the indomitable Agent 00, but I never dreamed of actually seeing them myself. Then I discovered a duped copy of it online for $2.50, and lo, there was joy across the land. It just goes to show that B-movies never die. Orson Welles’ original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons is lost forever, but if you want to see a 30-year-old Filipino midget movie, all you gotta do is ask the right people.
It’s called The Impossible Kid, and on the poster underneath the title, it says: Agent 00 is back! No gimmicks… All is true… Don’t laugh and turn him down. He is a tiny dangerous man! How fucking amazing is that? What can I even add to that? My meticulously modulated snark could only tarnish its glory.
Anyway, this time out Weng is an Interpol agent working in Manila, but he still wears the same safari-style white leisure suit. He’s trying to stop this terrorist organization that’s attempting to extort a billion Filipino pesos out the country’s leading industrialists. The leader of the group calls himself Cobra, and he hides his face with a KKK hood made out of an old tubesock. He says he’ll kill a rich man every day until he gets his money, and only Weng Weng can stop him. This is a much more streamlined and down-to-earth case for Agent 00. If FYHO was a Roger Moore adventure, full of gimmicky gadgets, corny one-liners, and a string of mannequin-like female co-stars, The Impossible Kid is lean-and-mean Sean Connery. Aside from an awesome miniature motorcycle and a few smoke bombs, Weng has to get by with his fists and his wits alone. Even though he gets the chance to pole vault, paraglide, and walk a tightrope, this movie is really a showcase for Weng’s kung-fu skills. He’s got a pretty great fight in a dojo where he has to fend off a bunch of karate killers before taking down a lady assassin. He’s also a force to be reckoned with in a gunfight, since he never misses and his opponents are always aiming over his head. He even gets to use a full-size machine gun this time, so he’s even deadlier. His action scenes are both hilarious and well choreographed. Sure, it’s funny to watch the little bastard decimate a bunch of regular-sized dudes, but you have to admit that he’s got some decent moves. I bet he could kick my ass.
I appreciate this meat-and-potatoes approach, but I still think For Y’r Height Only is better. That one was so packed full of amazing shit—from Weng’s tiny jetpack to the Filipino hoodlums who were dubbed to sound like Prohibition-era gangsters—that it would have been incredible even if it had starred a full-size superspy. The Impossible Kid plays it so straight that it would be kind of boring without Weng. There are a lot of scenes where guys in ugly blazers and ascots sit around arguing with the chief of police and shit like that. The upside of that is that this a much more competent movie than FYHO, in that the plot more or less makes sense and characters don’t just disappear for no reason, but since when did anybody want competence in a Filipino midget movie?
Still, saying that a movie doesn’t measure up to For Y’r Height Only is like saying that getting laid isn’t as good as winning the lottery. Just seeing Weng Weng back in action made me feel like I had a million microscopic teddy bears having a picnic in my soul—especially when I heard the theme song. It’s an honest-to-god blaxploitation power ballad with a soul diva just singing her fucking guts out about how badass Weng is and how much she wants to fuck him. The song builds to an epic crescendo as her mad dwarf lust causes her to totally lose her shit and wail, "I love you Weng WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENG!!!!!!" (I can’t verify this, since I haven’t seen any footage of the recording session, but I assume that she was so overwhelmed by emotion that she dropped to her knees Patti LaBelle-style and started ripping her clothes off, tears streaming down her face in apocalyptic ecstasy.) If anyone has any leads as to how I can get this amazing work of songwriting on my iPod, please let me know because I’ll never be complete without it.
According to IMDB, Weng Weng also starred in a western called D’Wild Wild Weng. As God is my witness, I will not rest until I have seen that movie and written an overlong, rambling review of it. That is my promise to you. I don't care how long it takes. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from my man Weng, it’s that nothing’s impossible, kid.
Ong-Bak 2
Mankind is one giant family united by blood and history, but it has long been a family at war with itself. That is, until one man brought us all together: Tony Jaa. White or black, Asian or Caucasian, Muslim or Undecided, we could all agree on one thing: That motherfucker kicks ass. In Ong-Bak, he taught us that it doesn’t matter if your feet are on fire as long as you can still crack skulls open with your elbows. In The Protector, he proved that there is no force on earth more powerful than a Thai man separated from his elephants. And in his eagerly awaited (and, as of this writing, not officially available in the U.S. yet) directorial debut, Ong-Bak 2, he illustrates that, while it’s possible to kick every ass you meet, ultimate enlightenment can only be achieved when you kick the ass inside yourself.
