"Dough?!" No, actually. There's only one substance that those two asshats would wade knee-deep into: wang sauce.

Donkey: Whether it’s East Coast and West Coast rappers dueling to reach new heights of misogyny, the Yankees and the Red Sox slugging it out to achieve new heights of complete and utter boredom, or the Insane Clown Posse struggling with their intellectual magnetic overlords in a losing battle of fucktarded asshattery, it’s always fun to sit back and watch a true rivalry play itself out. For its part the geek world is no exception, with colossal battles fueled by fanboy nerdgasms at every turn. Who can forget the glorious “Nintendo VS Sega” days of old, the forerunner to its the less than thrilling modern replacements in the form of “Microsoft VS Bootable Hardware”, “Nintendo VS The Dignity Of Any Gamer Who Isn’t In Grade School Or A Housewife”, and “Sony VS Innovation Of Any Kind”? But ask any geek and they’ll tell you that one of the most iconic clashes to ever curry their socially-inept/Dorito-stained favor comes in the form of comic book juggernaut Marvel Comic and their hated nemesis, DC. Their merciless war has been fought on countless fronts over the years as comic books have permeated into more and more mediums, with the most recent blitzkrieg being the comic book cartoon movie. Cheaper and faster to produce than their Hollywood blockbuster cousins, these films have been sprouting up faster than open sores at a Poison reunion tour, and being undeniable geeks, we’ve been there, armed only with our Valtrex prescriptions and a smile.

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. As a matter of fact, if anyone had ever stopped to look at things from a far enough gaze, they’d notice that for anyone not fortunate enough to have survived some kind of radioactive trauma with the gift of super powers instead of the usual cancer the world according to Marvel would be a horrible, horrible place. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

The Invincible Iron Man

When Iron Man says it burns when he pees, he's not fucking around.

Our first tentative step into the tear, urine, and for some reason strawberry milk-soaked abyss awaiting us came in the form of the classically uninteresting character known as Iron Man and I’ll be honest; I met the challenge with all the enthusiasm and excitement that’s usually palpable in a dentist’s waiting room. I never knew much of anything about the character as a child, as for reasons that I’ll never be able to truly explain a triple bypass patient flying around in an iron lung with a few ray guns strapped to it somehow never really seemed to capture my attention. I know: call me crazy. But I tried to keep the welling cynicism at bay for a few hours, drawing hope from the fact that – at the very least – modern versions of the character had been cleaned up enough that he didn’t look like he was wearing an old-timey scuba suit that would require four stout men to work the bellows. And besides, we had already sat through a movie featuring a silver dong on a surf board that rockets through the galaxy playing Paul Revere to a planet-consuming vaginal belch, so at this point I was up for pretty much anything.

For those of you who have read the comics or seen the vastly superior and shockingly outstanding Robert Downey Jr movie, you won’t find anything new here. Like its blockbuster counterpart, this movie once again tells the character’s origin story, recounting the events that lead Tony Stark, an arrogant billionaire weapons manufacturer, to suffer near-fatal heart damage after being taken hostage. To simultaneously break free of his captors and stay alive, Tony uses his own technology supplied to him to construct a rudimentary life-supporting/dong-punching suit of armor and fulfills his destiny in becoming the hero known as Iron Man. However, apart from this very basic outline, there is actually very little else that’s similar between this tale and the recent Hollywood picture. First off, instead of selling arms to the US Army in the Middle East, Stark is instead raising an ancient city in China that belonged to the dynasty of the Mandarin, whose leader and namesake I’m told is the classic arch-nemesis of the series. And instead of being captured by a group of power hungry terrorists who are after his weapons technology, he is instead captured by a group of warrior monks known as the Jade Dragons who have sworn to keep the Mandarin Dynasty buried and demand only that he undo his actions after he successfully raises the city. But most importantly, instead of battling against an unscrupulous mentor and business partner who doesn’t share Tony’s new found social conscience, Iron Man instead is forced to battle the Four Elementals – ancient Chinese spirits who spring to life and inhabit stone statues to wreak havoc on the world while facilitating the resurrection of their Mandarin master by gathering his four lost rings of power.

That leads us to my favorite aspect of this movie by far. Tony Stark is like the Marvel version of Bruce Wayne – a rich playboy with no super powers to speak of unless you consider extraordinary intelligence or a mint-sized trust fund to be super – with the difference being that Iron Man is the most genuinely charming and hilarious fully-armored syphilis dispenser the world has ever known, whereas Batman is more of a bad-ass that prefers brooding in the dark and, for reasons I’ll never understand, occasionally hanging out with boys so young that even your creepy mustache-sporting uncle would drop his Tootsie Rolls and chloroform just long enough to utter, “what the fuck?”. With that in mind, if your story is based on the fairly grounded reality of a nerd in a suit with an over-sized bank roll, why in Wilfred Brimley’s sweet face pubes would you match him up against supernatural beings? That seems completely goddamn backwards to me. I don’t even understand how a battle in that universe is supposed to go down. “The Serpent Ghost of Blackbeard’s Ballsack? Shit…it’s a good thing I opted for the AK47 over the Stinger missiles or his crippling Mind-Control Rays from the Phantom Zone might have made me look like a total asshole!” Seriously, this concept is nothing short of shit-headed, but if you need further proof, just try to flip that scenario around and watch someone fight real threats with only the power of abstract concepts. Picture some bag of dicks in a cape trying to stop a nuclear weapon with a combination of phat beats, the love of a good woman, and a plucky can-do spirit and you’ll see what I mean.

The Verdict:

Donkey: Despite featuring a character that I had long ago dismissed as less captivating than having a yeast infection so advanced that you could start leasing out your crotch as a Wonderbread factory, this movie is still probably one of the best of these cartoon adventures available out there. But keep in mind that’s pretty much like saying that taking a baseball bat to the knees is better than having your scrotum in a bench vice; either way you end up sorry that you ever took Gary Busey up on that dinner invitation. I give it three handsome mustaches out of five Chinese plagues.

Dr Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme

Seriously, how shitty is your movie if you're advertising that the DVD also contains FMV cut-scenes from video games on your cover? This couldn't be any fucking dumber if this was a TV show proclaiming "now with commercials!"

Have you ever drank so much that you’ve blacked out for 3 days, only to wake up in a dumpster with a chapped asshole, a mouthful of Flintstones chewable vitamins for kids, and Communications degree from the University of Phoenix in your hands? Me neither, but I imagine it would incur a level of confusion very similar to how I feel whenever I try to remember anything about this movie. I know that it’s the origin story of some dude whom, judging by the cover of this movie has an entirely unhealthy obsession for leveling up his World Of Warcraft avatar’s “Disco Dancing” attribute, but that’s about all I’ve got. Past that, I’m afraid that I’d have an easier time recounting my days of potty training than saying anything else about this movie. And really, who can remember all the way to last week?

The Verdict:

Donkey: Wait, what are we talking about? Just let me take a look at the movie’s cover to remind myself. Right…got it: Liberace impersonators at pride parades. Don’t even worry about the haters. I say, “You go, girlfriend!” I give this movie one rainbow flag out of five yawning, black oblivions.

Ultimate Avengers

Of all the random poses, my favorite is the Hulk clearly taking a dump.

Moving away from one of the most forgettable characters in comic book history, we instead change gears and charge head first into one of the most awesomely ill-conceived concepts in comic history: the super group. While this premise can work on rare occasions when it features characters whose powers are lame enough that left to their own devices they’d serve as little more than the opening act to a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new Burger King in Fresno, the fundamental problem with this idea is that when you put a bunch of genuine super heroes together, you usually create a force that’s nigh impossible to stop. That might sound great if you’re choosing your team in an attempt to make your quarter last as long as humanly possible while playing Capcom Vs Marvel in an arcade, but it doesn’t quite work in a narrative. The point being that when you assemble the Harlem Globetrotters, you’re going to have to throw something a hell of a lot more threatening than the Washington Generals at them or we all know how that game is going to end before it ever starts. Our heroes might as well be solving the movie’s conflict as a side note on their way to the dry cleaners at that point. But while comic book writers have the propensity to be exceptionally lazy, they’re not stupid, so being well aware of this problem their natural reaction to compensate and salvage some shred of a plot is almost always to create a conflict that’s so goddamn ridiculously immense that it’s firmly based in the ludicrous, causing the whole damn story to jump the shark. And just as you may have guessed, this flick is no exception.

The film begins by focusing on of what has already been documented as one of my most hated characters of all time, Captain America, as we return to World War II and once again witness his rise to closeted pedophile prominence. The astute reader will remember that we actually did a full review of the live-action turd based on this douche knuckle, but you’ll be relieved to hear that the origin story here is not a carbon copy of that rectal secretion. Sure it’s an equally retarded version instead, but it’s different nonetheless. Rather than being strapped to a missile by the Red Skull and fired at the White House only to drastically alter that missile’s course with a few half-assed heel kicks that send him crashing into the icy plains of Alaska, Captain Dick Stick instead discovers that the Nazis are actually aliens just before voluntarily jumping onto the missile that they fire at the US, fighting off an alien attacker (yes, while on the side of a missile slicing through the stratosphere), and blowing it up with a grenade as he plummets into the ocean below where he ends up entombed in an iceberg. I know that’s a lot to take in, so let’s just stop and look at the two finer points of this idiocy. First, this movie is suggesting that the Nazis were in fact lead by aliens. I’ll take a minute to let that sink in. Aliens. No shit. Feel like your skull just limped away from being the involuntary guest of honor at a five-alarm cluster fuck? Well it doesn’t stop there. The second major problem with this entire scenario is his Ziploc Sandwich Bag preservation. Freezing on solid ground in Alaska is dumb enough, but there’s no conceivable way to be encased in a goddamn iceberg as you’re sinking into the depths of the ocean without having long since drowned. That shit is going to take more than 15 seconds, so unless we’re talking about Aquaman, this motherfucker should be nothing more than a long-deceased monument to failure when they find him decades later.

