A carnival of technology

He’s arrived in the St. Nick of time!

Rated PG for action violence and brief mild language.

Starring Hulk Hogan, some kid who went on to star in Children of the Corn V, some kid who became the voice of Ducky in fifth through eleventh Land Before Time movies, and some kid who went on to star in That 70’s Show.

Viewed 2005-12-22 by susi, dshea, kat, dane and mike

Santa with Muscles is the ridiculous sort of bad movie rather than the exhausting. Sentimental Christmas movies have a hard sell to begin with. They’re expected to be either a sentimental feel good movie falling short of It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th St., or they’re expected to be a children’s comedy that falls short of Home Alone. We already have our Christmas classics; homes are filled with this nostalgia during the holidays rather than untried new films. Santa with Muscles, perhaps seeing the failure inherit in its situation, doesn’t try very hard to become the next classic. The protagonist, Hulk Hogan, is a callous, rich body builder who gets hit on the head and, through the magic of amnesia, ends up thinking that he’s Santa. The villain is an evil, rich developer who wants to demolish an orphanage for secret reasons. We later find that the secret is a cache of rare, exploding gems beneath the orphanage. There are only three orphans. Christmas appears to be set in July. The evil developer’s army of evil scientists all carry around T-squares for some reason. They look like really nice T-squares.

The movie fails through this erosion of absurdities. It doesn’t matter how good of an actor Hulk Hogan is, or whether the kids are doing their part or just reciting lines, or whether the characters are ones that we can grow to love, since everything is overshadowed by the implausibility of the story and the ridiculous evil scientists. Maybe this movie’s lesson is that science is bad. If I remember the main characters correctly, one was a fairly mundane evil doctor to the obsessive-compulsive developer, one was an evil geologist who posed some unclear threat, one was an evil chemist who carried around a tank of fart smell, and I don’t even freaking know what the woman was supposed to be. She shot lightning bolts out of her fingers. It’s as if the story was nothing more than a laundry list of archetypes and clichés. I don’t know if the filmmakers thought their audience that stupid or if it’s supposed to be a joke. Some moments felt like I was reliving the worst parts of Superman.

The final thing that left me scratching my head after this movie was its anachronisms. There were several clues that seemed to indicate an 80’s setting. The hair, the clothing, the mall as central to teenage life, the fact that exploding-gem cavern (in the catacombs under the orphanage where the orphans played) looked kind of like something out The Goonies. But the film was made in 1996. I just don’t get it.

Funny has a color all its own

Rated PG for comic violence and some mild sensuality.

Starring Robert Benigni and some people that I was probably supposed to recognize from the previous seven movies.

Viewed 2005-10-11 by dshea, mike, dcantrell, susi, and dane

The pain and sorrow of another man can evoke many emotions: compassion, sympathy, hilarity. When it’s funny, it’s slapstick, and even the French, masters of the sad-clown-flipping-a-pancake brand of inscrutable art, are able to see how this lowbrow humor can be high class (see The Straight Dope: Do the French really love Jerry Lewis?). However, slapstick is difficult to do, and, when done poorly, it’s painful to watch. One of the more concrete rules was perhaps best expressed by Krusty the Klown, “[it's] only funny when the sap’s got dignity.”

Son of the Pink Panther is the eighth movie in the Pink Panther series. The Pink Panther movies were funny because Peter Sellers had dignity as an utter failure, which is perhaps why Blake Edwards tried to piece another movie, The Trail of the Pink Panther, together from cut footage after Sellers’ death. The seventh movie, The Curse of the Pink Panther, though the plot still centers around finding a “missing” Inspector Clouseau, no longer contains Sellers (as far as I know), instead featuring a bumbling Ted Wass as the incompetent detective and Roger Moore as Peter Sellers. The Son of the Pink Panther, though perhaps not a sequel to this winner of a story in the strictest sense, is the next offering in the series. Robert Benigni takes the lead role as Sellers’ illegitimate son, but he lacks one very important feature: dignity.

It could be that Mr. Benigni is a very funny man—I’ve never seen him in anything else to compare—but in this movie, his character is worthless. He’s cast as a bumbling nobody, not even carrying the respect of being an incompetent inspector, and not revealed as Clouseau’s son until a good way through the film. Sure, he did stupid things and people got hurt in cartoonish ways, but it just wasn’t funny. It was only predictable and tedious.

The best part of this movie was the opening credits. It was difficult to find something worth watching after the animated panther and a scatting Bobby McFerrin left the screen.

If they think they can stop him, they’re dead wrong.

