Prepare Yourself For The Journey Ahead…
For the last two years, three brave men have walked the thin line between life and death, sanity and insanity, Black Cherry French Vanilla Pepsi Jazz and Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper. They have soared with the angels, and huddled below the earth with demons. They have fought alongside giant robots with hydraulic fists, and driven go-karts in an attempt to learn the ins and outs of back alley illegal street racing. They have done what you could not, what you would not, do. They are on a mission, one that will push them to the very limits of their physical, intellectual and emotional endurance.
They watch shitty movies, and now, for the first time, their stories will be recounted here.
Prepare yourself diligently for what is to come, and beware, for here be dragons.
Donkey: This week we’ll examine the works of Marvel and their stable of thoroughly inbred heroes. Arguably the more ridiculous of the two competitors, their comics always seemed to concentrate more on squeezing ridiculously muscular men into tighter and tighter pajamas than it ever did on maintaining even the slightest grip on reality.
Donkey: These movies suck. Now that we know the basics, let’s cut to the chase and put these two titans of bullshit in their head-to-head match up of destiny. But first let me just go on record right now to say that no matter what happens, the real winner won’t be rational comprehension.
Donkey: Like so many of the stories that your grandfather spouts out to support his endless case that you’re a soft-lipped pussy just because you’ve never been face down in thick jungle brush, ducking below an intense firefight between Charlie and Uncle Sam while grunting your way through the intense firefight of syphilis in your trousers resulting from standing fourth in line for a three dollar hooker, this week’s tale begins in the magical place we call ‘Nam.
Donkey: As this is our second dance with the master of swagger, brawn, and wooden acting known as Dolph Lundgren, we find ourselves clenching both our tasty beverages and our bowels just a little bit harder than normal, preparing for the spectacle that is about to unfold. To quote Forest Gump, having a man of Dolph’s caliber attached to your film is “like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get…until he pops out of that box of chocolates and smashes your fucking face through your colon”.
Donkey: As so many of the finest tales are ought to do, our film this week begins with a lone figure making his way into a city, strolling casually down a set of train tracks. We don’t know who his is or where he came from, but the music playing during the scene coupled with the pack over his shoulders tells us that he’s down on his luck, which therefore naturally means that it’s a safe bet that this unassuming drifter is going to be some manner of champion who eventually saves us all. So who is he? Richard Kimball? Bill Bixby? The Littlest Hobo? Nay: Rowdy Roddy Piper.
Donkey: Unlike most of our adventures into the land of pain and despair captured on film, this entry is polite enough to prepare us for the ordeal ahead by beginning with an ominous warning. Just as the Warner Brothers logo fades away from the screen, the disembodied voice of Sylvester Stallone mutters, “Okay, let’s do it” while in no way sounding like he has a mouthful of goat semen. This might as well have been followed by the sound of rubber gloves snapping onto his hands while he asks me to touch my ankles, because at this point it seems pretty clear to me that I’m going to feel like a finger has been up my ass by the time this movie is done.
Donkey: Like a creepy uncle with a mustache and a seemingly infinite supply of stained jogging pants, the holiday season is once again waiting just around the corner, ready to pounce on the innocent and unsuspecting.
Donkey: So here we are, finding ourselves once again treading into familiar territory by wrapping ourselves in the warm, ass-kicking comfort blanket of an 80’s martial arts extravaganza. And we’re not dicking around either; we’ve set our sights on the film that quite literally promises to be the best goddamn movie in existence. Not only the best, but the Best Of The Best, such as it were.
Donkey: Our escapades this week begin with a surprise bonus, rewarded to us as a result of watching Hard Ticket To Hawaii: SPECIAL EDITION! I know what you’re thinking: “Most ‘special editions’ consists of little more than charging me 10 extra dollars for the feature film and an image gallery of the director eating a sandwich, so what’s so special about this one?” Well it’s pretty much like that, but in this case the sandwich tastes an awful lot like herpes.
Donkey: The movie begins with an introduction to the story’s dim-witted face of terror, that which is supposed to stand for all things despicable and cruel. So kind of like the Rush Limbaugh of the film, if you will. And filling the role of sheer evil in this case is…the retarded guy from LA Law? I guess Jimmy Smits was too busy rolling his R’s in an attempt to remind people that he has more ethnicity than a tub of vanilla yogurt to take the part.