But of course when people do end up finding him, Captain Ball Sweat most certainly isn’t dead. Instead he’s pulled from his icy tomb by Nick Fury and revived for the express purpose of extracting the Super Serum that gave him his questionable and unremarkable powers, all with the intent to manufacture more incredibly expensive soldiers that will follow in his footsteps, undoubtedly meaning that they’ll take themselves out of action for generations to come during their first battle. Great plan! But this doesn’t exactly work out since the scientist forced to be in charge of the process is a captive Dr David Banner, aka The Hulk, who instead secretly uses the serum to try to cure his own spaz-based affliction. So with Plan A in the shitter and the re-emergence of the same Nazi alien threat from WWII, Nick Fury instead decides to recruit Captain Shit Stain and a few fellow superheroes to create the ultimate boy-band…The Avengers! Who else is on this team of glory and scrotal rug burn, you might ask? Only the best of the best, baby: Thor (insufferable son of the god Odin), Iron Man (whose likability quotient soars compared to the rest of these turds), Giant-Man (aptly named as he’s a giant douche), and Wasp (the world’s most powerful co-dependant).

Once these collective talents, ranging from the fantastic to the utterly obscure, finally join forces, they prove themselves to be truly unstoppable. And by unstoppable, I mean entirely stoppable. It turns out that they manage to defeat the alien threat only to immediately get their collective asses handed to them by an escaped and quite enraged Hulk, who is only subdued when his girlfriend, Betty Ross, talks him out of his fiery blood-lust with what I have to assume is gentle promises of Cleveland Steamers later that night. Yes, an entire team of supposed elite heroes got slapped down by one dude. So…yeah…go team!

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie is about a group composed mostly of clown shoes, but as I alluded to before, they still happen to be powerful enough clown shoes that they should be able to topple any foe. Just look at Thor alone. He’s a fucking god. I mean, really think about that. Unlike some other assholes we know, he’s not just a shield-wielding ball of cock vomit managing to make the already hollow institution of patriotism even more sickening, but an actual god. So if he has all the powers of a god, exactly what force could stand even the remotest chance of defeating him, other than possibly logic and critical thinking? Nazi aliens and a green steroid abuser, apparently. I give this sweet ball of failure three and a half missile jockeys out of five Nazi aliens. Seriously, by the end of it, I felt like I had just steam-cleaned the floor of a porn theater with my tongue, which made it all the more baffling as to why I ever agreed to watch…

Ultimate Avengers 2

I haven't been this disappointed to hear of a group's return since "Backstreet Back (Alright)".

Yep, they’re back again and this time they have assembled to face the terrible, unimaginable menace of…the exact same thing from the first fucking movie. Seriously? We’re not even trying anymore, are we boys?

Our tale begins when my beloved Captain Cock Snot and his pitching life-partner, Nick Fury, are approached by the Black Panther, the king of a fictional colony of Africans who recently ascended to the throne after the brutal murder of his father. He asks for their exceptionally incompetent help, explaining that the same Nazi aliens from the first movie are now back and attempting to subjugate his people so they can mine a fictional metal called vibranium, the vital component in all their alien weapons. Itching for any fight that will keep their minds from contemplating how incredibly useless they are, the Avengers assemble and agree to take the case for a mere 25 cents plus expenses. Time to Encyclopedia Brown this bitch! After traveling to that faraway land of Africa our team combines the help of a device designed by the now captive Dr. Banner and the power of blatant mediocrity to eventually save the day and defeat the alien horde once again. The story is so unremarkable that I can honestly say that the only moment where it manages to even slightly redeem itself is when Giant-Man has the decency to die. I could describe the killing blow, but I’d prefer to remember it my own way: as a simple matter of him realizing that no matter how large he could morph his body, it would never be truly equal to what a massive douche he is. But regardless of how you choose to savor the moment, good fucking riddance.

The Verdict:

Donkey: The longer this series goes on, the more it just proves that it never should have existed in the first place. This slapped together garbage feels like a Holodeck episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which means that I’ll give it three Picards dressed like Robin Hood out of five sexually functional robots pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. I honestly didn’t know how much worse it can get…

Next Avengers: Heroes Of Tomorrow

This might just be the most blatant example of children somehow managing to make an already shitty concept that much worse since the Mini Pops sang "We Built This City On Rock And Roll".

This is how much worse it can get:

The third installment in this junk-touching series rockets us all the way forward into the year 20XX where we meet up not with hardened heroes of might and majestic pants that we have come to expect, but with – as you may have guessed from the ridiculous DVD cover pictured – a pack of goddamn brats that have been spat from their loins. Serving as appropriately shallow remnants of the quite mediocre legacy of the Avengers, these kids are collectively orphaned after their parents meet their doom at the hands of the villain known as Ultron. But as annoying as they prove to be within seconds of gracing Blombo’s television, I have to hand it to these kids; at the very least they have the decency to showcase how quickly comics are to piss in the face of the slightest chance for original thought. How, you ask? They’re all carbon copies of their parents, making this less a reinvention of the series and more like the third worst episode of The Muppet Babies ever conceived, ranking only slightly higher than the one where Gonzo reveals that he hates Jews and the episode where Skeeter deals with her recent abortion through the healing power of song. As such, Kid Captain Cum Dumpster, Little Girl Thor, Mini Giant-Douche-Man, Wee Pimpin’ Black Panther, and Hawkeye Junior are all pretty much exactly what you would expect if you pictured the byproducts of their parents having sex with an exceptionally unattractive couch cushion. But regardless, after being safely hidden from the wrath of Ultron by the still swinging bachelor (read: genital crab farm) Iron Man, the children begin the story by promptly negating his efforts when their own idiocy accidentally gives away their location and provokes an immediate attack by their parents’ killer.

After escaping from their impending doom only to be left out in the real world completely alone for the first time, the bed-wetters are forced to learn valuable life lessons about sharing, co-operation, and the health risks of going ass to mouth in order to work together and stop a set of animatronic replicas of their parents that have been reprogrammed and sent after them by the diabolical Ultron. Let me just say for the record that seeing as how well thought out comics seem to be in general, I’m betting that this supposed “reprogramming” consisted of flipping an internal switch from “protect” to “kill”. But even after conquering their pack of murderous Disneyland Hall Of Presidents-style rivals, the kids are still left facing the ultimate test in the villainous Ultron, whom I might remind you, was able to destroy their much older and only slightly less diaper-wearing parents. Their solution? They lure him out to a desert plain where he is forced to face an aging and solitude-seeking Bruce “The Hulk” Banner, setting the stage for a battle that ultimately results in the destruction of this dastardly villain. So once again all of those keeping track will notice that the punch line to yet another goddamn Avengers movie is any time the Hulk is let off his leash for even a few minutes, he is quite capable of defeating whatever threat you manage to dream up thus making every other supposed “hero” in the story utterly irrelevant.

Beyond my natural distaste for almost any movie that predominantly features the inane antics of children, this cinematic tumor rots away at the ball sack of entertainment by representing another staple of comic book storytelling, and like so many of the others, it’s one that couldn’t be much more offensive if it was being delivered at the Apollo Theater as a tribute to the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by George W. Bush in black face. I’m talking about the concept of alternate realities, wherein the story being told is so outlandish that it might or might not be based in a different reality from that which the characters traditionally occupy, meaning that it’s “what could happen” rather than “what does happen”. That’s about as fucking stupid as reading a book where you get half way through only to stumble across “Chapter 7: None of the Shit in the First Six Chapters Actually Happened…Suck On That, Bitches”. But even if you’re going to tell a story based on a concept this tiresome, the least that you can do is make it entertaining. Might I suggest starting with one where Thor and Captain Turd Ripple end up being sexually molested by the Norse god of condoms covered in broken glass?

The Verdict:

Donkey: Super hero babies are one thing, but stuffing them into the same film as super hero robots? That kind of unbridled awesome makes any viewing of this film grounds for applying an Alabama rape kit, which if I’m remembering correctly is just a stern backhand and more rape. I give it two Muppet Babies out of five life long reminders that you should have had a vasectomy. Next up…

Planet Hulk

Correct answer: he's actually going to drive the lane and slam dunk their world.

It’s about goddamn time. Having watched the Hulk repeatedly save the Avengers from fates of suffering and despair so excruciating that they could only be replicated by actually watching any one of their own movies, it seemed long overdue that we turn our attention to a film based solely on his character alone. It’s kind of like waiting for the most talented member of a shitty to band to realize how much better he is than the turd farm playing around him and strike out on a solo career. But sadly, rather than being treated to a Thriller in this case, Marvel decided that it would once again kick us in the collective man-seed dispensers and dish up a steaming pile of Chinese Democracy instead.