Rated R for violence and language

Starring Steven Seagal and Phillip Morris

Viewed 2005-09-20 by dcantrell, susi, dane, dshea, and mike

The direct-to-video action genre can be a very special place: unbound by the financial constraints of heavy marketing and the need to create a product with mass appeal, the writers and directors are left to their own devices, free to compose a product full of subtlety and creative energy that will be passed without expensive detour into the arms of appreciative fans. Direct to video is a place for art. Steven Seagal’s acting is not art.

Steven Seagal is no stranger to the world of direct-to-video potboilers—The Foreigner was the first of three that he made in 2003 alone—but he brings no big-budget versatility to the small screen. He has a single style, and we all saw that in Under Siege. To make matters worse, director Michael Oblowitz carries the delusion that he is making something cinematically beautiful. The laundry list of effects, inappropriate slow-motion scenes, fast flipping between close-up shots of tense moments, and overuse of the MidgetCam serve only to create tedium, not beauty. The highly stylized settings, though nice to watch, barely even evoke a sense of their location. Nearly every locale appears simply European, and the inconsistently applied captions only add to the confusion. Are they in Poland again? Are they back in France? I don’t know, but everyone’s still smoking, so it must be Europe.

The ubiquitous smoking was annoying, too. I normally don’t mind smoking in movies. Smoking is bad and will kill you, but Clint Eastwood would have been incomplete without his thin cigars, and Bogey rolled his own right there in the middle of The Maltese Falcon, so whatever; light ‘em if you got ‘em. But when the smoking is stretched to comical extremes in an ostensibly serious movie, then perhaps there’s a problem. How are you supposed to sneak up on someone against the backdrop of Marlboro country? How can someone with a smoker’s lung capacity take a bullet and then run a mile? Are Luckies really a first-aid item?

The violence in the film was another annoyance. Action movies are supposed to be violent, sure, but the violence isn’t always supposed to be wanton. Perhaps there’s some Tarantino-esque “violence is everywhere, man” message being made, but I don’t like Tarantino, either. The only thing worse than a bad director is a knockoff of a bad director.

This movie was exhausting. What could have been a gory ballad of unattainable goals and a documentation of the harrowing world of the courier industry too quickly—and yet so slowly—devolved into a one-dimensional revenge flick. The item being delivered by Seagal, the foreigner, was revealed, the secret relationships were bared before the characters nearly as soon as the audience, and the secondary players were eliminated, leaving only Seagal and Sir Smokesalot among the characters who matter. If you want to see Seagal, watch Under Siege again.

Nuclear Power. In the best hands, it is dangerous. In the hands of Lex Luther, it is pure evil. This is Superman’s greatest battle. And it is for all of us.

Rated PG
Rated A-II by the USCCB (link)

Starring Christopher Reeve (before the accident), Margot Kidder (before the breakdown), and Gene Hackman as an art-deco villian lost in an 80’s pop-culture world in this touching fish-out-of-water tale.

Viewed 2005-08-23 by susi, dcantrell, dane, mike, and dshea

Most bad movies seem to fall into one of two general categories: the exhausting, and the ridiculous. Superman IV is one of the later.

To me, Superman starts off at a disadvantage. Growing up, I preferred the Marvel characters to DC, since their powers were more specific. Characters like Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men all had a very specific set of powers, and adversaries and obstacles had to be overcome within the confinment of these powers. Sure, there were exceptions created as lazy plot devices, but for the most part Marvel characters were less capable of unlikely feats as DC’s Batman, whose powers extended as far as his fancy gadgets allowed, and Superman, whose powers merely had to be super. The original statement of Superman’s powers were that he could “leap 1/8th of a mile; hurdle a twenty-story building… raise tremendous weights… run faster than an express train… and that nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin!” (Action Comics #1, 1938, via superman.ws), and his powers have evolved ever since. In Superman IV, his powers apparently include super hearing, bionic vision, heat vision, x-ray vision, telekinesis, super breath, the ability to erase other people’s memories, the ability to fly through space, and the ability to prevent others flying through space sort of near him from dying. Maybe the telekinesis one could be better explained by someone more familiar with the history of Superman, but it still seems pretty lame that he can move things without touching them or using any obvious temperature altering rays from his eyes. And, finally, Superman is a bit of a jerk. Specific to this movie, Superman turns global crises into personal conflicts, exploits the relationships of his friends and coworkers, and at one point takes Lois Lane for a cross-country flight for the purpose of clearing his mind and, once she remembers that he’s Clark Kent and everything seems happy, erases her memory. Superman’s expanding powers have apparently turned him into a self-centered asshole.

