B-Movie of the Day No. 70: Bloodfist II
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

As you may recall from the most recent Mr. Majestyk's Monday B-Movie Grab-Bag, 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 go 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 training montage. Or maybe even a thinking 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 him 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 completely out, 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 guy gets easily dispatched, and then this lanky, saggy-faced tae kwon do white guy wins his fight. I love seeing tall white guys do kung fu, because their feet are so huge. It looks like they could take a guy'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.

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Mr. Majestyk’s Monday B-Movie Grab-Bag No. 4
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

When does a B-movie review become a cry for help? When it's seven B-movies at once! Somebody stop me before I blog again!

The movie starts out with some shots of the Outback looking more like Mars. The atmosphere reminds me of the parts in Alien on the planet where they find the crashed spaceship. Right away, you can't take your eyes off the movie because everything looks so eerie and beautiful. Then we see some old dude investigate a strange noise outside his house. In the space of about 10 seconds, a 15-foot razorback boar with tusks the size of my forearms knocks him over, crashes through the wall of his house, snatches up his two-year-old grandson, and runs off into the night, leaving the house burning in the background. That's how badass this pig is. It won't just steal your two-year-old grandson right out of his bed. It'll burn your fucking house down, too. It's a hell of a start to a horror movie, because it lets you know that nothing is sacred.

So Grandpa gets tried for murder (like that famous baby-eating dingo case that Meryl Streep made a movie about) but he gets off for lack of evidence. Then he turns into Quint from Jaws, hunting razorbacks for revenge. "There's something about blasting the shit out of a razorback that just makes my day," he tells a crusading American reporter who's in town to expose the inhumane conditions at the local pet food processing plant.

Here's where the movie proves that every Australian film will turn into Mad Max eventually. The lady reporter is asking a lot of questions, sticking her nose where it don't belong, so these two cackling kangaroo hunters in an armored Road Warrior truck try to rape her. Luckily, the razorback scares them off, but not so luckily, he eats her. And her unborn child. This pig is hardcore.

So then her husband comes to town and teams up with Grandpa and a foxy blonde to kill the beast. It all plays out more or less like you'd expect, except for this trippy sequence in the middle of the movie where the husband is stranded out in the bush and he starts hallucinating huge lightning-bolt fissures in the ground and swarms of red flares streaking across the sky. The big finale takes place at the pet food plant, which is a great readymade climax location, what with its collapsible metal walkways and conveyor belts and giant whirring blades. It's the first time you really get a look at the pig, and even though it's clearly animatronic and it always moves like it's on rails, I still prefer it to CGI. By the way, between this and Babe, what is it with Ozzies and pneumatic pigs, anyway? This is one country that's not afraid of exploiting its worst stereotypes for the sake of international commerce. Good job, Australia.

Then the kills start. They're mostly offscreen at first, happening so fast that nobody even knows what happens. It's very understated, with an emphasis on suspense, not spectacle. It gets into some cheesy Hollywood bullshit at the end, but with enough quirky touches to make it worthwhile. However, despite the bloody UN-FUCKING-RATED! logo on the DVD box, this is not a gory movie. There's only one torso and no severed limbs, but the croc himself is fucking enormous and really well done. I thought he was 90% CGI, but then in the special features I saw that they made a couple of full-size animatronic crocs that looked fucking amazing. That's the problem with CGI: Once you know it's there, you see it everywhere. It taints your perception so you don't believe anything you see.

Oh, and one more thing Rogue has in common with Razorback: The heroes both use the exact same hold-a-big-pointy-stick-straight-out-and-let-the-beast-impale-itself-on-it maneuver. But there's a ridiculous but strangely logical twist in Rogue that makes it different. It's way over the top, but the more you think about it, it really is the only way this dude was going to be able to kill this 7.5 meter crocodile with the tools at his disposal.

Anyway, I recommend this one. It's way better than Primeval, that other killer croc movie that tried to pretend it was a serial killer movie/allegory for African politics. Rogue isn't embarrassed about what it is, and it doesn't pretend that its crocodile is a symbol for anything. It's just an angry animal with big teeth, and that's nothing to be ashamed of.

Next up I made the jump from Australia to Italy for The New Barbarians. Or did I? This is one of a swillion Road Warrior ripoffs the Italians made in the eighties, so even though it's got marinara running through its veins, its DNA is pure Down Under. This one starts out with a shot of the model city behind David Letterman's desk getting hit with a flare. Or something. I think it's supposed to be the apocalypse. Then we flash-forward an indeterminate amount of time and meet a ragtag band of motorhomers who get attacked by some evil dudes who call themselves Templars who wear white motocross bondage Spaceball uniforms and drive around in modified dune buggies with whirring decapitator blades coming off the sides and cannons sticking out the front. They also shoot little Star Wars laser pistols that make rinky-dink pew! pew! sounds but blow people's chests wide open in slo-mo. These major assholes (That was a Spaceballs joke) are part of a death cult that hates human life so much that they want to eradicate the last remnants of it on planet earth. Buncha pricks, in my opinion.

Then we meet our hero, a real boring dufus named Scorpion who drives around in a black muscle car with a silver skull on the hood and a big plastic bubble on the roof for no good reason. In fact, a whole bunch of vehicles in this movie have plastic bubbles on the roof for no good reason. Must be a post-apocalypse thing. So Scorpion is supposed to be some kind of badass, because the Spaceballs are always trying to get him to join them. He'd rather hang out with Fred "The Hammer" Williamson, though. He plays this loner with a bow and arrow who dresses like a cross between Wilt the Stilt in Conan the Destroyer and a Solid Gold dancer. The Hammer is always saving Scorpion's ass by laying back in the cut and shooting explosive arrows into the Spaceballs' necks and making their heads pop off like bottle caps. Please bear in mind that this is a couple years before Rambo II brought the explosive arrow to the mainstream.