I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out for years, pretty much ever since the credits for The Protector rolled in 2007. It got announced pretty quick, but its release kept getting delayed because Jaa had already spent all of the money in Thailand, so he had to wait for them to print more before he could continue filming. Then the pressures of directing and starring in the most expensive movie in Thai history while choreographing some of the most intricate fight sequences ever attempted and performing all of his own stunts caused him to have a nervous breakdown, so he had to wander off into the jungle by himself and live with the elephants for a few months before he could get his shit back together and complete the shoot. When a man pushes himself to the brink like that in the name of ass-kicking, I feel that it is my sworn duty as a proponent of the badass arts to see that man’s movie as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the Weinsteins have the U.S distribution rights, so we all know what that means: It’ll sit on the shelf for a year or so while they cut out all the weird parts and splice in a new score by some white guy with a ponytail who listened to Dr. Dre once, then they’ll release it in three or four American cities for a week and a half and then complain to Variety that American audiences just don’t “get” Asian cinema. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again, and I, for one, am not gonna stand for it anymore. That’s why I went to extraordinary lengths to procure this film in the here and now. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. If you want to see Ong-Bak 2, you have to know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who has the Internet. Then you have to ask that last guy if you can use his computer for a sec, and then you have to order the Asian import DVD from eBay because they didn’t have it at the porn store where you normally buy your Asian import DVDs.
Ong-Bak 2 has nothing to do with Ong-Bak 1 except that they’re both too awesome for this sick, sad world of ours. The first one was the story of a modern-day Thai dude who has to go to Bangkok and put his knee through about 250 faces so he can bring this stolen Buddha statue back to his village. The second one is much more epic. It takes place 700 years ago, when all these warlords were running around Southeast Asia, ripping shit up. Jaa plays this dude who gets trained by these multi-culti pirates to be the most hardcore motherfucker ever so he can go get revenge on the cocksuckers that murdered his mom and dad. That’s about all the plot a movie like this really needs, but Jaa is clearly trying to imbue this thing with some kind of spiritual message, so this simple story gets pumped up to Ben Hur levels through sheer filmmaking gusto. The visuals are sumptuous and colorful, with lots of slow-mo shots of Jaa standing on a cliff in front of the sunrise or looking all crazy-eyed into the camera with his hair hanging in his face while the cold, cold rain pours down like the golden shower of the Buddha. This is a beautifully crafted movie. Every facet of this film, from the camerawork to the art design to the acting, is comparable and in some ways superior to Hollywood product. Thai cinema has come a long way since Battle Warrior, where they couldn’t even afford lights or costumes. It’s even come a long way from the original Ong-Bak, which was amazing as an action showcase but pretty retarded as a movie. With Ong-Bak 2, however, Jaa clearly isn’t happy with making just another cheesy action flick about transvestite gangsters who steal elephants to impress their Australian investors. He’s trying to make some art here, and I think he might succeed a little bit. He lets the visuals do most of the talking, giving every frame a trippy kind of mysticism, while the score’s triumphantly old-fashioned trumpets put you in a Braveheart state of mind. I really don’t know what message he’s trying to convey with all this, but it certainly makes the movie feel more elegant and dramatic than any other Thai movie I’ve ever seen.
But shit, watching a Thai action movie for the cinematography is like watching a porno for the costumes. We’re here for action, and action we get. Ong-Bak 2 is less of a stunt movie than the first one. This is a straight-up fight movie. There are fewer jaw-dropping moments where you can’t believe that a human being just did that and survived, but the furiously paced fights, while smaller scaled, are much more intricate and varied. Jaa shows off by using just about every style of kung fu known to man, from Drunken Fist to Tiger Crane to his trademark Muay Thai, which he saves until the climactic 30-minute no-holds-barred battle royale with dozens of masked henchmen. He also gets to use a lot of weapons. Some are pretty standard, like swords and spears, but he also busts out some more exotic ones, like the Coiling Dragon Staff and this other one that looks like a nightstick tied to several yards of yarn. This movie is basically Jaa proving that he’s a well-rounded martial artist and doesn’t have to remain stuck in the Muay Thai ghetto. The glorious Thai people have always had a chip on their shoulder about their homegrown martial arts, so this movie is all about Jaa showing the purists of China and Japan that Thailand is ready to run with the big dogs.
Did I mention that this movie is absolutely insane? The plot keeps getting derailed by all these flashbacks and training montages, so you just never know what the fuck else is gonna happen in this thing. There’s this one scarfaced dude who lives at the pirate village where Jaa grows up who likes to throw explosives around for fun, so shit is always blowing up for no reason. There’s also some really excellent crocodile wrestling featuring what has to be the best CGI croc I’ve ever seen, since there’s just no other way they could get a 12-year-old that close to the jaws of death. Jaa also runs across the backs of a herd of stampeding elephants so he can put the leader to sleep with a punch to the top of the head, at which point all of the other elephants kneel before him like he was fucking Babar. Then there’s a flashback where Dirty Balls from Ong-Bak shows up and scratches his nuts. Then there’s this part where Jaa has to fight this gigantic motherfucker who’s got tattoos on his face that make him look like Fred Williamson after he got turned into a vampire in From Dusk Till Dawn. Speaking of vampires, Jaa fights one. He gets sent into this cave to test the power of his mind, so you think he’s gonna have to chop his own head off like Luke did in that evil tree in Empire Strikes Back. Instead, it’s more like the torture pit in Army of Darkness, because this pointy-toothed she-bitch starts hissing and spitting and jumping off the walls and trying to bite his throat out. Oh yeah, and he also does an interpretive dance while wearing a gorilla mask and fights a flying witch who’s dressed up like a crow. On the back of an elephant. Whose face he just did a bicycle kick off of. Which was after this Arabian dude with a wicker basket on his head threw him off a building. Twice.