The film opens with the Hulk reaping exactly what he deserves for saving his comrades as he rockets through the cosmos, imprisoned inside a space shuttle by his own teammates so that he might be banished to a barren but inhabitable planet where he can live out the rest of his life without harming another living creature. This concept is so astounding that I am compelled to say it one more time. The Avengers, in their collective wisdom, decided that the most fitting gift that they could give the one person who had saved all their asses on several occasions was a one way trip into the depths of space to end up in a place where he would quite literally do nothing else but die alone. Fuck, that’s way worse than just sneaking up behind him one day and killing him. And these are supposed to be heroes, kids. But of course, their plan is all for naught as the Hulk, whose condition has apparently been lowered from “thermonuclear rage” to “cold shower cranky” just eliminating the need to revert back to the form of Bruce Banner and instead stay in his massive green form permanently, manages to use his massive strength to break free of his bonds. But apparently the monster didn’t retain any of Dr Banner’s intelligence, as he decides that the best thing to do while hurtling through the cold vacuum of space is to smash the shit out of the inside of the shuttle he’s occupying. But amazingly enough, instead resulting in the Hulk being sucked into oblivion, his tantrum only manages to throw the craft off course, causing it to crash on a planet that he was never intended to visit.

Rather than falling victim to the truly staggering odds that his new destination is one that cannot sustain any form of human life, the Hulk instead emerges from his crash site only to find himself being taken prisoner by a race of local beings called the Sakaar who force him to take part in gladiator battles for their amusement. After finding solace in the company of a small group of fellow combatants, our ornery green hero ends up reluctantly joining a resistance movement which he eventually leads against the Sakaar. And after defeating their leader, the Red King, which simultaneously fulfills a convenient prophecy, the Hulk ends the film by taking his place as the defacto ruler of the entire planet.

Entertainment value aside – or more specifically, the very considerable lack of – the single greatest point of shittiness with this movie is the main character himself. As much as I love the Hulk from growing up and watching the Fugitive-esque 70s television show, that seems to be the only context in which I can find the character even remotely entertaining, with the exception of the recent Edward Norton movie that had a very similar theme. The essential problem is that the comic book vision of the Hulk is simply too powerful, to the point of which he simply becomes goddamn boring. After all, the basic concept behind the Hulk in all of these movies is that the angrier he gets, the more powerful he becomes with no limit to that power to be seen. So no matter what you do to try to kill him, he just gets more pissed off and comes back at you even harder, like a porn star that you’re trying to fight off with an elaborate series of blow jobs. The result is that watching this movie is a lot like watching a 3 round title fight between a newborn kitten and a particularly surly anvil that just found out his wife is cheating on him: the fight is never in any doubt, so why the hell even bother watching it?

The Verdict:

Donkey: It’s kind of like watching Gladiator in space, if Gladiator happened to have absolutely nothing remarkable or entertaining about it save the fact that it features the only character in the known universe that has as bad a temper as Russell Crowe. I give this one two and a half raging cases of small cox out of five unspeakably terrible betrayals.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Comics have taught me that consistency is not only unnecessary, but downright cool refreshing taste of Dr Pepper. Sure the tight controls, compelling story, and unspeakably cool atmosphere of Bioshock kept me from putting down the controller until the end of the game. That’s a given. But in the end, I just don’t think that the New Orleans Saints have what it takes to win another Super Bowl. At least not if Rudy and Theo Huxtable have anything to say about it. And I totally mean that shit.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: The second half of our exploration into geek hell as we cross the aisle and join DC Comics for part 2 of…THE COMIC BOOK MOVIE PARADE OF PAIN.

Back To The Main Page.

Sorry monkey...we all know that when The Asylum is involved, common sense has to die a terrible, poorly produced death.

Donkey: We all love music on some level, whether it serves as an artist prism through which we relate to the world around us or merely as a basic bass line that we use to jackhammer our crotches into the hips of a woman too busy supplementing her lack of self esteem with an metric ton of alcohol to dismiss our inane attempts at seduction. But when it comes to the various categories of music lovers, the group that I always found the most interesting was those who seemed all too happy to dismiss their favorite groups as “sell-outs” the moment someone actually cut them a cheque big enough that they as a collective could afford a whole pack of Big League Chew. When I first got into music as a teenager, I wondered if these people actually believed that musicians are only respectable artists when they’re sleeping on a friend’s couch after putting in a solid day of toiling in obscurity, but eventually I concluded that even the most pompous amongst us has to truly know in their heart of hearts (medically referred to as your chest balls) that no one could possibly be stupid enough to turn down the chance to get paid to do something they love. Besides, if you only consider something to be truly artistic when it’s yowled from the underwhelming mouth of those with an income-earning disability, then I’d gladly refer you to a few homeless people I’ve met in my time who would be more than happy to give you a mind-blowing sidewalk rendition of Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy in exchange for a patient ear that will stick around afterward to listen to the long, painful story of how they lost their left shoe. When I really stopped to think about it, the answer became quite clear. These people didn’t care so much about money or the illusion of artistic integrity so much as they were simply angry that everyone else had suddenly jumped on a bandwagon that they had found first. To this day I have never once experienced that kind of jealous pouting for myself. But I will admit that recently in the arena of movies, I came close.

After having spent so much time devoted to a website dedicated to protecting the world from the horrors awaiting them should they stumble across certain movies that few had ever heard of – particularly the works of one particular production company – you can imagine my surprise when I came across a major website detailing “the most watched trailers of 2009” only to find an Asylum film prominently displayed on the list. You heard me: the most watched trailers of the goddamn year. Every other movie was a major studio release that undoubtedly served as spank material for a legion of fanboys (Avatar, Transformers: Rise Of The Fallen, Terminator Salvation) and yet there it was amongst them, standing out like a moderately attractive woman in a Warhammer shop: Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus. Garnering a huge following after its trailer was unleashed upon YouTube, people apparently flocked to it in droves because of the combination of a ridiculous name and some of the signature Asylum scenes that you and I would expect, which can only be described as a God-forsaken attack on your nervous system. But the insanity didn’t stop there. I soon discovered that with the unexpected success of that movie, The Asylum decided to release a similarly themed follow up in the form of Mega Piranha.

The hype was stunning, but all we could think was…really? This movie? Of all Asylum movies, this is the one people notice? With the incentive of having so many people know it, we knew that we’d have to address it. And since its pseudo-sequel was so closely tied in every regard, limiting our conversation to one of them simply won’t be good enough. Like tearing the Band-Aid off quickly, it just makes sense to tackle them both at once. So with well-documented history that has earned us a small measure of authority, join us as we wade through the path of destruction left in their wake as we examine these latest atrocities, deciding not only which one if the better movie but also if the victor is truly worthy of The Asylum’s lineage.

The Plot:

Spoiler Alert: Despite the misleading poster, this movie is actually about the two deadliest combatants in a regional chess championship.

Donkey: Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus begins beneath the waves of the Pacific just off the shores of Alaska while bombarding us with underwater stock footage of what is clearly not anywhere near Alaska. There we join a marine researcher named Emma who appears to be researching nothing in particular when she unexpectedly witnesses a pod of whales to freak out due to a nearby sonar test, resulting in them smashing into the massive ice wall of a nearby glacier. This causes the soon discovered icy tomb to eventually shatter and free a pair of deadly adversaries that have been frozen in time; the fabled Mega Shark and Giant Octopus. Instantly revived after countless centuries, the two beasts immediately rocket off in different directions and proceed to wreak havoc across the world in ways you couldn’t possibly imagine unless your parents had decided to potty train you as a child by punching you directly in the brain. With no one willing to listen to her recounting of the tale she had witnessed, Emma enlists the help of her old professor, Lamar, and his Japanese colleague, Shimada who joins them after an oil rig off the coast of Japan is taken down by the Giant Octopus. But it’s not long before this dream team has company in trying to Encyclopedia Brown the case, as the US Navy finally begins to recognize the peril that they’re facing when the Mega Shark sinks a fucking battleship just by ramming it with its face. Brought in to provide counsel under the watchful eye of shadowy government official, our three musketeers are charged with the task of finding a way to stop the ancient menaces. After a plan involving pheromones and what I’m guessing would have been a couple of dudes in scuba suits ready to give giant hand jobs fails miserably, the military is ready to jump straight to the nuclear option when our trio finally comes up with a plan that sends the ancient warriors back to the cold depths for all time.

Sounds pretty good, huh? Or at the very least a better way to pass 90 minutes than staring into the void of oblivion while mentally reliving all your past failures? Well, you’re half right. So the question becomes: how can you possibly follow that up? If you don’t know the answer to that, then you really haven’t been paying attention to Asylum movies.

"To save mankind"? Why would any experiment for the good of mankind involve goddamn piranhas? That would be like trying to develop a more reliable family sedan by testing on AIDS.