So Scorpion and The Hammer get mixed up with this band of do-gooders. The Hammer isn't in town five minutes before he's balling this New Age broad. Scorpion is getting some action, too, but it's not really the kind he wants. He gets captured by the Spaceballs, who initiate him into their death cult by fucking him up the ass. Seriously.

This brings up some interesting issues about this film's attitude toward homosexuals. Is it trying to say that since gay dudes don't like to fuck women and make babies, they hate life and want to see it destroyed? Or is it the opposite? Are they saying that these particular dudes are gay because they hate life and want to see it destroyed, and thus the thought of shooting their seed anywhere near the fertile soil of a woman's uterus would be abhorrent to them? Personally, I don't think most of these dudes are really gay, despite their outfits. (How do they keep them so white out in the sandy desert, anyway?) I think they're just into killing and pillaging, and so they go along with the whole gay thing because that's the way their crazy leader wants it. I bet most of them secretly miss pussy, but they're afraid the leader will light them on fire if they bring it up. Also, Italians are outrageously homophobic, so the thought of getting cornholed must have been terrifying to them. Personally, I didn't think the scene was all that shocking. I've seen roughly 27,000 women raped onscreen, so it's about time a man got in on that action. I think this could be the next big thing. I want to see a movie where Brandon Fraser gets butt-banged by a mummy.

Anyway, then The Hammer rescues Scorpion again and browbeats him until he gets his manhood back. Then they have a big shootout with the Spaceballs at the end where Scorpion utilizes more bubble-based technology by wearing a plexiglass suit of armor that makes him look like a see-through He-Man. Then he uses the drill on the front of his car to bugger the death cult leader's dune buggy. The drill goes right through the driver's seat and bores out his colon, giving him a taste of his own medicine, I guess. Classy.

Anyway, this movie is ridiculous and amazing. In the sixties and seventies, the Italians were known for their innovative photography, but in the eighties, they got lazy and pioneered a technique that was either stylishly incompetent or incompetently stylish, I can't tell. Either way, if you only see one movie this year where the hero gets his pooper pumped by a gay Spaceball, make it this one.

Then I moved from Italy to Thailand for Bangkok Dangerous, which has been remade with Nicolas Cage in the lead for no particular reason. (Can somebody please tell me how this lanky weirdo became Charles Frickin' Bronson? I'm the audience for this shit, and I'm not the one going to see his movies. Are you? Is it your fault? Do I need to kick your ass to make this decade-long assault on our precious badass arts stop?) The original BD feels less like an Ong Bak-style Thai stuntfest than a stylish Hong Kong action-thriller version of an existential French hitman movie. It's about this young dude with hipster hair who was rendered deaf and mute when he was hit in one (1) ear with a rock as a kid. I don't get it either, but it also seems to take his moral compass away, because he grows up to be a hitman who thinks nothing of murdering people in broad daylight in front of their kids. This is one of those movies where every single second is fancy-pants, with lots of colored lights and elliptical editing and herky-jerky slow-mo and flashbacks that look like 8mm home movies. The plot is nothing special (He starts dating this girl who works at the drugstore, learns that killing is wrong, then needs to get revenge for his partner who got killed getting revenge for his girlfriend who got raped and later killed by the people getting revenge on the dude who got revenge on the guy who raped her, which makes the deaf dude need to get double revenge) but nothing ever really plays out in a generic way. It's a mostly somber flick with a few cool setpieces that defy genre expectations but still deliver the badass action. I don't really know why they're remaking it, though, since the whole point seems to be to show off the crazy style the Pang Brothers can pull off with very little money. Since Nic Cage seems to be able to get $100 million for whatever fucking piece of shit he wants, it's just gonna be another quirky action movie where the hitman is meant to represent alienation from society, just like every other hitman movie that has come out since The Professional. And the trailer makes it seem like he can talk, which kinda ruins the whole thing for me. I'd definitely watch a movie where Nic Cage has to shut the fuck up for a change.

Bangkok Dangerous was pretty good, but it was a bit too artsy for my tastes, so I brought it back to basics with the next flick, Bloodfist, starring kickboxing champion Don "The Dragon" Wilson. As far as the action hero hierarchy goes, Don is somewhere south of Dolph Lundgren and north of Jeff Speakman. I'd put him about on-par with Cynthia Rothrock and Michael Dudikoff. Bloodfist (and the roughly 108 sequels that have come out since 1989) is Roger Corman's answer to Bloodsport. He actually took sole producer credit on this thing, which was rare in those days. It tells the story of a guy who has to get revenge for his dead brother by entering a no-holds-barred kickboxing competition in Manila. (Actually, I guess it sounds more like Kickboxer, but with much less inspiring montage music.) Along the way, he meets a hilariously busty blonde who likes to dance on rooftops in her leotard, a comic-relief American played by the ugly overactor who Mel jumped off the roof with in Lethal Weapon, and a sensitive martial arts master who likes to paint pictures in the park when he's not teaching people to kick ass. The best part of Bloodfist are the opponents, most of whom are played by actual martial arts champions, including Billy Blanks, Mr. Tae-Bo himself. Even more impressive is the fact that he was the guy who blew his brains out on the football field at the beginning of The Last Boy Scout. Bloodfist is as generic as they come, but that's fine by me. I've seen this movie a hundred times before, and God willing, I'll see it a hundred times more. Personally, I think the Golden Age of the cheesy low-budget action movie was 1986 – 1992, right before Speed came out and made action movies something safe to bring a date to. Then Keanu struck again and put the last nail in the coffin of the Chuck Norris-style "I can't really act but I kick real good" martial arts star by proving in The Matrix that any asshole can look good doing kung-fu if you pay him enough. Bloodfist is a textbook example of a dead art form, and that's why it needs our support. If awesome individuals with incredible taste such as ourselves don't strive to preserve our badass heritage, Bloodfist and other movies with compound titles containing the word "blood" or "death" (or both. I would totally watch a movie called Deathblood) will be buried beneath the sands of time. Ask not what Don "The Dragon" Wilson can do for you, etc.