And then it just…ends. There’s a heartbreaking twist that you probably saw coming, and then things look hopeless for our young hero, and then this narrator informs us that all this shit is Jaa’s own fault but that maybe if we all pray for him he will be relieved of his torment and find inner peace, which I take to mean that there will probably be a third movie, but only if we all go see this one. It’s like in the stage production of Peter Pan where the audience has to prove that they believe in fairies or Tinkerbell dies. It’s totally jarring and probably really, really Buddhist.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where Ong-Bak 3 isn’t being rushed into production, so I’ll believe in fairies, vampires, bird bitches, Loch Ness monsters, Bigfeet, whatever you got. Just give me more Tony Jaa. Considering how long it took for this movie to finally get released, haven’t we all suffered enough?
I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out for years, pretty much ever since the credits for The Protector rolled in 2007. It got announced pretty quick, but its release kept getting delayed because Jaa had already spent all of the money in Thailand, so he had to wait for them to print more before he could continue filming. Then the pressures of directing and starring in the most expensive movie in Thai history while choreographing some of the most intricate fight sequences ever attempted and performing all of his own stunts caused him to have a nervous breakdown, so he had to wander off into the jungle by himself and live with the elephants for a few months before he could get his shit back together and complete the shoot. When a man pushes himself to the brink like that in the name of ass-kicking, I feel that it is my sworn duty as a proponent of the badass arts to see that man’s movie as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the Weinsteins have the U.S distribution rights, so we all know what that means: It’ll sit on the shelf for a year or so while they cut out all the weird parts and splice in a new score by some white guy with a ponytail who listened to Dr. Dre once, then they’ll release it in three or four American cities for a week and a half and then complain to Variety that American audiences just don’t “get” Asian cinema. They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again, and I, for one, am not gonna stand for it anymore. That’s why I went to extraordinary lengths to procure this film in the here and now. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. If you want to see Ong-Bak 2, you have to know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who has the Internet. Then you have to ask that last guy if you can use his computer for a sec, and then you have to order the Asian import DVD from eBay because they didn’t have it at the porn store where you normally buy your Asian import DVDs.
Ong-Bak 2 has nothing to do with Ong-Bak 1 except that they’re both too awesome for this sick, sad world of ours. The first one was the story of a modern-day Thai dude who has to go to Bangkok and put his knee through about 250 faces so he can bring this stolen Buddha statue back to his village. The second one is much more epic. It takes place 700 years ago, when all these warlords were running around Southeast Asia, ripping shit up. Jaa plays this dude who gets trained by these multi-culti pirates to be the most hardcore motherfucker ever so he can go get revenge on the cocksuckers that murdered his mom and dad. That’s about all the plot a movie like this really needs, but Jaa is clearly trying to imbue this thing with some kind of spiritual message, so this simple story gets pumped up to Ben Hur levels through sheer filmmaking gusto. The visuals are sumptuous and colorful, with lots of slow-mo shots of Jaa standing on a cliff in front of the sunrise or looking all crazy-eyed into the camera with his hair hanging in his face while the cold, cold rain pours down like the golden shower of the Buddha. This is a beautifully crafted movie. Every facet of this film, from the camerawork to the art design to the acting, is comparable and in some ways superior to Hollywood product. Thai cinema has come a long way since Battle Warrior, where they couldn’t even afford lights or costumes. It’s even come a long way from the original Ong-Bak, which was amazing as an action showcase but pretty retarded as a movie. With Ong-Bak 2, however, Jaa clearly isn’t happy with making just another cheesy action flick about transvestite gangsters who steal elephants to impress their Australian investors. He’s trying to make some art here, and I think he might succeed a little bit. He lets the visuals do most of the talking, giving every frame a trippy kind of mysticism, while the score’s triumphantly old-fashioned trumpets put you in a Braveheart state of mind. I really don’t know what message he’s trying to convey with all this, but it certainly makes the movie feel more elegant and dramatic than any other Thai movie I’ve ever seen.
But shit, watching a Thai action movie for the cinematography is like watching a porno for the costumes. We’re here for action, and action we get. Ong-Bak 2 is less of a stunt movie than the first one. This is a straight-up fight movie. There are fewer jaw-dropping moments where you can’t believe that a human being just did that and survived, but the furiously paced fights, while smaller scaled, are much more intricate and varied. Jaa shows off by using just about every style of kung fu known to man, from Drunken Fist to Tiger Crane to his trademark Muay Thai, which he saves until the climactic 30-minute no-holds-barred battle royale with dozens of masked henchmen. He also gets to use a lot of weapons. Some are pretty standard, like swords and spears, but he also busts out some more exotic ones, like the Coiling Dragon Staff and this other one that looks like a nightstick tied to several yards of yarn. This movie is basically Jaa proving that he’s a well-rounded martial artist and doesn’t have to remain stuck in the Muay Thai ghetto. The glorious Thai people have always had a chip on their shoulder about their homegrown martial arts, so this movie is all about Jaa showing the purists of China and Japan that Thailand is ready to run with the big dogs.