So, as you can see, Superman IV doesn’t begin with the best of settings. In addition to Superman’s appearance as a lazily-written, unlikable character, the plot of the movie centers around a heavy-handed political message. After some wacky hijinks between Margot Kidder and Mariel Hemmingway at the newspaper and even more painful comic relief with Lex Luthor and the teenage stereotype at the chain-gang quarry, the goal of the movie eventually becomes to disarm the world. Obviously, the best diplomat to handle the threat of global thermonuclear war is Superman, someone who settles conflicts through super strength and mind control. After an unlikely sequence in which all the countries of the world launch their missiles into Superman’s space net, Superman unknowingly throws a box of something from Lex into the sun about halfway through the movie, creating Nuclear Man. Nuclear Man is a really dumb villian. Besides his unfocused goal of destroying everything in sight rather than simply destroying Superman and getting it over with, Nuclear Man’s weakness is shade. Fight inside, Superman! Ugh, eveyone’s an idiot.

Superman IV is a Golan-Globus sequel, and it shows. Unbelievable (even within the constraints established by super powers) action sequences are interspersed with tedious comedies—mostly based around Superman’s double identity—with no attention paid to pacing, characterization, or overall enjoyability. I can’t even remember what happened to Nuclear Man. I think the moon was involved. Maybe he got locked in a dark closet. This movie is dumb.

Future Beware: The soul is in the software

Rated R for sci-fi style violence, sequences of strong sexuality, and for language.

Starring Elais Koteas, Angelina Jolie, and Jack Palance’s mouth.

Viewed 2005-08-03 by mike, susi, dshea, dane, and dcantrell

The premise of the cyborg series is a thought that occurs to most science-fiction writers who spend more than a few minutes thinking about artificial intelligence: what would society be like if computers were just like humans? I suspect that at least one of the writers involved in the making of this movie had lofty intellectual ideas for this movie. At least I hope that the sex scene in the beginning where the robot woman explodes was meant to be more thinky than titillating.

This movie uses a lot of cliches to avoid having to spend too much time establishing the setting—there are cyborgs that have become ingrained in every facet of society, from soldiers to hookers; there is a gigantic American corporation, Pinwheel, that controls everything and is competing with a corporation in Japan that does the same thing; cyborgs are almost human but still lack a full understanding of the intricacies of human emotion—but then squanders its 99 minutes on disjoint, colorless scenes where nothing is explored besides the thin storyline. This style of this movie reminded me a lot of Universal Soldier: The Return in that each scene had no purpose other than to connect the one before it to the one following. There is never any suspense or any emotion evoked by any of the characters. There’s really nothing at all to hold the viewer’s interest. Will there be an explosion in this scene? Will someone be topless? Is it over yet?

Chief among the details that didn’t make any sense was the presentation of Jack Palance’s character. He always shows up on a television screen, and the characters talk to him through this. Televisions are presumably still one-way devices in the future, but this doesn’t seem to matter very much. Nor does it matter whether the TV is plugged in or in one piece. I guess his character is just supposed to be that badass.

One notable feature of this movie is that, since it was filmed in 1993, 18 years after the birthday in Angelina Jolie’s IMdb bio, this is the first movie where we get to see Ms. Jolie’s boobies. Fortunately, no one exploded during her sex scene. Also, due to the fangs of one of the minor characters towards the end, it could be argued that this film had both a vampire and an explosion. The thing that will most stick in my mind, however, even more than Angelina Jolie’s boobies, is Jack Palance’s battle cry while executing a one-man ambush against hopeless odds: “If you’re going to dine with the devil, make sure you bring a really long spoon!”

This movie was difficult to watch. Reading the jacket cover you think, “wow, a horror movie about a possessed laundry machine? kick ass!” But then you actually watch it and you begin to demand the world give you those 106 minutes back. OK, let’s get in to the movie.

First, a possessed laundry folding machine? Are you kidding. I’d say it’s worse than Killdozer. What moron can’t get away from a STATIONARY OBJECT? So what if it’s possessed? Family Guy had it right when they had the short scene with the Stephen King parody pitching his idea for a story involving an evil lamp monster. Then he just asks for money.

It’s set in Maine, I think. Every Stephen King movie is set in Maine, which no one can relate to because you aren’t allowed in Maine if you’re an outsider. Stranger than that is the choice of props for the movie. You can’t really place the time period because the cop drives a Jeep Cherokee SUV and has a computer, but the laundry machine and facility look like something from the 1920s. Eh?

Robert Englund stars as the owner of this machine and he does what he can with the part, which isn’t much. His character in V was better. They did manage to find a Jesus look-alike to play the pot smoking hippie that happens to practice witchcraftery. Yeah, he gets cut in half by the laundry folding machine.

Oh, the we have title point was reached when pot-smoking Jesus was reminiscing about his job on that machine. He says it’s called the Mangler. Yeah, sounds fun!