Then there's The Dead Pit, the directorial debut of the guy who made The Lawnmower Man. It's about this psychiatrist who's running experiments on the inmates of an insane asylum by cutting their skulls open and sticking electrodes in their brains. When he's done with them, he soaks them in formaldehyde and tosses them in the titular corpse crater. Then he gets shot in the domepiece by another doctor, who bricks up the dead pit and forgets about it for 20 years. Then this bosomy amnesiac checks into the asylum and starts having dreams where she walks around in her huge late-eighties panties and a cutoff tanktop that stops about an inch and a half underneath her knockers. In one of them, she gets her shirt blasted off by a firehose, followed by her face. Then, while she repeats the line "I know this sounds crazy, but…" to everyone who'll listen, the evil doctor comes back to life with red glowy eyes and starts wandering the halls, giving icepick lobotomies and making bad puns. Along the way, the chick makes friends with this amiable Brit who likes to blow stuff up. His pyrotechnic skills come in handy at the end when he needs to knock down a tower full of holy water to destroy all the zombies that have crawled out of the dead pit, and his English accent comes in handy when he needs to say the line "They've got brains in their hands." Then there's a really obvious plot twist, some melting, etc. Nothing special here, but it gets the job done. Plus, it has the awesome tagline "When the dead start walking, you'd better start running," which is pretty good advice in my opinion.

And last up we have a little oddity from the end of the drive-in era, Beyond Evil, a horror movie starring the B-movie dream team of John Saxon and Lynda Day George. I don't have to tell you about John Saxon, who appeared in such classics as A Nightmare on Elm Street 1 & 3, Enter the Dragon, Suspiria, and Black Christmas. He's one of those B-movie stars who was relegated to That Guy status in his old age. It happens. Lynda Day George, however, is the wife of Christopher George. Together, they appeared in the vintage chainsaw flick Pieces and Day of the Animals (See B-Movie of the Day No. 65). Her and Saxon play this couple who move into this castle on some island somewhere that's haunted by the ghost of a 100-year-old witch who possesses Lynda and uses telekinesis to throw dudes out windows and rip cars apart while they're still driving. All that shit is just alright, but the interesting part is the beginning. See, Saxon is business partners with his wife's ex-husband, who pretends to be a good dude but is always passive-aggressively reminding Saxon that he got her first. It's an odd little touch that I thought added a lot to the movie, maybe even giving it a whiff of subtext, but then the plot took over and cars started exploding and it was just a straight-ahead possession movie. The weird thing is, I don't know if it's just because I kept falling asleep or if some reels were out of order, but it seems like Saxon's character is sort of insane. The movie makes him out to be the voice of reason, but his wife sleepwalks once and right away he starts panicking and punching out male nurses (He was trained by Bruce Lee, remember) and going to faith healers who rip tumors out of old ladies with their bare hands. I mean, you and I know that his wife was in fact possessed by a witch who can make green lights appear out of nowhere, but he doesn't. Seems like he's jumping the gun a bit. Anyway, Beyond Evil is an okay movie that is totally not worth buying on bootleg DVD-R like I did. But they can't all be winners like Shredder Orpheus (See B-Movie of the Day No. 61).

5:41 PM - 5 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

B-Movie of the Day No. 69: Lost Boys: The Tribe
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

You fuckers owe me for this one. I know you all heard about this movie on that TV show with the two Coreys (Who Wants To Pay Me For The Last Scraps Of My Dignity?, I believe it's called) and you were morbidly curious about it. I understand. Who wouldn't want to rubberneck at the bloated corpse of a 21-years-in-the-making direct-to-DVD sequel to one of the greatest cheesy horror comedies of the eighties, the heyday of the cheesy horror comedy? But you sonsabitches knew that you wouldn't actually have to watch it, because you figured, "Hey, that handsome devil Mr. Majestyk will probably review it. That fuckin' guy will watch anything."

1. I resent that. 2. Why, thank you. I didn't think you'd noticed my devilish good looks. 3. The joke's on you, jack, because Lost Boys 2: Lost Boysier isn't actually all that terrible. I mean, it's not what anyone with functioning eyes or ears might mistake for a good movie, but this is straight-to-video we're talking about here. It's like the Special Olympics. You get points just for trying.

What the deal is, this is exactly like the original Lost Boys, only extreme. Instead of just being nihilist punks who think being undead gives them the right to dress in whatever ridiculous New-Wave-hair-metal-goth-thrift-store-Aquanet-funboy fabric sculpture they want, these new vampires are surfers who dress like generic frat douchebags. Someone on the Onion message board called them "brosferatu," and I feel comfortable stealing that. I'm not 100% certain that they wore shell necklaces, but I think it was implied. Maybe they forgot to CGI them in in post.

The one exception is the leader, Shane, who's sort of like Fabio, Jr. He's got long, wispy hair, wet, sensitive eyes, and overinflated lips the color of coral. He's played by Kiefer Sutherland's half-brother, Whatshisdick Sutherland, and he's roughly 1/64th as awesome as Kiefer was in the original. He's kind of a ponce, but he's got just enough of that weird sleepy-eyed Sutherland magic to not be a complete and total travesty. Luckily, he's not trying to be badass or anything. Kiefer got all the badass in that family. He's going for more of a Patrick Swayze thing here, like he's supposed to be all sensitive and sexy, but he'll still tear out your throat out if he has to. He almost pulls it off, but mostly he just looks like he needs an acoustic guitar and a "Meat Is Murder" pin.