Did I mention that this movie is absolutely insane? The plot keeps getting derailed by all these flashbacks and training montages, so you just never know what the fuck else is gonna happen in this thing. There’s this one scarfaced dude who lives at the pirate village where Jaa grows up who likes to throw explosives around for fun, so shit is always blowing up for no reason. There’s also some really excellent crocodile wrestling featuring what has to be the best CGI croc I’ve ever seen, since there’s just no other way they could get a 12-year-old that close to the jaws of death. Jaa also runs across the backs of a herd of stampeding elephants so he can put the leader to sleep with a punch to the top of the head, at which point all of the other elephants kneel before him like he was fucking Babar. Then there’s a flashback where Dirty Balls from Ong-Bak shows up and scratches his nuts. Then there’s this part where Jaa has to fight this gigantic motherfucker who’s got tattoos on his face that make him look like Fred Williamson after he got turned into a vampire in From Dusk Till Dawn. Speaking of vampires, Jaa fights one. He gets sent into this cave to test the power of his mind, so you think he’s gonna have to chop his own head off like Luke did in that evil tree in Empire Strikes Back. Instead, it’s more like the torture pit in Army of Darkness, because this pointy-toothed she-bitch starts hissing and spitting and jumping off the walls and trying to bite his throat out. Oh yeah, and he also does an interpretive dance while wearing a gorilla mask and fights a flying witch who’s dressed up like a crow. On the back of an elephant. Whose face he just did a bicycle kick off of. Which was after this Arabian dude with a wicker basket on his head threw him off a building. Twice.
And then it just…ends. There’s a heartbreaking twist that you probably saw coming, and then things look hopeless for our young hero, and then this narrator informs us that all this shit is Jaa’s own fault but that maybe if we all pray for him he will be relieved of his torment and find inner peace, which I take to mean that there will probably be a third movie, but only if we all go see this one. It’s like in the stage production of Peter Pan where the audience has to prove that they believe in fairies or Tinkerbell dies. It’s totally jarring and probably really, really Buddhist.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where Ong-Bak 3 isn’t being rushed into production, so I’ll believe in fairies, vampires, bird bitches, Loch Ness monsters, Bigfeet, whatever you got. Just give me more Tony Jaa. Considering how long it took for this movie to finally get released, haven’t we all suffered enough?
High Voltage
Remember when I used to review horror movies? I’ve always vacillated between action and horror, but lately, I want all action, all the time. I still watch horror movies, but I rarely feel the need to write about them. Maybe it’s because I tend to feel that horror is gonna be just fine without me to sing its praises on the internet. Trends come and go, but horror always survives, thanks to a devoted fanbase with a never-ending influx of people who have just turned 17 and want to prove how hardcore they are. Action, however, is kind of on the endangered list. Every now and again there’s a random hit like Taken, but kids these days prefer their action movies to be about robots with superpowers, not unshaven men with shoulder holsters. The classic action movie is going the way of the western or the film noir. Rather than being a viable commercial genre, it’s quickly becoming a purely retro phenomenon, an exercise in aesthetics to be consumed solely by nostalgists.
Luckily, I’m not the only one keeping the flame burning. I was recently exposed to the works of Isaac Florentine by fellow action fetishist Outlaw Vern. Florentine is a direct-to-DVD director who is almost single-handedly keeping the meat-and-potatoes American action movie alive. The fact that he is an Israeli who works in a heavily Hong Kong-influenced style and usually shoots his movies in Bulgaria only proves how dire the situation is.
Florentine is a former martial arts instructor who got his start choreographing stunts and directing episodes of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, so this is a dude who knows the best angles at which to film a guy kicking another guy so that he flips end over end and crashes headfirst through a coffee table. This is a very useful skill for an action director to have, but you’d be amazed at how many don’t have it. He shoots clean frames that emphasize movement and causality, so that his action sequences flow logically from one exciting event to the next. This is a decidedly classical approach when compared to contemporary action filmmakers, who prefer to hire highly skilled stuntmen to design and perform an intricate and immaculately timed dance of destruction, and then kick the camera around in front of it like an empty shoebox they found in the street. Florentine also has an excellent grasp of the proper tone for old school action. It’s not too light, not too heavy, and never ironic. He treats his one-dimensional characters with respect and takes their stories seriously, but he also has no delusions of grandeur. He knows he’s making cheesy movies where character development is defined by putting a chair leg through the chest of the guy who killed your partner.
This isn’t the first time I’ve reviewed one of Florentine’s movies (The Shepherd: Border Patrol) but for some reason I didn’t mention him in the last one. That’s why it’s kind of a shame that I have to introduce you to him with High Voltage, which, in addition to having a title that looks really eye-catching on a VHS box but doesn’t have anything at all to do with the film contained therein, is nothing special. It’s an early film of his, so he hadn’t quite perfected his chops yet. His later work like U.S. Seals 2 and Special Forces shows a much more confident directorial hand, as well as much more impressive stuntwork. But High Voltage does have its moments.