Donkey: Our cinematic adventure this week begins with the motivation behind JCVD’s ball showcasing splits of glory by detailing the epic downfall of his parents. We’re introduced to them at the same time as the movie reveals the object of pure desire that they are betrayed and killed for. But in an epic journey featuring a lethal dose of sweetness such as this, what could possibly stand as a grand enough prize for those involved?
Donkey: After completing decade-long research that will finally produce a hypothesis that explains to the world exactly why Steve Guttenberg was ever paid to appear in films, Future Scientists from the year 20XX will focus all the power of their brains and cybervag-equipped robot lovers to coming up with the exact formula for creating the bullet ejaculating money shot that we’ve come to know as the action hero movie.
Donkey: The best part of this DVD by far is that it plays the trailers for Evil Dead and Evil Dead II before getting to the title menu, and quite lengthy trailers at that. It’s almost as if the movie itself was trying to give you one last warning that you could be watching something much more entertaining than what’s about to come. Trust me…it’s a warning you should heed.
Donkey: The movie begins in the year 2017 where we bare witness to the immaculate monument to shrunken testicles, Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing the title role of Ben Richards, and detailing his Greg Louganis-like dive from grace.
Donkey: Not bothering to fuck around with pomp, circumstance, or even proper editing, Troll II starts immediately with its first scene and corresponding dialogue literally no more than a second after the roar of the MGM logo, almost tricking you into thinking that you’ve missed a chunk of the movie already. Fear not, as it wouldn’t matter even if you did.
Donkey: This week’s festival of pain climbs aboard a rocket sled of stunted imagination and barrels us forward into the future, stopping first a distant three years from now. As stock footage of fires and random destruction flashes across the screen, a narrator describes a revolution started by “the disillusioned masses” which causes liberty to vanish.
Donkey: To lube us all up for the clusterfuck that we’re about to grope our way through, the original music from Super Mario Bros chimes in while showing the production company logos, which is probably as close to the game as you’re going to get. But you can almost hear them begging: Remember that game? It was a good game, right? A true classic? Try to remember that for the next hour and a half while we take a piping hot piss in your mouth.
Donkey: Our truly epic saga begins with the original film, which has the noticeably distinct quality of a made-for-television movie. But that seems only appropriate as through the work of brilliant casting, it stars a made-for-television-infomercial actor, Michael Dudikoff, playing the title role of an American Ninja named Joe. He is a man of few words, but once he does open his mouth to reveal a remarkably high voice, we realize it’s probably for the best.
Donkey: As we soon discovered, nothing can prepare you for Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. Nothing except perhaps for the clips of the movie that they show while the title scrolls across the screen. With this kind of completely unnecessary recap coming before the movie has even started, I can only hope that Clive takes this bizarre choice even further and has a two minute recap for even twenty minutes of the film.
Donkey: Our movie this week begins with a narrator who delivers a ten second introductory prologue so superficial that it might as well have been, “It’s He-man, bitches! Enjoy!” while forcing us to stare at an oil painting of Castle Grayskull that they try to pass off as photo realistic. Then they roll some opening credits roll across a background that looks like a rainbow puked on the film before the movie quite literally explodes down to the surface of Eternia.
Donkey: Our feature starts as all tales worth telling happen to, in Gainesville, Georgia circa 1863. A small band of Confederate troops wanders down a lonely road in the pouring rain, having taken some time away from subjugating black people and planning weddings between cousins to transport a cache of the much famed Confederate gold.
Donkey: If nothing else – and trust me, there will be absolutely nothing else – you can applaud the producers of Evil Behind You for knowing what an audience wants. This is why the adventure that they’ve laid out before us this week begins with what all the kids are clamoring for…an educational video!
Donkey: As the curtains part to reveal the cinematic crotch fungus that is Over The Top, we begin by watching the two main characters go about their lives in the few remaining moments before their paths collide for all eternity. Sly enters the movie riding a giant metal steed on a saddle made of power ballads, setting his steeled gaze on the road ahead through the aviators of a champion. In other words, shitty music is playing while he drives his shitty rig.
Donkey: We begin our cosmic adventure through space and time with the live action version of Fist Of The North Star, starring…Gary Daniels? Oh, that’s right: THE Gary Daniels. For those of you who don’t know who that is, fear not, you still won’t know when this movie is over.