Shit, I just realized that this movie isn't just a sequel to The Lost Boys; it's also a sequel to Point Break. Hear me out: The plot involves this dude who has to infiltrate this pack of surfer vampires because his sister is in the thrall of the head vamp. So he pretends to be one of them while kind of becoming friends with the philosophy-spouting, golden-haired messiah dude. But then he kinda does become one of them, because he drinks the blood and vamps out for the final battle. He does not let the bad guy surf off into the sunset at the end, though. Instead, he chops off his head and makes him catch on CGI fire. (Spoiler)

So what happens is this brother and sister move to what I assume is Santa Carla, although I don't know if they ever say the name. Their parents died or something and now the bro is real overprotective of the sis, to the point where he's banging some surfer groupie in the shower at a party and has to stop halfway through to go check on her.  The fucked up part is that Lil Sis had already drank the vamp juice by that point, so he might as well as just stuck around and finished himself off. The damage was done. It's not like not getting his nut was helping anybody out.

Shit, I forgot the opening scene. It stars Tom Sa-fuckin'-vini as some shirtless dude who finds the vamps surfing on his private beach in the middle of the night. Then there's a little twist that isn't gonna fool anybody, and they eat his gizzard out and tear his head off and punt it into the ocean. It's not a very good fake head, but hey, head's head, am I right, guys? Ain't nobody gonna turn down head, even lackluster head like this.

The problem is, the camerework is all smooth and anonymous while the mock-Jamaican brosferatu is calling Tom a bloodclot pussyhole, but as soon as the violence starts, it's like they hand the camera off to Michael J. Fox or something. Everything starts shaking all over the place, which must have caused the editor to have a seizure, because he starts chopping out frames in the middle of the action, Gladiator-style. What the fuck? This is what we used to call a "money shot," dude. We need all the frames we can get. I really don't get why directors insist on doing this shit. Are we supposed to be impressed? We've all been complaining about blurry, unintelligible action for the better part of a decade now, and these wannabe auteurs still act like they're D.W. Griffith inventing the close-up. Note to recent film school graduates: In order for something to be "edgy," it needs to be right the fuck out there on the very edge of what's possible. If everybody's been doing it for years and we're all sick of it, it's more like "middle-y."

Anyway, good job on your cameo, Tom. Too bad you couldn't have stuck around and teamed up with Corey Feldman, who returns as Edgar Frog, the only remaining Frog Brother. I think Tom would have made a great Uncle Neville Frog, aging vampire hunter/bootlegger/ladies man.

But seriously, Feldman is without a doubt the best thing about this movie. Remember how in the first one he made his voice deeper so he could sound older? Well, he's in his mid-thirties now and he's still doing that shit. (It's still better than Christian Bale's Batman voice, though. Somebody fetch that man a bat-lozenge.) He lives in a decrepit trailer when he's not out staking suck-monkeys, and it's kind of sad that something unspecified happened to his brother in between movies. But he's still dedicated to the cause, so he's upped his arsenal to include a grenade launcher that shoots holy water balloons that make vamps' heads pop like, well, like water balloons. This is the awesomest thing in the movie, bar none. Honestly, they should have eighty-sixed the fucking creepy bro-and-sis Flowers in the Attic duo and focused on Edgar Frog's ongoing battle with the undead. I mean, the guy playing the brother completely sucks with a sub-Paul Walker dull-eyed anti-intensity that is difficult to watch, and the sister, while not a bad actress, is so damned young and cute that I feel really, really fucking old and saggy when she takes her top off.

Anyway, the movie isn't nearly as terrible as I'd been led to believe. Yeah, the CGI is laughable. Yeah, the neu-metal covers of the original's soundtrack are nauseating. And yeah, they cast the wrong Sutherland. But there was enough wacky shit going on to keep me entertained. There's one unique twist about how the brosferatu like stabbing and gutting each other for fun, since they heal right up afterward. It's like the vampire version of the classic cup-check. Plus, there's a pretty decent motorcycle/skateboard/cop car chase that sort of reminded me of Rad. And like I said, Feldman is badass in a Bruce Campbell kind of way. He may seem like a joke now, but remember, this is the dude who killed Jason. Never underestimate the Feldog.

So I hesitantly recommend Lost Boys: Stupid Generic Subtitle for those of you whose standards have been as rotted away by years of abuse as mine have. I might even say it's better than Road House 2, as far as outrageously belated straight-to-video sequels go. But seriously, when Top Gun 2: Supersonic Boogaloo comes out next year, that's all on you guys. It's time for you to take one for the team.

But wait, what about Corey Haim? I hear he bawled like a little baby bitch on national TV when he found out his services were not required for this flick, so Feldman broke out the machete and made the producers bring the Haimster in for a day of shooting. His scene pops up in the middle of the credits. Feldman is sitting on a picnic table on the beach when Haim comes out of the darkness, looking so much like post-weight-gain David Boreanez I thought they were attempting some kind of Buffy crossover. Then they both mumble some vague bullshit about some beef that went down between them, and then Haim vamps out and attacks Feldman. But just when you're like, "Oh shit! The Battle of the Coreys!" the fucking movie ends. But that's not the worst of it. There's an alternate ending on the DVD that's way better, and I have no idea why they didn't use it. In this one, Haim shows up at Feldman's trailer in the middle of the day to tell him that his brother Allan Frog, now a master vampire, is on his way back to town to settle the score. Then they show Allan driving in a fucking muscle car, looking like Gene Simmons and cackling like a maniac while groping his fishnetted vamp girlfriend. I don't know about you, but that's the fucking movie I want to see. I never thought I'd say this, but bring on Lost Boys 3: The Return of Allan Frog. Not only is it a great idea, but it would also be the only sequel ever based on a deleted scene. Now that would be edgy.