I give this movie 2/10 because it was just plain bad. There were only 3 sets. And Ted Levine’s voice. Come on.

There is a fate worse than death

Rated R for gory horror violence and language.
Rated O by the USCCB (link)

Starring Robert Englund, some other guy who looked kind of like Robert Englund, and Ted Levine playing Frankenstein’s monster on a Listerine bender playing a cop.

Viewed 2005-05-27 by dshea, dcantrell, susi, dane

Stephen King really likes demonic possession. Children of the Corn II’s antagonist was a kid possessed by a corn demon. Dreamcatcher was about people possessed by diarrhea-based aliens. In The Mangler, the antagonist is a demonically possessed industrial laundry presser and folder, joined by a demonically possessed refrigerator as a sort of miniboss. The fate worse than death is death by folding.

This movie tries to drive itself more on gore than on plot. There is some explanation provided for the Mangler’s behavior, given by the hippie character with plenty of resources on the occult and laundry equipment, but none of it matters. All of that is just filler between the three or four scenes where someone gets eaten, ironed, and neatly folded. As comic relief to break the remaining 90 minutes of tedium, Ted Levine attempts to talk without ever moving his tongue.

The Mangler, as a sort of side-plot from the inanimate antagonist, also provides a hidden documentary on anachronism. This small Maine town—Cabot Cove or whatever it’s supposed to be—seems to have been casually grazed by the hand of technology, leaving computers and new cars beside ancient-looking gas refrigerators, flash bulbs, and labor laws. I believe that the moral of this is that Maine sucks and will kill you.

I had seen Universal Soldier before seeing this movie. I couldn’t remember if I had or not, but then I saw the ones in this movie and thought, “oh, right, that movie…yeah, I remember the first one.”

That didn’t make this one bearable. Van Damme isn’t even a bad actor. He’s not even an actor, really. It’d be like me trying to act. Also, he has that accent which makes him sound like a pussy.

My main question about this movie is how can Van Damme be in this one if he died in the first one? Didn’t the first one establish that the universal soldiers were dead soldiers that had been brought back to life with neon green medical gel and all they could do is kill (see, in the medical gel world, neon blue would mean they’d turn in to zombies…see Resident Evil for confirmation).

This movie clearly establishes Van Damme as not-a-unisol, but they make references to that being his old job. What? How can being dead be a former job?

I was very disappointed that the giant tank of acid wasn’t used for anything. They kept walking by it. Over and over. Very disappointing.

Also, like Shea, I question why we keep making movie plots around self-aware computers. James Cameron constructed a well-formed proof showing that self-aware computers are bad (Terminator/1984, Terminator 2/1991). Come up with a better idea.

I give this movie 3/10 because we didn’t take any breaks watching it and it was watchable, but nothing happened that you didn’t already expect.

I have to admit that I was little worried about not understanding the story because I couldn’t remember which of the seven Children of the Corn films I had and had not seen. Still, I went in to the movie optimistic that I could figure out what was going on.

I should note that our copy of the film was a Hong Kong VHS rip since the 2nd installment of this series is not available on DVD in the United States. Besides being very grainy and having just stereo sound, we were able to pick out the most important details. During our bad movie watching sessions, I try to make note of the special effects and I also try to assemble some sort of plot in my head. This usually involves indentifying the protagonist(s).

Throughout the whole movie I never could figure out who the protagonist was supposed to be. I think it was the corn since that was the least logical. If you watch this film, it feels like 3 or 4 short films that are thrown together and they happen to connect under a central theme (corn). Think about movies like Airport and Earthquake where you have a random ensemble cast and they are all joined by this central event that’s happening. Except in this movie there is no ensemble and the central event is rotting corn. Not that great.

Some of the highlights of the film including lowering a jacked up house on to an old lady, Wizard of Oz style. I also claim predicting that the combine would be responsible for killing the main evil child. It was. And I predicted it!

I didn’t understand the native American guy. Like he had some sort of connection with the corn that involved a tree and a ghost, but that’s about all I remember.

One of the actors was Terrence Knox (easily identified by his disappearing/re-appearing hot pink shirt). I first saw him in the short-lived TV drama called Tour of Duty. This was not his best work. This movie, I mean. Tour of Duty was meant to compete with China Beach and I think it was better because it had less Ricki Lake.

On the special effects front we didn’t have anything special except for some lame fake blood and that thermal vision camera effect they used in Predator. The corn was capable of this, I think?

What else can I say about the corn? Not much. We did take four breaks while watching this movie. No one objected either and it was difficult to sit back down and finish it. I give this movie 2/10 only because I did finish watching it and the combine did kill someone. It loses the remaining 8 stars because it didn’t make any sense at all.

This movie sucked.