Enter Mega Piranha. After being awaken in his dank apartment by the Secretary of State via a video phone that doesn’t actually exist, Jason Fitch – Special Forces – is sent to Venezuela to investigate the mysterious death of a US ambassador who was killed on a river cruise. But Fitch can’t possibly be ready for what awaits him as he arrives in the country just to be accosted at the airport by Sarah Monroe, a genetics professor from UCLA whose research is directly responsible for the events leading up to his assignment. It is explained that Fitch has actually arrived to face a catastrophic danger about to engulf all of humanity in the form an escaped strain of killer piranha that are expanding exponentially in size after being developed in her lab. Until now, Sarah’s pleas for help have been ignored by Colonel Diaz, a military junta commander, but all that changes when Fitch confirms her story by traveling to the local river, engaging in an underwater knife fight with a school of the killer fish, and capturing a specimen that jumps out onto the riverbank after him. He delivers the obviously rubber corpse to Sarah’s team and the news of his discovery to Diaz. Forced into action, Diaz finally does his part by firing blindly into the river from a few helicopters, managing to accomplish nothing more than freeing the menace even further by breaking the only natural dam in their path. Then just to be a dick, he arrests Monroe and her team, blaming them for the crisis and calling the fish a CIA plot, which is probably the only rational explanation of why you’d be bio-genetically enhancing piranhas, if you think about it. But their incarceration is short-lived as Fitch springs them in a daringly uneventful rescue just before the full horror of the evil piranha is revealed in an attack on the city by the now-giant fish for no reason I could possibly comprehend. In the face of the expanding danger, Fitch and the gang plan an attack where the local river meets the ocean, hoping that the piranha will stop there since they are fresh water fish. But the massive US battleship that Fitch calls in to lead the river mouth assault fails as miserably as Diaz’s helicopter attack did, establishing for a second time how fucking dumb the idea of blind gunfire into a river in the hopes of hitting fish truly is. With nothing left to stop them, the piranhas not only successfully migrate into the ocean, but they also manage to destroy the fucking battleship along the way.

Staring multiple failures in the face at this point, Fitch and the team manage to escape in a helicopter to regroup with the Secretary of State at a floating fortress where they discover that the US military has come up with a plan to – well who would have guessed it? – nuke the fuckers. But unlike Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, in this movie they actually go through with it and to no one’s surprise, it doesn’t work. As a matter of fact, all it does is piss off the fish enough that they attack the nuclear submarine that fired upon them and cause it to fucking explode after less than a dozen bites. How? Don’t ask, because the answer would be the logical equivalent of a fart directly into your mouth. But just as the military masterminds come up with a new plan to hit the marine-based scourge with an even bigger nuclear attack, Fitch proposes a slightly different idea. Leading a team of commandos packing guns that couldn’t look any less realistic if they were Laser Cats, Fitch dives into the fucking ocean and tries unsuccessfully to take them out in hand-to-gills combat. So after taking a break from the deep sea battle just long enough to jump back up into a helicopter unknowingly piloted by Diaz and his henchmen only to kill them using a flare gun and a piranha-attracting remote, Fitch jumps back into the ocean and finally manages to turn the tide and defeat the horde. But of course by this time the piranhas have already attacked the Florida Keys, resulting in immeasurable destruction and countless shots of innocent civilians getting hilariously devoured.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: 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.

Star Power: Washed Up 80’s Pop Starlets? Check!

Her follow up to the smash hit Electric Youth might not catch on quite as well: Middle Aged Mediocrity.

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: When it comes to casting, this movie doesn’t fuck around, attacking with a three point combination strike of deadly mediocrity. The opening punch lands softly enough in the form of background players who leave us awash in a sea of familiar faces not seen since another true Asylum classic, Death Racers. But that’s just warming up for the throat jab to come, as the film’s true star power shines its blazing dullness when we discover that the lead role of Emma belongs to the indispensable Deborah Gibson. Yes, THE Deborah Gibson of Electric Youth fame. If your heart just fluttered upon hearing that news, chances are that you’re either a soccer mom or just about ready to snuggle up and watch Queer As Folk with your life-partner. Seeing as I’m neither, I couldn’t give much of a shit beyond being stunned that anyone actually bothered to cast her. And after being left reeling from that remarkable obscurity, the death strike comes soon after as the role of the shadowy government agent tasking Debbie with saving the world is performed by the über-douche, Lorenzo Lamas. If you don’t know much about this bowl of cocksnot, I recommend looking up him and his laser pointer antics on the mercifully short-lived reality show Are You Hot?, where he and his in-no-way-ridiculous looking ponytail had the audacity to serve as a judge whose sole purpose was to break down and criticize people on their physical appearance. Granted that while anyone who appeared on the show was likely narcissistic enough to deserve it, this shining example of truly noteworthy idiocy has nevertheless earned him a permanent place in the Despicable Douche Hall of Premature Ejaculation and Mustard-Stained Tank Top Fame. Seriously, the fact that he didn’t end every one of his critiques with, “…but what the fuck do I know? I’m Lorenzo-goddamn-Lamas! My opinion is only worth its weight in drunken broom handle sodomy!” is astounding to me.

Somewhere in this distance you can hear, "What you gotta do is you gotta make the battleship go faster! Take corners tighter!"

Mega Piranha: No slouch in its own right, the spiritual sequel puts up some tough competition in this category. You want Asylum alumni? Well, no one really does, but regardless it’s got an all-time favorite in Johnny Johnny Johnny from Street Racer, who makes an all-too-short appearance as the captain of the US battleship that fails to stop the piranhas only to be ultimately destroyed in the river attack. You want mildly inappropriate but exceptionally obscure actors with questionable audience appeal? See how you like the busboy from the classic episode of Seinfeld filling in as Colonel Diaz, or the timeless Greg Brady himself, Barry Williams, playing the Secretary of State for a whole 7 minutes of screen time. But the true genius comes when the movie matches Debbie Gibson’s obscure 80’s starlet power with another teenage sensation who was equally brief in relevance; Tiffany of I Think We’re Alone Now fame. I’d be proud to say that I knew very little about her, but alas Weird Al’s cover of her biggest hit made sure that she was at least on my radar enough as a child to know that she apparently spent her own childhood performing in malls, making her something that even now I would go as far out of my way to avoid as an Abercrombie & Fitch.

In a surprisingly blunt moment of honestly, Tiffany explains just how far "up to here" America had it with her by 1988.

Winner: Mega Piranha. While Lorenzo Lamas makes a strong case, attempting to douche his way to a victory for his cast, this battle was never that close. Johnny Johnny Johnny is a force that’s matched by few among the Asylum regulars. And while Debbie Gibson’s acting can only be described as “pretty bad”, that’s actually a step up from her music (I’ve never actually heard the sound of an asthmatic goat bleating for its life while being fed into a wood chipper, but I’m still pretty sure I’d rather listen to that). Tiffany, on the other hand, delivers a truly stunning performance that couldn’t have seemed more uncomfortable and unsettling if she were reading her lines off a ransom note telling her that her children being held by the local chapter of NAMBLA.

Love Scenes: Unmotivated And Mildly Creepy? Check!

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: After the three Heroes of Science and Might are enlisted by the US Army to stop the titular beasts, the team jumps into action via a random montage of clearly unrelated beaker-based “research” which I’m pretty sure is nothing more than my first year university chemistry lab on titration. But while this is obviously not at all helping the problem at hand, it turns out that it is serving a far more insidious purpose: love. For some reason all this pointless busywork on needless experiments gets Debbie Gibson and Shimada, the Japanese scientist, into the mood for some sweaty junk fondling in a nearby broom closet. The kind of discomfort that is shared between both the actors performing this and we the audience while try to watch it is usually reserved for finding your grandma’s “personal massaging device” and slowly realizing why it was in a drawer that reeks of AstroGlide, Rub-A535 cream, and ribbon candy. Seriously, the only way it could be more fucked up is if Debbie’s elderly father was there coaching Shimada along on his quest to find her G-spot.

You know what else drips like this, science boy? Let's just say your doctor will tell you in a few days. Now shut up and kiss me!

Mega Piranha: This movie takes a far different approach from its predecessor, delivering attempts at romance that are even more half-hearted than my attempts to watch them, most of which are limited to Tiffany sharing a few awkward moments and long stares with Fitch in the last 15 minutes of the movie with no conceivable tension up to that point which would justify it. But what it lacks in heart, it attempts to make up for in unmotivated titty shots at the start of the film, just before those titties are promptly plucked off of a boat and devoured by fish.

At least this random hooker can meet her death with the satisfaction that the silicone is going to kill every fish that was dumb enough to eat her.

Winner: Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus. Watching topless chicks get devoured is something no one can be ready for, but barring an unruly outbreak of lip fungus mashing into a terminal case of gingivitis, it takes a lot for me to see two people start making out and utter the phrase, “ewwwwww” aloud. Nice work, Debbie.

Special Effects: Worthy Of Special Ed? Check!

This film actually deserves a lot of credit for creating CG generated piranhas that somehow manage to look like rubber.

Truly equal in every way, both movies thrill us with signature scenes developed by Tiny Juggernaut, the special effects wizard(s) behind The Asylum’s long-standing legacy of visual splendor, if splendor happens to be a synonym for eyeball rape. Beyond countless little things, both movies wield the best CG that a fistful of “30 cents off Shake N’ Bake” coupons can buy, creating titular animals that look and move like they’re being controlled by a puppet master fighting the onset of psoriatic arthritis with mind-altering hallucinogens, and an endless parade of explosions that you couldn’t look any dumber if they were caused by lighting a fart on fire. And the real icing on the cake is not just that the very expected Asylum policy of allowing the same shots to be used over and over again in each movie is in place. No, it’s that there are a few shots that are used over and over again in both movies. This is the kind of recycling that even Ed Bagley Jr would give you the finger for.