3:51 PM - 19 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

B-Movie of the Day No. 68: Get Crazy
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

In my neighborhood—Fort Greene, Brooklyn, home of brownstones, bodegas, and baby strollers—they have a flea market every weekend in the summer. I like to stroll through on Sunday mornings, still stinky from sleep, to buy some homemade Mexican breakfast from the food tents or maybe a bootleg funk compilation from the guy selling incense. But my favorite booth sells used CDs (I found a promo copy of bodybuilder/heavy metal god John Mikl Thor's Thor Against the World for five bucks), DVD-R's of out-of-print movies, and random duped CD compilations (I got one called Ultra Chicks Vol. 5 that's full of French bubblegum pop from the sixties. I'm weird like that.) It's run by one of those hyperactive older gentlemen who never really grew up. On weekends, he projects real 35mm film prints of strange old movies at a playground in my old neighborhood (Greenpoint, which is like Sesame Street, only with Polish people instead of Muppets). He still rocks a vintage rock T-shirt, usually Television or New York Dolls or something of that vintage, and despite his upbeat demeanor, he carries an air of melancholy. He seems like a man who's watched the world leave him behind as it forgot about all of the music and movies he loved when he was young and vital. But he's a fighter, so he shows up every weekend with a small assortment of lovingly hand-selected bootlegs to spread the word. I bought Chained Heat from him, as well as the cheapest copy of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! in existence. He's one of those older guys who's just so psyched that a young dude is at all interested or knowledgeable in anything made before 1998. You should have seen his eyes light up when he realized that I knew who Henry Silva was. For just a moment, he believed that maybe the glories of his youth wouldn't be buried under the sands of time, that there are a few whippersnappers out there who can tell the difference between classic and old. And I looked at him and I wondered: Is this my future? Someday, when my roguish good looks have abandoned me, will I be out there in the park, preaching the gospel of Kickboxer and Luther the Geek to a crowd of skinny hipsters who can't even remember a time when movies weren't all 3-D choose-your-own-adventures that get beamed directly into your cerebral cortex? Maybe. If that's what it takes to keep the B-movie alive in the 21^st century and beyond, then so be it. I will be a prophet of the absurd, unappreciated and malnourished, but crackling with wisdom for those brave enough to absorb it.

Anyway, this dude really recommended today's movie to me, and it's a great one. He called it "the best rock movie of all time," and I think he may be right. It's directed by Allan Arkush, a graduate of the Roger Corman Academy of the Drive-In Arts, and it's a pseudo-sequel of sorts to Arkush's earlier cult classic Rock & Roll High School, the movie that airlifted the Ramones from the dank cellars of Queens to the sun-kissed streets of California, where they looked like leather-clad bog monsters compared to all the tanned teenyboppers.

Get Crazy might be even better. It's a screwy madcap comedy set at a Filmore-esque theater on New Year's Eve, 1982. It begins, as every movie did back then, with a Star Wars parody. A model spaceship with a hair dryer hot-glued to its underbelly flies overhead with a tinfoil-wrapped astronaut astride it, Dr. Strangelove-style. It crashes into a giant blinking 1983 sign, and the lights come up, introducing us to the wacky crew of the Saturn Theater. Daniel Stern is the harried stage manager who has to wrangle the night's concert into shape, but he's kind of distracted because he just met the girl of his dreams and every time he looks at her he imagines that he's Tarzan and she's Jane, so they have these getting-to-know you conversations while he walks around with a live chimp in his arms. It's that kind of movie.

Meanwhile, the villain (Ed Begley, Jr.—remember him?) and his two sycophantic sidekicks Mark and Marv (former teen heartthrobs Bobby Sherman and Fabian) are trying to buy the theater so they can turn it into a soulless stadium where the kids can't afford tickets and no one can see the stage. "Fuck you and fuck rock & roll!" he declares, fucking fighting words if I've ever fucking heard them.

Luckily, the rockolytes of the Saturn have an ace in the hole in the form of their drug dealer, Electric Larry, a glowy-eyed cryptkeeper heavy metal high plains drifter from outer space who appears in a puff of smoke every time anybody needs any pharmaceutical enhancement, whether they know it or not. I don't want to lapse into hyperbole here, so I will merely say that Electric Larry is only the coolest goddamn thing I have ever seen in my entire fucking life and leave it at that.

So then the bands start arriving, and they rule, too. The opening act, a Muddy Waters parody called King Blues, is underwhelming, but he does provide a much-needed history lesson by singing a boogie-woogie song called "The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll." From that point on, every succeeding act does their own cover of "Hoochie Coochie Man," bringing it back to where it all began and proving that no matter what style you play, it's all American music, baby, straight from the gut.

The next band is called Nada, and they're a sort of New Wave Oingo Boingo-y chick band with a million members and a lead singer in a cheerleader/marching band uniform who likes to do cartwheels around the stage while the audience pogos up and down like lottery balls. Then they bring out punk icon Lee Ving on vocals. He's playing a dude named Piggy who's pretty much the Tazmanian Devil of rock who has to be chained up before the performance so he doesn't headbutt everybody to death. With him encouraging the people in the balcony to perform 20-foot triple-lindy stagedives, they blast through a supersonic punk version of "Hoochie Coochie Man" that flat-out rocks. "Who says a whiteboy can't sing the blues?"  says King Blues.