Donkey: Known perhaps as much for their lack of subtlety as their startling lack of quality to anyone whom has seen as many of their films as we have, The Asylum’s Street Racer surprises no one as it begins with not just a street race, but what is probably the worst ever caught on film. It goes without saying that the movie got its budget from the director saving the allowance that his parents had given him for the last three months, and this scene reinforces that right from the start.
Milobar: Tonight we’ve got Total Recall…SPECIAL EDITION!
Donkey: Damn straight. The regular edition is for hemophiliacs and communists. So sit tight folks, and get all your supplies from your local “supplements” store ready. You’re going to need to exercise every muscle in your colon to sit through this one.
Milobar: We’ve got one of the greatest of the great tonight: Cool As Ice.
Donkey: This is one of the all-time champions and yet another strong contender for the greatest shitty movie we’ve ever seen.
Milobar: It really is. It’s tough to get much better than this. It’s one of the best done shitty movies, in my opinion, because they took this so seriously.
Donkey: The Apocalypse begins with what, by any measure, has to be considered one of the greatest prologues ever to blow its stinging load of awesomeness into human eyes. It opens with two couples and what appears to be a roadie from Poison’s 1993 “We Still Suck” tour sitting around a campfire in the deep backcountry of California, sharing good wholesome laughs about how four of them are going to get laid tonight while a certain someone will be stuck singing Every Rose Has Its Thorns while jerking off into a tube sock.
Milobar: We have a special guest tonight: The man, the legend, the genital infection…Blombo. And he’s just in time for some Robot Jox.
Blombo: You know, I remember everyone seeing this movie when it first came out. I think it came straight to video, but sadly, everyone rented this damn movie and I don’t know why.
Milobar: Captain America. One of the shittiest super heroes ever concocted in one of the shittiest movies ever made.
Donkey: That’s a combination sent straight from the gods, my man.
Milobar: Is this another movie with Wilfred Brimley in it?
Donkey: The movie begins with the final mission of JCVD’s assuredly illustrious career as a government agent. A career that has undoubtedly been filled with thrills, spills, and unnecessary groin stretching. He’s been sent to recapture a truckload of plutonium that was stolen from a military base outside of Croatia before it can be sold to the Iraqis. There we have it folks. After all the whining done by the liberal elite and their ridiculous need for “facts”, this movie answers where Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were. You’re welcome, Bush administration.
Milobar: Universal Soldiers, or as I like to call it, Incoherent Shoutfest V: The Revenge of the Unintelligible Sentence.
Donkey: This has got to be my favorite Asylum film so far when it comes to the title alone. Normally when they’re choosing a title for these things, they will at least take the original title and change a word. Not this time. Instead they said, “Fuck it, just throw an ‘S’ on the end and we’re good.”
Milobar: Sweet, sweet Ice Pirates.
Donkey: Of all the Hollywood movies that we’ve watched for Shitty Movie Night, this one is probably the most obscure.
Milobar: It’s definitely one of the most ridiculous.
Milobar: Our third Asylum experience, Alien Vs Hunter.
Donkey: Featuring William Katt, the dude from The Greatest American Hero, playing Lee, the main character.
Milobar: I don’t even know who, or what, the fuck that is. Nor do I care.
Donkey: Behold, Gymkata…one of the crown jewels of the Shitty Movie Night experience. To anyone out there reading this, I can’t recommend this movie highly enough. But if I’m successfully in lobbying for the passage of Bill C-434, then my word won’t matter as you’ll soon be mandated to watch it in teased hair and legwarmers for the true retro experience.
Milobar: I honestly believe this is the greatest shitty movie of all time. For all the readers who think Troll 2 should claim that title: fuck you, we’ve seen that movie and it’s got nothing on Gymkata.
Donkey: The movie starts with Kurt Thomas doing an uneven parallel bar routine in the dark. The movie tries to make this otherwise tedious event reassuringly dramatic with the sound of Kurt’s heart pounding as he takes to the pole, so to speak. And something tells me that Kurt is exceptionally comfortable with taking pole.
Donkey: Snakes On A Motherfucking Train! This is a Mallacchi Brothers film, which therefore means that someone thought this film required a group effort. I can’t believe that two people are actually responsible for this.