Winner: Ironic comedy. Seriously, that’s about all. Everyone else loses.

Animal Attacks: Hilariously Unmotivated Or Flat-Out Insane? Check!

Like so many boogie boarders can tell you, this bridge's mistake was managing to somehow look like a sea turtle.

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: When your movie is so goddamn about the epic battle between two non-existent titans that you can’t be bothered to think of a title that doesn’t sound like it was made up on a dare, you know that your movie is going to involve a lot of crazy shit. But while the battle between the enemy combatants is exceptionally pedestrian at best, it’s their attacks on the human populace that truly make the movie. They trade scenes of modest hilarity when Giant Octopus rises out of the ocean to take down an entire oil rig, Mega Shark leaps out of the San Francisco bay to take a massive bit out of the Golden Gate Bridge, and Giant Octopus swats a low-flying fighter jet out of the air with a single swipe of its tentacle. But the modest chuckles these exploits deliver pale in comparison to the movie’s single greatest moment of epic hilarity. Allow me to paint the scene:

High in the clouds somewhere over the deep blue of the ocean, we catch up with a commercial passenger jet as a stewardess walks down its aisle asking for people to remain in their seats. As she draws closer to a young couple, the dude stands up just in time to be jostled by a pocket of turbulence, forcing the flight attendant repeats herself for the 90th time and insist that he sit back down. Somewhat shaken and apparently a 5th degree moron, the kid’s retort is to slowly return to his seat while blurting out that he and his girlfriend are “getting married in two days,” like that statement should somehow magically enable the stewardess to mentally manipulate air streams and smooth out the ride just for him. But as he settles back into his seat, the kid suddenly lurches forward towards the camera and cries, “HOLY SHIT!” Equally startled to attention, we watch as the camera turns to show what the kid sees at that very moment, but just like him, we can’t possibly believe it: the fucking Mega Shark has jumped out of the ocean only to take down the fucking jet with a single chomp of its jaws. That’s right, the fucking shark jumped high enough out of the ocean to take out a passenger jet, which could only be equaled by how far the Dr Pepper shot out of my nose upon witnessing this spectacle.

Sit back and shut up, Frank. No one wants to hear your "there's something on the wing" Shatner impersonation.

Gotta get to that shoe sale!

Mega Piranha: Lesser in scope but not in epic hilarity, this film makes up for its singular source of menacing doom with the sheer volume of stupidity that it invokes. Like our good friend Mega Shark, the killer fish manage to destroy large-scale war vessels, causing battleships to sink and nuclear submarines to explode all through the power of biting. Yes, biting. But it doesn’t stop there. Next the expanding piranhas set their sites on whole cities, attacking Venezuela and then eventually the Florida Keys with the brilliant strategy of leaping out of the water and crashing into random buildings, which somehow causes massive explosions that seem to suggest that the entire infrastructure of these towns was based on gasoline and fireworks depots. And why the fuck any species of fish would be motivated to jump to their own deaths just for shits and giggles, I’ll never know. Of course once the hoard begins its march towards idiocy, the human death toll begins to mount and there are countless shots of people being hilariously crushed or swallowed whole. But like Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, this movie also has one particular assault that stands out above all the others.

As the killer piranhas carry out their first attack on the Venezuelan city, Fitch runs down to the river to investigate when he notices a random girl dying on the beach. But as he goes to comfort her (read: feel her boob) while she slips into the comfort of oblivion, Fitch becomes the next target of the fishes’ random attack. A piranha jumps out of the nearby river, knocking Fitch to his back as he parries it away. And in that moment of vulnerability as Fitch lies prone, the floodgates open, allowing the movie to truly shatter the notion of awesome itself. Hoping for a mouthful of douche-sandwich, a steady stream of piranha flies out of the river with their sights set directly on our hero. So with no time to get to his feet, Fitch fights off the assault of nearly a dozen flying fish, one immediately after another, by kicking them away in a steady stream of bicycle kicks. Yes, bicycle kicks. Think Liu Kang from Mortal Kombat without the sweet chicken sound or career potential. And the imagery of this conceptually retarded moment is only enhanced by how indescribably poorly it’s executed. Fitch looks like he’s pretending to ride an invisible exercise bike more than actually kicking, and the piranhas being kicked away aren’t actually lined up properly with his kicks.

Damn it. Now my boots are going to smell like fish taint.

Winner: Mega Piranha. A shark jumping high enough to take down a jumbo jet is the very definition of rad and easily makes the movie worthwhile, but there simply aren’t enough of these attacks peppered throughout Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus. On the other hand, Mega Piranha is brimming with idiocy, which Fitch’s foot-work caps off unspeakably well.

Character Development: Heroes Of Mind And Colon Bending Might? Check!

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: Not in this case, actually. The main characters in this movie couldn’t be much less interesting if they were solving the movie’s crisis while putting on an insurance seminar, stopping only long enough to recite whole pages of the dictionary.

BBOOOORRRRIIINNNNGGGG!!!!!!!!!!

Stealth tactics this terrible are usually reserved for delivering delicious hash browns to unsuspecting victims in Sneak King.

Mega Piranha: On the other hand, one of the true gems of this movie is the main character and professional turd wrangler, Jason Fitch. I have no idea who this actor is and suspect I never will (mostly from not caring enough to find out), but the only way this Jason Bourne wannabe could have been matched was if the Matt Damon puppet from Team America: World Police played the part while screaming that one famous line, “MATT DAMON!” Seriously, this guy’s exploits are the stuff of legend. But how badass is he, you ask? Well how does being stealthy as a fucking ninja strike you? When he first arrives in Venezuela to begin his investigation, the Colonel insists that he stay at the base as an honored guest whose honor it is to be locked under watching eyes. But undeterred in his quest for answers, Fitch merely breaks out of the colonel’s military compound by employing camouflage techniques not seen since a toddler covered his eyes and declared “you can’t see me”, allowing him to go unnoticed by guards while he clings to a fence a mere 3 feet above them in plain sight.

The movie actually would have made just as much sense if the dialogue for the last 30 minutes had been "mmmpphhh mpphh mmphh mmmppphhh!"

Still not impressed? How about the ability to bend physics to your mere whim sound, Jack? Apparently our hero’s complete lack of charisma and screen presence is a result of being traded away for immeasurable power over the very laws of the universe. We first witness this splendor when he’s escaping from Venezuela with Sarah’s team onboard a helicopter with a severed fuel line. A normal man would panic once he realized that he was mere seconds away from an inevitable crash into the ocean, but Fitch instead insists they MacGyver that shit in a way simply unheard of by man, prompting Sarah’s team to hook up an oxygen tank that not only fuels them but somehow gives the helicopter a fucking nitro boost. Impressed yet? Well that’s not all. The second farting in the face of the impossible comes later in the film when Fitch is leading the underwater assault against the giant piranhas. Throughout the duration of the entire battle, Fitch is communicating with his team and the army back at headquarters by talking in a regular speaking voice over his radio connection. That sounds pretty easy, right? The problem is that a fucking breathing apparatus is stuffed into his mouth the entire time, which would make this feat as impressive as singing your way through The Phantom Of The Opera while carrying a batch of newborn kittens in your pie hole.

Winner: Mega Piranha. Hmmm…a man who boot-fucks a school of fish while looking like he’s Sweating To The Oldies, or three lab rats whose greatest accomplishment is to successfully give a prehistoric fish a boner? Tough choice.

The Movie’s Ending:Blatantly Illogical? Check!

So epic that you can barely see what's going on.

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus: At the very least, the ending of this movie is somewhere in the same ballpark as making sense. Sure it’s busy rubbing out a batch of baby-sauce in right field instead of paying attention to the game, but at least it’s close. The punch line ends up being that after repeated failed attempts to destroy the two giants using conventional weapons that should have by all rights torn them to pieces, Debbie Gibson and her crew come up with the brilliant idea of luring the two combatants to the same location in hopes that they will fight each other to the death, eliminating both problems in one fell swoop. So that, go figure, is exactly what happens. After the same scene of Giant Octopus wrapping its tentacles around Mega Shark only to have one of them bitten off is played multiple times, as once again The Asylum blatantly pads its movie while assuming that the audience won’t notice that we’re stuck in a shitty Groundhog Day-esque loop, the two creatures finally sink into the blackness of their watery grave. The only major flaw with this little pearl of storytelling is that if we are to suppose that their hatred for one another was so strong that they are compelled to fight one another to the death upon seeing one another, then why didn’t the ancient enemies do exactly that at the beginning of the movie when they were freed from their ice tombs while quite literally facing one another in mid-battle? Get back to me on that while I’m busy not giving a shit.

So epic that being able to see what's going on actually makes the ending MORE confusing.