The next act is the best. It's a Mick Jagger spoof called Reggie Wanker played by none other than Malcolm Mac-Fucking-Dowell, who is so awesome I can't even describe it. Most actors simply don't have the raw animal charisma to play a believable rock star, but he does. He doesn't have a great voice, but who gives fuck? This is rock and roll. You want perfect pitch, go listen to folk, hippie. He belts out a Kiss-like "God of Thunder"-y anthem called "Hot Shot" with lyrics along the lines of "I'm a mystical sage of a nuclear age in seduction / I can take any heart, I've mastered the art of corruption!" It's phenomenal, a truly transcendental rock saga. Then, while his Keith Moon-like drummer (played by Doors skinsman John Densmore) pounds out a 20-minute solo on a kit the size of a cargo van, Wanker goes backstage to have an orgy with a literal roomful of naked girls packed from floor to ceiling in a cube-shaped mass of sweaty limbs. Unfortunately, when he extricates himself, he discovers that his wife is banging the house nerd (Dan Frishman of Head of the Class fame), so he goes back onstage and turns "Hot Shot" into a heartbreaking lighters-in-the-air dirge. Then he sips some Electric Larry-spiked water and goes into the bathroom to get a pep talk from his penis, who becomes his new manager.

Fuck, this movie rules.

Anyway, there's all kinds of other shit going on backstage, like a glowing disco bomb and an uptight fire inspector, played by Robert Picardo, one of fellow Corman alumni Joe Dante's stock company. (He was the first werewolf in The Howling.) Other great cameos include Clint Howard in a one-line role, Eating Raul's Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel doing their usual thing, and, most interestingly, Dick Miller and Jackie Joseph, who played Mr. and Mrs. Futterman in Dante's Gremlins—which didn't come out until the following year. I have no idea how this strange cinematic intermingling came about, but it's probably my favorite dual cameo of all time. I doubt anyone else gives a shit, but seeing this early version of the Futtermans made my fucking day.

In the end, the theater is saved, a giant talking joint walks around, and Lou Reed (supposedly playing a Dylan parody, though I honestly couldn't tell the difference) shows up for a solo closing number that actually kind of breaks your heart. This movie is just pure joy from front to end, a big, stupid, sublime rock & roll blowjob. Movies just aren't this fun anymore. It's a shame I had to find this one on bootleg DVD on a racketball court in Brooklyn when it should be out there in every Best Buy in the land. I guess that's why we need people like the guy who sold me Get Crazy. He's the real Electric Larry. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Currently listening : Destroyer By Kiss Release date: 1997-08-12

2:45 PM - 14 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Mr. Majestyk’s Monday B-Movie Grab-Bag No. 3
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

To quote Quiet Riot, all of my ladies deserted me this weekend, so I was forced back into the arms of my first love: Ye Olde DVDe Collectione. With all that time on my hands, I dug deep, deep, deep into the back catalogue for some extra special weirdness to fill the void. Enjoy.

First up we got 1983's Chained Heat, the last great Women In Prison flick. It's most famous for featuring Oscar-nominee Linda "Your mother sucks cock in hell!" Blair's very first nude scene, but she's actually kind of the worst thing about the movie. I don't really know why she became sort of a B-movie starlet after this, since she's a terrible actress (Her Best Supporting Actress nomination for The Exorcist was largely the result of Mercedes McCambridge's uncredited voiceover work.) and not even all that good looking. I mean, she's kind of cute in a chubby-cheeked, sorta bovine way. She's what you might call a "tomato" if you were a Depression-era mobster looking for a new moll. In any case, she's perfect for the part of the new fish who gets sent to prison for accidentally running somebody over. She never looks like she has any fucking clue what's going on around her, so she's makes an excellent exposition sponge. Really, though, what makes Chained Heat awesome is the supporting cast full of B-movie veterans. We're talking Sicilian Skeletor lookalike Henry Silva in his most sympathetic role yet as a double-crossing, drug-dealing pimp, Sybil Danning as the dyke leader of the white prisoners, Tamara "Cleopatra Jones" Dobson as her opposite number on the blackhand side (these two have an epic Amazon-on-Amazon fight with chains and knives that rivals anything in Kill Bill), and ubiquitous character actor John "Killer Klowns From Outer Space" Vernon, who steals the show as the coke-sniffing warden who likes to make homemade porno with his female charges in his office hot tub. So you can tell that this is a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred exposé of the sexual, sociological, and economic implications of America's bloated prison industry. It also has lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of tits, many of them wet and soapy. Unfortunately, Chained Heat is long out of print, but check it out on bootleg if you can find it.

P.S. I thought of referring to Linda Blair as Linda "Fuck me, Jesus! Fuck me!" Blair but thought that might have been too offensive.

Next we have Kickboxer, which I've always thought of as Bloodsport's retarded little brother. Even as a kid when I would happily watch any piece of shit as long as it had one (1) explosion in it (O, how I've matured since those days), I knew there was something wrong with Kickboxer. Maybe "retarded" is too strong. Maybe it's just got Asperger's Syndrome or something. It looks normal, but every now and again it does something completely inappropriate because it can't help itself. You feel kind of bad for it, but it's also hilarious. This was the first time I'd seen it since junior high, and let me tell you, it has aged marvelously. It tells the story of a preppy Eurotrash douchbag (Jean Claude Van Damme) whose brother is a world-famous kickboxing champion with a mullet and a porn star mustache. After Big Bro gets paralyzed in Thailand by this ponytail-wearing Muay Thai mutant, JCVD vows revenge, so he gets trained by this wacky master dude out in the boonies who likes to drop coconuts on him from great heights and stretch out his humongous thighs with an elaborate system of ropes and pullies. And you know what that means...

Oh yes. There will be montages.