What we got here is a movie in which TV heartthrob Antonio Sabato, Jr. leads the least badass gang of armed robbers in movie history. We’ve got a pre-Road Trip Amy Smart, who's way too cute to look tough pumping a shotgun, plus the puffed-up frat monkey who played the deputy in Freddy vs. Jason and a couple of nondescript white guys in blue button-ups and khakis. What they do is they attempt to rob a bank, but then they discover that it’s being used as a front for some Vietnamese gangsters, so they team up with the bank manager (who also happens to be the head gangster’s moll) to rip off the loot and make a break for Mexico. The manager is played by Shannon Lee, daughter of Bruce, who I’d only ever seen in a Hong Kong flick with the amazing title of And Now You’re Dead. Mostly she’s just the love interest, but she does get one fight scene in what is probably not the least convincing bar set I’ve ever seen. Her kung fu is serviceable at best, but at least she’s kind of cute.
The first half of the movie is kind of boring, but it really picks up after that barfight. Amy Smart’s lame boyfriend gets killed in the crossfire with a gang of bikers (one of whom is played by Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds), so they force a priest (Hit List’s Ken Lerner in a rare non-lawyer role) to marry her and the corpse at gunpoint. Once that happens, things get much more absurd and enjoyable.
This was 1997, so naturally every movie had to have a bunch of colorful Tarantinoesque underworld factions becoming entangled with each other in a series of double-crosses and coincidences, so the climax is all about the Vietnamese gangsters and a vengeful biker (played by Johnny from The Karate Kid) converging at an Arizona motel run by Antonio’s freakishly beefy Sicilian uncle. Then Florentine really gets to let ’er rip with the roundhouse kicks and the machine guns and the people falling over railings. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but at least it doesn’t skimp on the good stuff. And in these days of incompetent action and sissified CGI, sometimes that’s the best you can ask for.
Luckily, I’m not the only one keeping the flame burning. I was recently exposed to the works of Isaac Florentine by fellow action fetishist Outlaw Vern. Florentine is a direct-to-DVD director who is almost single-handedly keeping the meat-and-potatoes American action movie alive. The fact that he is an Israeli who works in a heavily Hong Kong-influenced style and usually shoots his movies in Bulgaria only proves how dire the situation is.
Florentine is a former martial arts instructor who got his start choreographing stunts and directing episodes of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, so this is a dude who knows the best angles at which to film a guy kicking another guy so that he flips end over end and crashes headfirst through a coffee table. This is a very useful skill for an action director to have, but you’d be amazed at how many don’t have it. He shoots clean frames that emphasize movement and causality, so that his action sequences flow logically from one exciting event to the next. This is a decidedly classical approach when compared to contemporary action filmmakers, who prefer to hire highly skilled stuntmen to design and perform an intricate and immaculately timed dance of destruction, and then kick the camera around in front of it like an empty shoebox they found in the street. Florentine also has an excellent grasp of the proper tone for old school action. It’s not too light, not too heavy, and never ironic. He treats his one-dimensional characters with respect and takes their stories seriously, but he also has no delusions of grandeur. He knows he’s making cheesy movies where character development is defined by putting a chair leg through the chest of the guy who killed your partner.
This isn’t the first time I’ve reviewed one of Florentine’s movies (The Shepherd: Border Patrol) but for some reason I didn’t mention him in the last one. That’s why it’s kind of a shame that I have to introduce you to him with High Voltage, which, in addition to having a title that looks really eye-catching on a VHS box but doesn’t have anything at all to do with the film contained therein, is nothing special. It’s an early film of his, so he hadn’t quite perfected his chops yet. His later work like U.S. Seals 2 and Special Forces shows a much more confident directorial hand, as well as much more impressive stuntwork. But High Voltage does have its moments.
What we got here is a movie in which TV heartthrob Antonio Sabato, Jr. leads the least badass gang of armed robbers in movie history. We’ve got a pre-Road Trip Amy Smart, who's way too cute to look tough pumping a shotgun, plus the puffed-up frat monkey who played the deputy in Freddy vs. Jason and a couple of nondescript white guys in blue button-ups and khakis. What they do is they attempt to rob a bank, but then they discover that it’s being used as a front for some Vietnamese gangsters, so they team up with the bank manager (who also happens to be the head gangster’s moll) to rip off the loot and make a break for Mexico. The manager is played by Shannon Lee, daughter of Bruce, who I’d only ever seen in a Hong Kong flick with the amazing title of And Now You’re Dead. Mostly she’s just the love interest, but she does get one fight scene in what is probably not the least convincing bar set I’ve ever seen. Her kung fu is serviceable at best, but at least she’s kind of cute.
The first half of the movie is kind of boring, but it really picks up after that barfight. Amy Smart’s lame boyfriend gets killed in the crossfire with a gang of bikers (one of whom is played by Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds), so they force a priest (Hit List’s Ken Lerner in a rare non-lawyer role) to marry her and the corpse at gunpoint. Once that happens, things get much more absurd and enjoyable.