Mega Piranha: By contrast, this movie’s ending is a glorious monument to making no sense whatsoever. After taking a break from his underwater battle to dispose of Diaz in his helicopter, Fitch rejoins the fight just in time to go head to head with the same giant piranha that has just finished plucking Diaz’s helicopter out of the air. And with the helicopter still in its jaws, that fish follows Fitch into a coral patch where it gets stuck, leaving it open to attack. Using his last functioning brain cell, Fitch turns and fires, hitting what I assume is the helicopter’s fuel tank which in turn causes an underwater explosion that takes the piranhas entire face off. Now, I know what you’re thinking: didn’t I explain earlier that the piranhas were attacking whole cities by jumping out of the water and landing on buildings, meaning that there are actually lots of these huge fish? You bet. So what should the death of one of them result in? That’s right; absolutely nothing. And yet, this one fish bleeding in the water causes all the others to come and cannibalize it. Seems odd, but why not? The problem is, once all the fish start feeding….that’s it. The conflict is declared over. The problem is apparently solved and it took us a few minutes to figure out what the fuck had just happened. Somehow this movie is suggesting that just because the fish decided to eat one of their own, that somehow stopped every single one of them, even though this is the same hoard of fish that had stopped to feed on one of its own earlier in the movie. This isn’t even trying to make any goddamn sense and is quite possibly one of the laziest fucking endings in cinematic history. It honestly could have cut from the underwater fight directly to a shot of Abraham Lincoln giving a pepperoni pizza a high five then back to Fitch laughing and playing Marco Polo with the piranhas and it wouldn’t be any less intelligible.

Winner: Mega Piranha. This one’s not even close. The ending of Mega Piranha is one of the most spectacular failures The Asylum has produced to date, and as we all know by now, that’s saying something. Something that smells like taint.

The Verdict:

Donkey: The results speak for themselves. Even by its own rights, Mega Piranha is probably the greatest modern Asylum movie that we’ve seen in quite some time, hearkening back to the glory days of Universal Soldiers and Alien Vs Hunter. I give it four and a half bicycle kicks out of five horribly devoured civilians. But given its competition, it looks even better as Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus, on the other hand is an exceptionally average entry into our catalog that once again proves that hype rarely lives up to its own billing. The single outstanding moment of the shark taking down the airplane is worth the awkward romance and remarkable lack of further redeemable scenes, but not by much. Trust me when I say that the glory is all in the name. There’s little else past that. I give this turd a very charitable three washed up starlets out of five hilarious airline accidents. Stick with the pseudo-sequel if you want some real laughs.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Ending a movie properly is overrated. Hell, it downright unnecessary. And that’s the kind of indisputable fact that can be translated to everything else in life, like writing. That’s why I have weighed the options and decided…

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Our greatest single review to date as we tackle more movies at once than man was meant to ponder in….THE COMIC BOOK CARTOON MOVIE PARADE OF PAIN.

Back To The Main Page.

Look out, Dolph! He's trying to inject you with some personality!

Donkey: Mothers, teachers, and a disembodied hand preparing a delicious looking fried egg have been begging or flat out threatening us for years in an attempt to keep us away from the evil clutches of drugs, lest our brains become an essential part of a wholesome and balanced breakfast. And for years growing up, I actually believed the hype, thinking that anyone who so much as uttered the word “weed” when describing their garden was probably a foaming-at-the-mouth junkie filled with the HIV, whose sole purpose in life was tricking me into joining a secret cult dedicated to chasing dragons straight off a fucking high rise and plunging to a euphoric death faster than you can say “Sponge Bob’s heroin-filled Square Pants”. Those were much simpler times. But as I grew up and began to question pretty much everything around me, I came to realize that while drugs are still an enterprise every bit as perilous as investing your retirement savings into a pension fund run by Gary Busey and MC Hammer, the subject isn’t quite as black and white as they would have you believe. Just like almost everything in life, the subject breaks down into many different shades of gray. Drinking beer is supposed to be an ice-cold filtered road to pure refreshment, even though drunks are some of the most violent people I’ve ever met in life. And yet at the same time, pot is supposed to be the inevitable first step to a lifetime of crime, desperation, and societal destruction, even though the potheads that I’ve met in my life usually aren’t prone to do anything worse than eating all my Cheetos at any exceptionally slow pace while giggling their asses off at classic episodes of Dr. Who. As for coke heads, well once you get into the professional world, you find yourself working for most of them. But still the stereotypes will never go away, so for every Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle that promotes the wacky hi-jinx of hang gliding and overcoming racial stereotypes all while being more baked than a hot apple pie, there’s an I Come In Peace waiting to hold you down and violate you with a bong shaped like your uncle’s mustache. Try enjoying a Phish concert after that, you dirty hippie.

But just for the record, this movie is awesome to watch while totally high.

The Plot:

Donkey: After punishing my brain with what was literally seconds of retrospect, the best way that I can describe I Come In Peace is kind of like a low rent version of Predator 2. The differences being that instead of Danny Glover’s battle with drug dealers being interrupted by the appearance of an alien who has come to Earth in search of ultimate sport hunting, the story in this case centers around Dolph Lundgren battling shitty drug dealers only to be interrupted by the appearance of an alien who has come to the Earth searching for the ultimate high. Oh yeah, and instead of Bill Paxton, the role of the quirky sidekick is played by a dude that you’ve probably never heard of. Granted this is a rather simplified analysis of course, but seeing as I’m not exactly getting paid to bring any true insight to the subject and I have no real journalistic integrity to speak of, that’s about as good as it gets. But for anyone not satisfied with that, I’ll take my description even further into shallow waters: watching I Come In Peace is comparable to being crazy drunk and watching your friend reenact the story of Predator 2 using sock puppets, provided that those sock aren’t as much puppets as just filthy socks that you stole off a hobo while stumbling home from the bar. Don’t think I can get any lazier than that? Watch me, asshole: I Come In Peace is like watching Predator 2 through a nasty case of pink eye caused by Dolph Lundgren dropping trough and farting in your face for the duration of the film.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Exhibit A: Lions And Tigers And Societal Decay Caused By Hardcore Street Drugs…Oh My!

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”. Or something like that. But when casting Dolph, the very least of what you’re going to need is an exceptionally terrible threat for him to overcome. After all, playing referee to a high stakes game of octogenarian Shuffleboard, battling a rival gang of kindergarten girls to determine who draws the fluffiest kittens, or any other frilly bullshit that the prettier Hollywood elite might be called in to handle just isn’t going to get the job done in this case. Short of the dong-punching glory of JCVD or possibly an elephant with a steroid problem, very little could stand as proper opposition to Dolph. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the only way to make this movie last longer than 3 minutes and 2 clown-shattering roundhouse kicks is to immediately introduce an antagonist from the depths of the cosmos.

My friend, I've traveled across the known universe to make America skinny again, one slap at a time.

Since our villain will need to have the power of a thousand exploding suns, there’s no better way to establish him as an alien bad ass than pitting him against the most horrifyingly evil threat of the 80′s: a stereotypical middle-aged business executive. So we begin on a dark and fateful night where said victim is driving along while cursing about the sweet but severely malfunctioning stock CD player that came in what he exclaims is his $70,000 car. Keep in mind that when you see the exterior of the car, this seems like a credible claim as it appears to be some kind of Mercedes or other luxury vehicle. But when they show the craptastic CD player, which looks more like a fucking ham radio, you can’t help but notice the surrounding dashboard in all its wood paneled glory, which makes me think that this can’t be the same car on the inside as it is on the outside. And if that’s the case, then I hate to bust it to this guy, but the pine condom clad Chrysler Le Baron that he’s rolling in wouldn’t be worth $70,000 if it had a stripper dispenser in the trunk. But before the idiocy of his own words can sink into that tiny brain, he becomes so engulfed in his own shenanigans that he loses control of the car and crashes into what looks like a Christmas tree sales yard, ensuring that anyone who happened to be picking one out at the time was about to have a pretty shitty holiday season. And just when you wonder what the fuck the point of this scene is, he climbs out of his 3-horse-powered pussy magnet just before it’s demolished by a sudden explosion caused by an object falling from the sky. As the man stands in bewilderment wondering if there will be any way to get his 2 Live Crew CD back, from out of the wreckage floats a massive blond dude who states in an ominous monotone voice, “I come in peace”. Based on his method of terror that we’ll cover later and the fact that I can’t be bothered to remember whatever shitty name they actually gave him, we’ll just go ahead and call this extraterrestrial Professor Moneyshot. And upon the professor uttering that always awesome title shout out, the film cuts immediately away from the scene, leaving us wondering if this alien was about to offer the random yuppie information on an exciting new career in TV/VCR repair or possibly try to sell him a Slapchop.

But again, when dealing with Dolph Lundgren, one villain just won’t be enough for your movie. So after being introduced to the movie’s primary source of unstoppable terror, the flamboyance level is dialed way up as our attention is then turned to its secondary, entirely stoppable terror in the form of a local crime ring known as “The White Boys”. This supposed “gang” consists of upper class, white collar executives who peddle drugs while carrying out business like they’re running a Fortune 500 company. This bullshit is something that you could only pull off in the 80’s. To understand just how retarded this entire concept is, picture the seminal Michael J. Fox film The Secret Of My Success. Got it? Good. Now imagine that the commodities that his company is trading in are cocaine and heroin, and then picture the hostile takeover scene at the end being carried out with Uzis. Not since James Bond has there been a more ridiculous idea that serves no other practical purpose than to give a hard on to middle-aged men going through a midlife crisis looking to live vicariously through the silver screen. But regardless, the gang officially enters the movie when a few of their more ruthless members manage to perform the daring feat of infiltrating a police station and blowing it straight to hell in an attempt to cover their tracks after they steal an entire shipment of dope from their evidence room.