And they are magnificent. This was 1989, the final days of the power ballad, but they went out in a blaze of glory with Kickboxer. Every song in the movie is about not giving up, fighting the good fight, standing strong to the end, all that happy horseshit. There are plenty of fire-related metaphors. "Light" and "night" may or may not be linked in a rhyming couplet once or twice. Most of them are sung in the second person, which I appreciate. Thanks for believing in me, Stan Bush. Another thing that's hilarious about this movie is the idea that the world-champion kickboxer could be paralyzed in the middle of a huge arena and tossed out into the street like an old couch and nobody would say anything. I mean, it's fucking Thailand, not Mos Eisley. Then there's the part where the filmmakers feel they need to amp up the villainy before the final fight, so within a five-minute span, they have the bad guys kidnap JCVD's brother, rape his girlfriend, and stab his dog. Jesus Christ, movie, don't you think you're laying it on a little thick? Let's leave the dog out of this.

About that final fight: It's fought "in the ancient style," which is to say in an underground temple with the combatants wrapping their fists in resin-coated rope covered with broken glass. A lot of people don't know that the ancient Thai people (known as the Siamese back then) used ceremonial Heineken bottles in all their ritualized combat. Thank you, Kickboxer, for shining a light on this overlooked facet of world history.

The fights are actually pretty good, some of Jean Claude's best, but they pale in comparison to the movie's centerpiece: the dance scene. The master wants to test JCVD's fighting skills, so he takes him to the local bar, gets him trashed, and tells him to dance to a cheesy electropop song so he can observe his balance. The local toughs get outraged by this leotard-wearing Belgian pumping his waxed crotch and shaking his womanly thighs in their direction, so they attack him. This is probably the funniest scene I've ever seen in my life. It goes on for like three minutes, and I was laughing my lungs out the whole time. I was actually winded when it was over. I'm pretty sure that when famous inventor Gustav Demetrius von YouTube III created his popular time-destroying website, he did so with this scene in mind, so I strongly recommend hunting it down immediately. Then download "Never Surrender" from the soundtrack. Remember: You've got the heart of a hero.

Next up is the downer of the bunch: Bloody Reunion. It's kind of a Korean variant on April Fool's Day, with all these old friends reuniting at a lakeside estate, where old grievances rear their ugly heads. Speaking of ugly heads, there may or may not be a mongoloid basement-dweller in a bunny mask running around, helping his victims wash down a mouthful of razor blades with boiling water. I say may or may not because this movie has one of those Usual Suspects endings where you find out that everything you just saw was bullshit. It worked in that movie because the big twist actually made the movie make more sense, but here, it just turns the whole movie into a big waste of time. It's even worse than High Tension. A note to the post-millennial slasher movie: Keep it simple. It's like a punk song: You could throw a glockenspiel in there, but why the hell would you want to?

And lastly, we return to the big house for a variation on the Women In Prison genre that I like call Men In Prison. It's the No. 1 independent film of 1980: Penitentiary. I wouldn't exactly call it documentary-style realism, but it seems to be a little more true-to-life than Chained Heat. For one, it automatically has a political edge because, unlike other movies that make prison seem like a multi-culti Epcot Center with shivs, Penitentiary has the guts to make 99% of the inmates black, the way it was in 1980 and the way it is now. It's not afraid to show the casual homosexuality of the long timers, which is seen as just a fact of life. It's also the only prison movie I've ever seen where the guards and wardens aren't total scumbag sadists. Nobody gets beat down by a screw, and there are no cruel or unusual methods of punishment. All this and some off-kilter, naturalistic performances from many non-actors would make Penitentiary more of a straight drama than an exploitation movie, except for the fact that I doubt many real-life prisons have administration-sanctioned underground boxing tournaments in which the victors win connubial visits and possible early parole. Somehow I don't think rewarding convicts for being the best at beating the piss out of somebody is the most effective method of rehabilitation, but what do I know. The fights are brutal and not overly choreographed, and there's a pretty great performance by this old guy named Seldom Seen who's been in jail for 35 years and is scared to get out. He has some good speeches that humanize the convicts in a way that watching them get all sweaty as they choke each other can't. But the plot doesn't kick in until way too late, so the movie sorts of meanders for a while. A good, heartfelt flick, to be sure, especially for the audience for which it was intended, but it could have been tightened up a bit. Just my two cents. Please keep that sharpened tuna can away from my neck.

Currently listening : Call to Action By Stan Bush Release date: 2007-11-06

9:00 AM - 9 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

B-Movie of the Day No. 67: Cop
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

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.

8:56 AM - 7 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

B-Movie of the Day No. 66: Roar
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Today we have the winner of the Win Your Own B-Movie of the Day Sweepstakes: Roar, a Lions Gone Wild movie made by Melanie Griffith's parents over the course of five years on their ranch in California. Congratulations to Claudia for her winning entry. I was quite moved by her earnest depiction of the effect this unique film had on her as a child, and I resent the implication that the fact that I had already agreed to watch it with her had anything at all to do with her victory. I run an honest game here.

Roar is what you might call an oddity if you were particularly fond of making gross understatements along the lines of "Oscar Wilde sure had a way with words," or "You know, George W. Bush really isn't that great of a president."(B-Movie of the Day: Your source for vague political humor since 2007.) There's never been another movie like Roar, and there never will be. The circumstances of its creation are so bizarre that they could never be duplicated. See, Melanie Griffith's parents are Tippi Hedren (who must have developed a taste for getting menaced by animals from being in The Birds) and producer Noel Marshall, who had just made a fortune with The Exorcist when he started production on this career-killer. He and Tippi got big into animal conservation, so they started rescuing big cats and bringing them to their compound in California. Before long, they had over 150 lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and jaguars running wild on their property. So, with Noel directing and Tippi and Melanie starring, they started filming Roar to show the world that man and beast can peacefully coexist. Five years and several maulings later, they had a $17,000,000 home movie on their hands.