Milobar: But only one vagina.
Donkey: Indeed. And their mother should be ashamed. Wait, hold on…I just looked this movie up on IMDB and it says that the movie was actually directed by “Peter Mervis as the Mallacchi Brothers”. What?! How the fuck can I take your movie seriously if you’re so embarrassed by it that you not only won’t use your own name, but need to further secure your anonymity by using two fake ones instead?
Milobar: Get ready for it, here comes Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Donkey: Or as I like to call it, Bad Idea II: The Teabagging Of Irrelevance.
Milobar: I personally like to call it Pppppllllgggghhhh: My Balls!
Donkey: The movie begins with what we will later discover is Galactus ravaging a planet, consuming it much in the same way that actually reading a Fantastic Four comic would erode your imagination and basic motor functions.
Milobar: It’s pretty gay that they turned Galactus into a giant interstellar cloud, but I suppose it’s still less gay than if they kept him the same as he was in the comics. A giant space dude in a purple outfit. Fuck you, Stan Lee.
Milobar: Transmorphers! The excitement in the air is so thick it’s like having a mouth full of cottage cheese.
Donkey: The movie begins with a title screen of the Transmorphers logo that is probably the best special effect in the entire film. No shit. It’s all downhill from here.
Milobar: I love the movie’s opening shot. It’s the same opening shot The Asylum uses in all their ‘It Came From Outer Space’ films. It’s just random shit flying through space. Sometimes they’re rocks, sometimes they’re space ships. This time they’re giant fucking Rubik’s cubes. (Okay, they look more like dodecahedrons, but seriously, how many people on the Interwebs even know how to pronounce that word?)
Milobar: We’ve got some Arena tonight. We’re watching it on VHS.
Donkey: Hell yes. The only way to watch one of the most obscure movies that nobody has ever heard of is on VHS. That tells you a lot about what we’re about to witness: you can’t get this movie on DVD. We were actually forced to rent the tape.
Milobar: I looked up Arena on IMDB and their “MOVIEMeter” says that Arena is up forty three percent in popularity this week.
Donkey: I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that’s because you just looked it up.
Donkey: Like a lot of shitty movies, this one starts out on the complete wrong foot with the title screen alone. I love how the title isn’t DOA or Dead Or Alive…it’s both.
Milobar: It’s literally the same thing twice. I’m glad they put what the letters mean underneath the letters, so that I know that DOA means Dead Or Alive.
Donkey: Hell yeah. Otherwise you might think it stands for Divergent Oscillating Affluence, so it’s a perfectly reasonable precaution.
Milobar: Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (and ends)… I can’t wait to get this shit started (and over with).
Donkey: The tragic tale of a man parting ways with his mustache. Although you’ve pointed out one of my favorite aspects of this entire film right off the top; the movie has “The Adventure Begins” right in the title, so you know that they intended this to be the first in an ongoing series of films, like a bold new American James Bond franchise. And yet, somehow fate had something different in mind. With Fred Ward in the lead, that’s shocking.
Donkey: To be entirely honest, I couldn’t really tell you what this movie was about. I know it involved April O’Neil accidentally getting sent back in time to feudal Japan after coming into contact with an ancient Japanese scepter, and the Ninja Turtles traveling back in time to rescue her. But frankly, I have only brief, scattered memories of this movie that are a challenge to try to form into anything remotely coherent.
MORTAL KOMBAT!!!!!!!!*
* Our apologies for that, but as demonstrated quite literally in the first 2 seconds of this film, it’s actually a legal obligation to begin anything related to Mortal Kombat with that trademarked scream, whether it’s a movie, article, or simply bringing it up in casual conversation.
Donkey: Street Fighter: The Movie is loosely based on the smash hit videogame Street Fighter II. And we do stress the term “loosely”, as it wouldn’t really be surprising to discover that the movie was equally based on a hooker-fueled meth binge, or a bout of explosive diarrhea brought on by licking the floor of a Cambodian slaughterhouse. The first warning sign of the quality that we were about to endure was the fact that a movie based on a fighting tournament does not feature a tournament anywhere in the plot. It’s not even close. They might as well have taken the characters from the game and had them reenact The Terminator, Short Circuit 2, or Terms of Endearment. It would have been just as goddamn relevant.