Exhibit B: He-Man And The Masters Of The Action Movie Clichés

Despite popular belief, it wasn't breaking up with Elaine that made him drop all the weight. It was the copious amounts of coke.

That’s right about the point where we finally catch up with Dolph, our film’s super cop forged in the same hellfires as all the other classic action movie super cops of his time. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: He’s a take-no-prisoners-or-showers bad ass who smashes skulls while dropping deuces on the rule book and giving the general public the finger. Seriously, he’s such an unoriginal caricature that he might as well be wearing a clown wig, dancing around maniacally with children, and trying to sell me colon cancer in the form of a Big Mac. But regardless, our hero enters the film sitting in his car and listening through an ear piece, undoubtedly while stroking the barrel of his gun like it’s about to burst forth a piping hot bowl of his man-chowder, as his undercover partner works in a nearby empty nightclub attempting to complete a drug deal with the head of the White Boys. The gang’s leader, Victor Manning, whom the astute observer will recognize as Roy from the Junior Mint episode of Seinfeld (and that’s about all), drones on about the importance of a higher education, wasting time until members of his crew show up with the heroin freshly stolen from the police evidence room. But just as it appears that the deal is about to go through successfully, allowing the gang to celebrate in the traditional White Boy fashion of singing a rousing rendition of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats, Junior Mint Manning reveals to Dolph’s partner that the gang is quite aware that he’s actually a cop. Things are looking grim, but as we all know, nothing bad can happen when you’re partnered with a super cop. Right?

"Sweet God, helt me?" What does "helt me" mean? Fuck it, I'm staying here.

Not so much. It turns out that Dolph’s partner is facing two fatal problems at this point. First, this drug bust consists of one asshole dumb enough to sit alone across from a group of men who are armed with more than just bad jokes and worse stock tips, and another asshole sitting in a car, waiting for the right time to rush in and tweak the balls of the criminal underworld. If Tango & Cash taught us nothing else, it really illuminated how much trying to carry out any kind of bust with only one or two guys is going to turn out much like deciding to pull your car and its empty fuel tank to the nearest gas station using your scrotum: it might be hilarious to watch, but it’s destined to end in nothing but pain. That fundamental issue is bad enough, but on top of that, while this whole thing is going on, his partner’s fate is ultimately sealed when Dolph notices that two crazed junkies have run into a nearby convenience store and are attempting to rob it. Figuring that his partner is fine on his own while literally in the middle of the goddamn drug deal, Dolph leaves his post to go smash those junkies’ pie holes like they just accused him of being an avid fan of the WNBA. So of course while he’s skull fucking his victims, the White Boys predictably execute his partner. Or as a gaggle of yuppies pretending to be bad asses might say, they liquidated his assets all over the fucking wall.

The astute observer might think that Dolph is pulling up his leg for a blistering roundhouse, but he's actually pulling his cheeks apart slightly to add the follow up fart to his signature attack.

Watch out! It's hearing track 1, Courtesy Of The Red, White, And Blue that actually kills its victims. The slashed throat is just the cherry on top.

With the now dead cop’s only backup keeping himself busy making sure that the local slush machine will be safe for either generations or at least days to come, the execution goes uncontested, leaving both the stolen drugs and a lot of police money are left in the well-moisturized hands of the White Boys. Quite pleased with himself, Junior Mint Manning takes the cash and leaves his goons to take care of the body and collect the dope. But as soon as he leaves, things go straight to hell. As the white-collar criminals mill around the room aimlessly, Professor Moneyshot appears on the scene, repeating his introductory line of, “I come in peace”. Then before anyone can react, he fires what appears to be a Super CD of Death out of a wrist holster which proceeds to fly around and slash the throat of every motherfucker in sight. Since it proves to be so lethal to so many people with such efficiency, I think it’s fair to assume that this particular CD was Toby Keith’s Unleashed. And just as the last goon meets his honky tonk doom while being knocked through a plate glass window to the street outside, our hero Dolph finally remembers that he’s not just in the neighborhood to buy Fun Dip and Garbage Pail Kids collector cards from the corner store, so he runs into the nightclub to investigate. But by the time he makes it inside, the after-party is already long since finished. Professor Moneyshot has split with the drugs in tow, leaving only a pile of well-dressed dead bodies in his wake. When Dolph eventually spots the body of his partner among them, he gathers all the talent he can muster and attempts to show what could either be described as remorse or extreme post-taco-binge gas pain. Either way, watching his facial contortions is kind of making me want to poop.

This picture might as well be on a milk carton, because after this movie, you won't see it again for a long, long time.

Fast forward to a short time later and that same nightclub is swarming with cops and reporters, either because they discovered the evening’s carnage or because David Lee Roth paused from his nightly ritual of snorting coke of a hooker’s ass and surrendering to male pattern baldness long enough to make a public appearance in disturbingly tight pants. Sadly it’s the former, so we join the fray just in time to see Dolph get chewed out by his captain for allowing his partner’s chest to be ventilated by a semi-automatic. But just as he’s thrown off the case and put on vacation, he’s taken right back off of it when he learns that the FBI has taken over the investigation and wants his help. So with that it’s officially time to beat another movie stereotype to death when the movie transitions into a buddy cop film the next day. Dolph is introduced to his new FBI partner played by Brian Benben, whom a small handful of unfortunate souls will likely recognize him as the former star of an old, terrible cable show called Dream On. I only happen to remember this because the show was played on SuperChannel and had an adult rating due to possible nudity, and unlike today’s youth who can see the most hardcore acts of sexual depravity by simply Googling the phrase “Papa Smurf”, when I was 12, I had to sit through the dumbest shit imaginable just for the possibility of nudity. I would describe the B-Cube as a straight-laced, by the book perfectionist who touches himself at night while reciting the Boy Scout pledge, but that’s almost as predictable and redundant at this point as describing Ann Coulter as an insane pile of racist diapers filled with baboon shit. It just goes without saying at this point.

Jesus...did they send this guy to kill his prey with a massive dose of fucking ugly?

Reinforcements for the side of justice and bad hair don’t stop there, though, as a few minutes later we’re introduced to the Kyle Reese of the movie in the form of a second dark-haired alien who shows up in a rundown apartment building. This ugly motherfucker, whom we’ll call Kyle Grease out of sheer laziness, is a space cop sent through the depths of the universe to not only to stop Professor Moneyshot and his expedition of destruction, but also to learn the true meaning of Christmas from the love of a crippled boy with a plucky spirit that’s at constant odds with his fantastically crippled body. Or at least that’s what I’m going to claim, since that’s about the only way that his entire role in this film could find purpose.

Exhibit C: Hello, And Welcome To The Middle Of The Film

Now that our players are all introduced and the stage is set, the meat of the movie plays out while clinging to a standard formula so tenaciously that you’d think unoriginality was going to cure the director’s testicular cancer. It begins with…

Step 1: Show the villain killing people. A lot of people. We start by establishing the blonde menace that is Professor Moneyshot as he runs through the streets, reaping havoc amongst the populace like a case of radioactive genital crabs. His calling card consists of uttering the phrase “I come in peace” just before knocking his victim to the ground and shooting a small hose into their chest. After then pumping in a milky white fluid into his victims, he then blasts a second hose directly into their forehead and sucks a different set of fluids back out, making this whole process look an awful lot like P-Money’s squirting a tepid load of his baby batter into his victim before harvesting the orgasmic delight of the experience for future resale. But instead, it turns out that he’s actually injecting his victims with the stolen heroin that he took from the drug deal at the beginning of the film, then extracting the endorphins that the human brain releases, which are produced more and more as the victim overdoses, creating a perfect and harmless drug. As much as I hate to admit it, this is actually a mildly clever idea. Too bad they couldn’t build a movie around it that didn’t smell like hobo taint.

High five? Ha! Just kidding! No, you're actually dead.

Professor Moneyshot’s scourge of terror begins at a random shitty motel, where after being provoked by the horrors of a power outage and a barking dog, the resident owner freaks out and fires a shotgun at Pro-Mo immediately upon seeing him, even though for all intents and purposes he looks human and doesn’t make so much as a single threatening move. For all this guy knows, Professor Moneyshot is just a husband and father of 3 who is trying to get his family a room for the night at this dump. Of course, the shotgun greeting does seem more appropriate moments later when he’s on the business end of P-Money’s pleasure pump system, but that’s beside the point. The next target is a young black dude working in a parking garage, but this time the proceedings end with Kyle Grease showing up and trying to stop Professor Moneyshot. For the record, “trying to stop him” in this case means “shooting every car in the garage while completely missing his target, only to cause a series of ridiculous explosions that don’t stop Professor Moneyshot from getting away”. And the final victim in the string of attacks is a female mechanic working on cars alone in a dark shop while listening to sweet 80′s hair rock on a ghetto blaster. Normally I don’t encourage the depiction of violence against women, but let’s face it; people who listen to Winger get what they deserve.