In most When Animals Attack movies, you get about 20% animals and 80% people standing around talking about animals. In Roar, it's reversed. Pretty much this entire movie, nearly every single frame of film, is utterly bursting with wildlife. It's kind of overwhelming. Most of the action takes place at this log cabin with a huge water wheel attached to it. This house is lousy with lions. It's Lionzapoppin'. There are lions in the kitchen, lions in the rafters, lions on the roof, lions on the patio, lions in the rumpus room. You've never seen so many goddamn lions in your life. It's like Lionpalooza. I can't stress enough how surreal it is to see this otherwise normal seventies-style house filled wall to wall with big cats. Every time a door opens, a feline flood pours in, licking its chops and looking to play.

And the star of the movie, Mr. Noel Marshall himself, is a total fucking lunatic, because he's right there in the midst of the beasts at all times. You know how when people have a couple of badly disciplined dogs and they're always jumping all over you and getting dirt on your clean shirt, and their owner is just like, "Oh, don't worry about them. They're just saying hi." Imagine that, only with a hundred lions. He spends the whole movie with lions jumping on his back, swatting him in the face, knocking him down, tearing his clothes. And he just laughs it off. He can't walk three feet without at least two or three fucking enormous lions wrestling him to the ground and chewing on his head. And he's just like, "Ha ha ha, they're just playing. Ho ho, I think I might need a tourniquet. Yup, it's a spurter. Oh, you naughty lions, you got me good this time."

This movie doesn't have much of a plot, and it doesn't really need one. The spectacle of watching an entire pride of lions—not to mention some subsidiary clusters of tigers and jaguars, plus the occasional cheetah—casually trashing this house and terrorizing its occupants is almost hypnotic, especially when you realize that these people really lived like this. These lions aren't trained at all. They're just doing their lion thing. At the end of the day, they didn't get wrangled back into their cages and brought back to the zoo. They just went down to the rumpus room and ate a La-Z Boy. Because that's how these lions roll.

What plot there is consists of Noel trying to bring these two stray tigers back to the compound (which the movie pretends is located in Africa) so they don't get shot by this indeterminately accented Franco-Prussian dude with a bandage wrapped vertically around his head like he's got a toothache in an old Looney Tunes cartoon. There's a pretty awesome scene where Noel is tooling around in a jeep with the tigers in the backseat, their tongues flopping around in the breeze. The whole time that he's dicking around with these tigers, though, his entire family (played by Noel's actual family) has arrived from the States for a visit. For some reason, they aren't aware that their paterfamilias is a complete maniac, so they freak out when they discover that the house is overrun with big cats. Most of the movie consists of them running around the house like idiots while the lions chase them from room to room. But the weird part is, the lions aren't trying to eat them or anything. They're just trying to play, but since the people are so wigged out, they get the lions all overstimulated, so they trash the dump. It's hilarious. One by one, the family members all somehow manage to fall off the roof into the river (one of them on a motorcycle), where they get chased by tigers, who don't seem to have the same aversion to water as most cats. Then they try to get away in a motorboat, but they run into an elephant whose mother must have been killed by a boat or something, because he smashes the shit out of the fucking thing and chases the Marshall family back to the house to be menaced by the playful lions some more.

Meanwhile, there's this subplot going on concerning a struggle for control of the pride between the noble leader, Robby, and a vicious rogue lion named Togar. They're kind of the Professor X and Magneto of the Roariverse. One opts for peaceful coexistence with humans, the other for violent rebellion. Then that fucking poacher offs Robby, prompting Togar to get revenge by de-torsoing the asshole. Then you kind of figure that he's gonna go back to the pride and start the fucking revolution, but then Robby's son (named "Robby's Son" in the credits) fends him off and maintains control of his father's legacy. By then, Papa Marshall has finally made it back to the ranch, by which point the fam has figured out that the lions don't really want to eat them, so we're treated to a concluding montage showing the Marshall family spending some quality time with their leonine compatriots, frollicking and drinking lemonade and shit. Then the end credits encourage us to openly scorn and ridicule people who wear fur. Is that really what Robby would have wanted?

In researching this review, I discovered why the movie took so long to shoot. It's because everybody kept getting mauled. Cinematographer Jan De Bont (who would go on to shoot Die Hard and direct Speed) got mauled. Melanie Griffith got mauled in the face and needed plastic surgery. And Noel himself got mauled so bad that it took him years to recover. Then there was a flood that killed a bunch of the lions, including Robby. And there was also the fact that they had to get a whole new crew nearly every shoot day because union rules prevented the various grips and gaffers from being total fucking idiots and letting themselves be mauled by lions and tigers on a daily basis. This movie is either a shining example of man's limitless potential or his endless hubris in the face of the natural world, I can't tell.

So Roar is a real you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it kind of movie, and a very entertaining one at that, but there's one little problem: It might not actually be the one that traumatized Claudia as a child. She seems to remember the movie ending with the Marshall clan escaping from the lion-infested house in a cage on wheels, but nothing of the sort happened in Roar. So either she's remembering it wrong or there's yet another movie about killer lions out there somewhere. And if there is, as God as my witness, I will track down this movie like it was the scumbag who shot my partner in cold blood the day before his retirement. I don't care if it costs me my shield, I will bring this movie to justice. Wherever it runs, wherever it hides, I will find it and make it pay for what it did to Claudia. You hear that, movie? I'm coming for you. And I ain't lion.

9:09 AM - 25 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

B-Movie of the Day No. 65: Day of the Animals
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

While I am loathe to steal any thunder from the lovefest that is my Tourist Trap review, 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. For that, B-Movie of the Day salutes him.

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.

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.

9:08 AM - 14 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

B-Movie of the Day No. 64: Tourist Trap
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

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 20^th 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 Muh-fuckin' 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 No. 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 st