This was 1997, so naturally every movie had to have a bunch of colorful Tarantinoesque underworld factions becoming entangled with each other in a series of double-crosses and coincidences, so the climax is all about the Vietnamese gangsters and a vengeful biker (played by Johnny from The Karate Kid) converging at an Arizona motel run by Antonio’s freakishly beefy Sicilian uncle. Then Florentine really gets to let ’er rip with the roundhouse kicks and the machine guns and the people falling over railings. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but at least it doesn’t skimp on the good stuff. And in these days of incompetent action and sissified CGI, sometimes that’s the best you can ask for.
Crank: High Voltage
There are basically two types of people in this world: Those who think the Crank series is preposterous, offensive, and retarded, and those who are like “Duh.” Personally, I find that first type of person hilarious. Obviously, a series of films as over-the-top and willfully unrealistic as Crank and Crank: High Voltage had to have been designed that way from the start, but these assholes seem to think that it requires a world-class intellect like their own to notice it. They’re like, “At the end of the first one, Statham fell like 10,000 feet out of a helicopter. There’s no way he could survive that. What a crock of shit.” And I’m like, “I know, right? You know what else sucks? I saw this cartoon once where this dude shot a duck point-blank in the face and all that happened was its bill turned around backwards. And then—can you believe it?—the duck just turned the bill back around like nothing happened! That’s totally not what would happen if you really shot a duck in the face. Also, the duck could talk.” Basically what I’m saying is that pointing out that Crank is ridiculous and unbelievable is not a valid criticism. All you’re telling me is that you don’t like that type of shit in the first place, so why should I care about your opinion? It’s like somebody saying that Motörhead sucks because they’re too loud.
Now, I’m not necessarily saying you’re an asshole if you don’t like Crank and its sequel. I mean, you got a couple strikes against you, but if you could get down with the movies in theory but just don’t care for the hypercaffeinated visual style, I can appreciate that. I don’t normally go in for that kind of shit myself, but I think it works within the confines of the Crankiverse. So it’s cool, you and me can still be BFF’s. Just don’t try and tell me that the absurdity and crudity that has been carefully layered into the films from the script stage on was some kind of mistake that only you were sophisticated enough to point out. That dog won’t hunt.
Anyway, we should probably get around to talking about Crank Fucking 2 at some point. Most of you won’t agree with me, but I think the first one was a little better. The second one has way more crazy shit in it, but I think the storyline of the first one (Hitman has to keep his adrenaline up to stop the poison in his veins from stopping his heart before he gets his revenge) was more interesting. It’s a great action movie plot, because it creates a compelling reason for the hero to cause needless destruction, do lots of drugs, and pork Amy Smart in public. In Crank 2, Statham has had his heart (which is so badass that it somehow survived the poison from the first one all by itself) removed and replaced with an artificial one, so he’s got to keep juicing it with electricity so it won’t conk out before he gets his real one back. This leads to some hilarious shit, like when he electrocutes himself at a power station and somehow turns into a giant rubber-masked Godzilla version of himself. But it’s not as socially irresponsible as a movie that says sniffing cocaine off a filthy restroom floor to get your heart rate up is the right thing to do.
Also, I think the acting in the first one is a little underrated. There are so many little supporting parts that are so much more memorable than they could have been, from the dude who gets thrown off the roof who yells "What you mean ding? Whayoumeanding?" as he falls to his death to the surprisingly affable black gangster in the bathroom who says the immortal line: "There's a white nigga in here with a gun!" I also really appreciated the scenery-chewing yet oddly sympathetic performance of the main villain, who has a few moments where his facial expressions mix grief and hysteria and rage and humor in equal proportions. The performances in Crank: High Voltage are more of the Troma-style overacting-for-overacting’s-sake school. They’re entertaining and they fit the tone of the movie, but they’re not as distinctive as the ones in Crank 1.
The main area in which the original surpasses its sequel is in its ending. Having your hero jump to his (seeming) death from a helicopter and, while falling through the clouds, leave a goodbye message on his girlfriend’s answering machine was both incredibly badass and sort of sweet. It was a bold move to conclude 90 minutes of foul language, fornication, and bloodshed with a man coming to terms with his own mortality by giving closure to the woman he loved.
But even if Crank 2 isn’t as awesome as Crank 1, it’s still more awesome than a gorilla with a chainsaw. This movie is giddy, mean-spirited fun from beginning to end. It’s basically just scenes of crazy sex and violence and profanity slapped together one after the other, so you’ve barely had time to reconfigure your mind-grapes to deal with the insanity you just witnessed before they slap you in the face with some more. To support my thesis, I give you this quote from noted Onion AV Club commentator and caps-lock enthusiast Zodiac Motherfucker:
I AM HERE TO SERVE NOTICE ABOUT THE REAL THATS RIGHT CRANK 2 BITCH FUCK YEAH IT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY FUCKING FUCKING LIFE. WALL TO WALL OWNAGE YOU GOT STRIPPERS SHOOTING MOTHERFUCKERS YOU GOT CHINESE GANGSTERS TEARING SHIT UP YOU GOT GREAT BIG JACKED UP CHOLOS OWNING PEOPLE YOU GOT GAY DUDES WITH NUNCHUCKS YOU GOT STATHAM RUNNING AROUND LIKE A FUCKING HURRICANE OF OWNAGE YOU GOT AMY SMART BEING AWESOME AND HOT AND GETTING FUCKED IN PUBLIC YOU GOT HOOKERS CRUSHING SOME FAT MOTHERFUCKERS NUTS YOU GOT OLD ANCIENT ASS CHINESE DUDES GETTING PUSSY YOU GOT MOTHERFUCKERS GETTING THROWN OUT OF WINDOWS YOU GOT LITTLE KIDS BEATING THE FUCK OUT OF OTHER LITTLE KIDS LIKE FOR REAL A STONE FUCKING BEATDOWN HOLY SHIT IT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING INSANE THE OWNINGS PER MINUTE ARE PROBABLY THE HIGHEST THEYVE EVER BEEN
CRANK BITCH FUCK THE FUCK YEAH CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY THIS YEAR MOTHERFUCKERS GET YOUR ASS TO THE THEATER AND FEEL THE FUCKING VOLTAGE IF YOU LIKE TITTIES YOUR GONNA FUCKING LOVE CRANK 2
ZMF is rarely this effusive, but he's just barely scratching the surface of Crank 2’s madness. He didn’t mention how the pussy-getting old Chinese dude is played by David Carradine. Or the part where a stripper gets shot through both titties and they start leaking saline. Or when Statham interrogates a fat dude by cramming eight inches of greasy shotgun up his ass. Or Bai Ling’s outrageously offensive pidgin English, which is full of lines like “I bitchfuck you!” that are even funnier when subtitled—it’s like a Chinese takeout menu published by Larry Flynt. Or then there’s the part where a character from the first movie has a cameo as a rubber head in a fish tank. Or the part where a dude has the tip of his elbow hacked off with a machete for no reason. Or the part where Statham gives the audience the finger with his fucking face on fire. Shit, he didn’t even mention the part where Amy Smart puts Corey Haim through a windshield.
Still, despite his deplorable oversights, ZMF’s enthusiasm is dead-on. (Also: "Fuck the fuck yeah” is now something I say.) This is a superior entertainment that never stops coming up with inventive new ways to blow your fucking mind. I strongly recommend seeing this movie with an audience. I have gone on record as stating that the American public as a whole is allergic to awesome, but my Crank: High Voltage viewing experience has renewed my faith in my fellow countrymen.
Before I close, I would like to give a post-dated “Fuck you” to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for failing to recognize the groundbreaking work of music legend Mike Patton. His score for Crank 2 is the weirdest and most rockingest soundtrack I’ve heard since Dario Argento lost Goblin’s phone number. It sounds like if Sergio Leone got signed to Anticon to record a tango/thrash/electro jazz album that got remixed by DJ Spooky to be the soundtrack to Todd McFarlane’s porno revamp of Tom & Jerry. So yeah, it’s a Mike Patton album, only it comes with a feature-length music video full of boobs and blood and occasional interludes by REO Speedwagon.
Seriously, what do I have to do, jerk you off on my chest? Go watch the fucking movie already.
Now, I’m not necessarily saying you’re an asshole if you don’t like Crank and its sequel. I mean, you got a couple strikes against you, but if you could get down with the movies in theory but just don’t care for the hypercaffeinated visual style, I can appreciate that. I don’t normally go in for that kind of shit myself, but I think it works within the confines of the Crankiverse. So it’s cool, you and me can still be BFF’s. Just don’t try and tell me that the absurdity and crudity that has been carefully layered into the films from the script stage on was some kind of mistake that only you were sophisticated enough to point out. That dog won’t hunt.
Anyway, we should probably get around to talking about Crank Fucking 2 at some point. Most of you won’t agree with me, but I think the first one was a little better. The second one has way more crazy shit in it, but I think the storyline of the first one (Hitman has to keep his adrenaline up to stop the poison in his veins from stopping his heart before he gets his revenge) was more interesting. It’s a great action movie plot, because it creates a compelling reason for the hero to cause needless destruction, do lots of drugs, and pork Amy Smart in public. In Crank 2, Statham has had his heart (which is so badass that it somehow survived the poison from the first one all by itself) removed and replaced with an artificial one, so he’s got to keep juicing it with electricity so it won’t conk out before he gets his real one back. This leads to some hilarious shit, like when he electrocutes himself at a power station and somehow turns into a giant rubber-masked Godzilla version of himself. But it’s not as socially irresponsible as a movie that says sniffing cocaine off a filthy restroom floor to get your heart rate up is the right thing to do.
Also, I think the acting in the first one is a little underrated. There are so many little supporting parts that are so much more memorable than they could have been, from the dude who gets thrown off the roof who yells "What you mean ding? Whayoumeanding?" as he falls to his death to the surprisingly affable black gangster in the bathroom who says the immortal line: "There's a white nigga in here with a gun!" I also really appreciated the scenery-chewing yet oddly sympathetic performance of the main villain, who has a few moments where his facial expressions mix grief and hysteria and rage and humor in equal proportions. The performances in Crank: High Voltage are more of the Troma-style overacting-for-overacting’s-sake school. They’re entertaining and they fit the tone of the movie, but they’re not as distinctive as the ones in Crank 1.
The main area in which the original surpasses its sequel is in its ending. Having your hero jump to his (seeming) death from a helicopter and, while falling through the clouds, leave a goodbye message on his girlfriend’s answering machine was both incredibly badass and sort of sweet. It was a bold move to conclude 90 minutes of foul language, fornication, and bloodshed with a man coming to terms with his own mortality by giving closure to the woman he loved.
But even if Crank 2 isn’t as awesome as Crank 1, it’s still more awesome than a gorilla with a chainsaw. This movie is giddy, mean-spirited fun from beginning to end. It’s basically just scenes of crazy sex and violence and profanity slapped together one after the other, so you’ve barely had time to reconfigure your mind-grapes to deal with the insanity you just witnessed before they slap you in the face with some more. To support my thesis, I give you this quote from noted Onion AV Club commentator and caps-lock enthusiast Zodiac Motherfucker:
I AM HERE TO SERVE NOTICE ABOUT THE REAL THATS RIGHT CRANK 2 BITCH FUCK YEAH IT IS ONE OF THE GREATEST MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY FUCKING FUCKING LIFE. WALL TO WALL OWNAGE YOU GOT STRIPPERS SHOOTING MOTHERFUCKERS YOU GOT CHINESE GANGSTERS TEARING SHIT UP YOU GOT GREAT BIG JACKED UP CHOLOS OWNING PEOPLE YOU GOT GAY DUDES WITH NUNCHUCKS YOU GOT STATHAM RUNNING AROUND LIKE A FUCKING HURRICANE OF OWNAGE YOU GOT AMY SMART BEING AWESOME AND HOT AND GETTING FUCKED IN PUBLIC YOU GOT HOOKERS CRUSHING SOME FAT MOTHERFUCKERS NUTS YOU GOT OLD ANCIENT ASS CHINESE DUDES GETTING PUSSY YOU GOT MOTHERFUCKERS GETTING THROWN OUT OF WINDOWS YOU GOT LITTLE KIDS BEATING THE FUCK OUT OF OTHER LITTLE KIDS LIKE FOR REAL A STONE FUCKING BEATDOWN HOLY SHIT IT IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING INSANE THE OWNINGS PER MINUTE ARE PROBABLY THE HIGHEST THEYVE EVER BEEN
CRANK BITCH FUCK THE FUCK YEAH CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY THIS YEAR MOTHERFUCKERS GET YOUR ASS TO THE THEATER AND FEEL THE FUCKING VOLTAGE IF YOU LIKE TITTIES YOUR GONNA FUCKING LOVE CRANK 2
ZMF is rarely this effusive, but he's just barely scratching the surface of Crank 2’s madness. He didn’t mention how the pussy-getting old Chinese dude is played by David Carradine. Or the part where a stripper gets shot through both titties and they start leaking saline. Or when Statham interrogates a fat dude by cramming eight inches of greasy shotgun up his ass. Or Bai Ling’s outrageously offensive pidgin English, which is full of lines like “I bitchfuck you!” that are even funnier when subtitled—it’s like a Chinese takeout menu published by Larry Flynt. Or then there’s the part where a character from the first movie has a cameo as a rubber head in a fish tank. Or the part where a dude has the tip of his elbow hacked off with a machete for no reason. Or the part where Statham gives the audience the finger with his fucking face on fire. Shit, he didn’t even mention the part where Amy Smart puts Corey Haim through a windshield.
Still, despite his deplorable oversights, ZMF’s enthusiasm is dead-on. (Also: "Fuck the fuck yeah” is now something I say.) This is a superior entertainment that never stops coming up with inventive new ways to blow your fucking mind. I strongly recommend seeing this movie with an audience. I have gone on record as stating that the American public as a whole is allergic to awesome, but my Crank: High Voltage viewing experience has renewed my faith in my fellow countrymen.
Before I close, I would like to give a post-dated “Fuck you” to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for failing to recognize the groundbreaking work of music legend Mike Patton. His score for Crank 2 is the weirdest and most rockingest soundtrack I’ve heard since Dario Argento lost Goblin’s phone number. It sounds like if Sergio Leone got signed to Anticon to record a tango/thrash/electro jazz album that got remixed by DJ Spooky to be the soundtrack to Todd McFarlane’s porno revamp of Tom & Jerry. So yeah, it’s a Mike Patton album, only it comes with a feature-length music video full of boobs and blood and occasional interludes by REO Speedwagon.
Seriously, what do I have to do, jerk you off on my chest? Go watch the fucking movie already.
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