While all of this is going on, the Dolph-Benben duo work diligently (and by diligently I mean barely) to sort out the situation at hand. Naturally, since their entire relationship consists of what could be described as one long, drawn out naked towel snapping fight in a locker room, they manage to accomplish very little beyond bickering and pointing out one another’s flaws like an old couple who have been happily married for 35 years. But despite this they still manage tread down the well worn path of the gritty movie cop by falling ass backwards into the answers that they seek, leading us to…

Step 2: Good old fashioned half-assed detective work. After returning to the scene of the crime and finding little more than an opportunity to squabble with one another over procedure and technique, our heroes embark on a field trip to a nearby strip club to gather information from a contact, which of course is nothing more than a convenient excuse to give us an obligatory and highly unnecessary titty shot. Through the dense fog of boobage, Dolph surveys the tittiscape until he finds his contact, Owen from Tango & Cash, playing pool at a nearby table. Who the fuck goes to a strip bar and plays pool? I have never once seen or heard of a man who has passes up seeing a naked woman to practice his bank shot. But after questioning Owen about the whereabouts of Junior Mint Manning and the stolen drugs, Dolph learns that the White Boys are under the impression that the cops are the ones responsible for the carnage that took place after the failed bust that night. While processing this information at a one word per every 12 minutes rate, Dolph plays idly with balls at the pool table until finally being struck by an idea that leads them back to the scene of the crime. Once there he tests a new theory which he formulated using very little facts and knowledge that he just pulls out of his ass, stating that the weapon that killed all those yuppies was a projectile which must have bounced around like a cue ball. Dolph then re-enacts the movements of his theorized weapon to the point of finally managing to find the deadly copy of Unleashed lodged in a speaker. Having never seen an atrocity like this album before, since it’s obvious that he is more of a smooth jazz kind of guy, B-B-Ben tries to simply grab the disk, which only manages to cut his fingers on its razor sharp edge in the process. Undaunted, he tries again and eventually manages to dislodge it, causing the album of unspeakable suffering to fly around the room, randomly smashing shit before coming to rest in a speaker again. Having seen enough, Dolph decides that the better tactic is to take the whole damn speaker with him with the disk still attached.

Step 3: Love. Having already proved that Dolph is a man who can shatter a dude’s skull from 50 feet with a mere glance while simultaneously being intellectually defeated by a MadLibs puzzle or pack of Double Mint gum, the film now pulls out the other essential skill in the action hero’s toolbox and displays Dolph’s innate talent for delivering a woman to orgasmic ecstasy after a mere 50 to 60 hours of painstakingly arduous effort. So after his evening of intense investigation comes to a close with very little result, Dolph decides to keep that kind of winning streak alive by showing up at the front door of Diane, his coroner girlfriend, whom is about as happy to see him as an outbreak of the herpes. But despite knowing that a hot bath and a washing machine set on the spin cycle would probably make for a more satisfying evening, she eventually allows him in. Naturally as soon as he gets in the door, Diane succumbs to his considerable charms so completely that she only slugs him 3 times in the face before finally pausing long enough to allow him to kiss her. It’s an awkward love scene as at first she seems like she’d be having a better time trying to play tonsil hockey with a spitting cobra with advanced gum disease, but eventually Diane submits to what is likely a night of awkward fumbling and disappointment. This takes us to…

If someone gave me this glorious femullet, I'd be pissed off too.

Step 4: Have other people solve the mystery for you. The next morning Dolph arrives home to find his front door kicked open and his apartment tossed. He creeps through the place, looking for intruders with gun in hand, which of course allows for a classic situation to unfold where he and Brian 2-The-Ben each sneak up on opposite sides of the same corner at the same time, both thinking that the other side of the wall is either going to reveal the perpetrator or the multiple face kicks of Ferris Bueller’s sister. Actually, as stupid as that might sound, Dolph comes up with something even better as just before reaching around and grabbing what he soon discovers is his partner, he mutters, “either you’re Santa Clause or you’re dead, pal”. I’m not really sure what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but what I take away from this is that if I ever wanted to toss Dolph Lundgren’s house and get away with it, I just have to take a dump in a sock and hang it over his chimney while wearing a rented Santa suit. Once our heroes realize that the two of them are alone in the apartment, B3 informs Dolph that there were more killings last night before demanding to know where the lethal album of despair is. Happy to oblige, Dolph leads them to where only the best cops leave an essential piece of evidence: in the hands of a random and completely inappropriate friend.

Dolph’s friend in this case is supposed to be a man of science. Granted that he has no credentials or traits to prove this other than a lab coat and being hopped up on caffeine to the point of absurdity, but sure, I guess that’s what a scientist is. How absurd is this scene, you ask? Well, let’s just say it’s crazy enough that I was hoping this prick would eventually just die in a tragic rectal thermometer accident, as once the Super Squad begins a conversation with him, he screams for absolutely no reason before laying up on a table and bringing his feet up over his head in an apparent attempt to sniff his own balls. Yeah, I get it: you’re trying to show me that he’s quirky. But now you’re just pissing in my face and calling it Liquid Golden Grahams. But once his entirely unnecessary eccentricities are put aside, he finally shares the secret of the Super CD of Doom. With absolutely no explanation as to how he could have possibly decoded the mystery in one night, he explains that it’s a weapon that is controlled by magnetic force which it uses as a means of propulsion, including the electrical charge in a human body. Our dynamic duo decides to leave the Killer Album from Hell with this lab rat after a prerequisite amount of bitching from the B-Cube, and move on.

The visit takes an awkward turn when Dolph's friend stops to try to blow himself.

The next stop is the CSI lab where Dolph’s girlfriend Diane gives them an up close tour of one of Professor Moneyshot’s victims, pointing out all the gaping and bloody attractions before finally explaining the way in which he was killed. Since she concludes that the sizable holes in the victim’s head and chest weren’t lovingly hand crafted by bullets, they had to be caused by something else entirely. Since testing shows that the victim was full of morphine but showed no signs of being a user, she decides that whoever stole the heroin must be using it to overdose people with, but hasn’t yet figured out why. Thoroughly confused, Dolph and the Ben-Squared are about to leave the police station when someone hands Dolph a package that had been dropped off by courier only moment ago, which turns out to be an autographed picture of Junior Mint Manning complete with a note declaring that his partner, Warren J. Cocksnot, will be paying Dolph a visit soon.

Some would take this thinly veiled threat as a hint to lay low for a while, but not our hero. But never one to shy away from an opportunity to head butt a man square in the testicles, Dolph instead decides to walk straight into the belly of the beast and after a remarkably uninspired car chase scene with two members of the White Boys along the way, he shows up at the White Boys’ corporate offices with Ben-Square in tow. Naturally the B-Cube starts bitching about the prospect of barging in without a warrant, so he elects to prove his real value by staying behind in the car while Dolph heads upstairs to smash testicles alone. Disregarding all thoughts of subtlety, Dolph slaps the few random guards that greet him around like red-headed step children before finally bursting into the gang’s boardroom, interrupting their discussion on quarterly reports and the need to always staple the new cover sheets on TPS reports. Faced with Warren J. Cocksnot and a 20 other dudes whom are all well armed, Dolph defies basic logic and summons the nerve to demand that they all throw down their guns, which they in turn are retarded enough to actually do. Quite happy with himself, Dolph then sits down at one end of the boardroom table with Vice President Cocksnot facing him from the opposite side, and discusses who’s really responsible for the grizzly demise of the White Boy gang members after the botched drug bust the other night. They confirm their belief that the bloodbath was the work of the cops and that they don’t have the drugs. But just as the relatively courteous visit is about to come to a close, random goons trot Brian “Bam Bam” Benben into the room and demand that Dolph throws down his gun. Once he complies, VP Cocksnot laughs and exclaims that while his partner, Junior Mint Manning, wants the two of them dead, he’s got a better idea. I’m not entirely sure, but I’m predicting a prolonged gang rape scene in our future.

Quick, someone draft up a memo demanding that everyone pick up their goddamn weapons and shoot this fucker.

Exhibit D: Cold And Emotionless VS Wooden And Detached…The Epic Battle Begins!

Why is his role in the film less than 5 minutes in length? Too busy killing the Chang Sings.

Apparently I’m wrong. Rather than allowing his men to have their way with Dolph’s sweet ruby starfish, Warren J. Cocksnot instead sends him and the DoubleBen out to perform a drug deal that none of his men particularly feel like doing. And just as we’re questioning what kind of goddamn criminal organization allows its members to pick and choose what orders they want to follow, we soon discover reason for the yuppies’ fear: the exchange is with Al Leong, one of the baddest Chinese dudes of 80′s cinema. Most people will remember as Endo from Lethal Weapon, but I will always remember as Random Member of the Wing Kong in Big Trouble In Little China. As one might expect when trying to deal with a man carrying a fourth degree black belt in Iron-Lotus-Total-Explosion-Of-The-Fucking-Head karate, the deal goes horribly wrong. But fortunately none of that matters a few moments later when Professor Moneyshot swoops down onto the scene to steal the drugs being exchanged, disposing of Al Leong and exposing himself to Dolph for the first time. Luckily for our heroes, who stand unknowingly in the face a sweet grunge rock death, Kyle Grease also shows up and tries to take out P-Money, possibly for a nice seafood dinner. A brief firefight ensues which ends with both aliens gone and the humans left wondering what the fuck just happened, but at least this creates a big enough distraction that Dolph and BenBen are able to slip away from their White Boy escorts.

It was horrible...so horrible...I'm going to have a headache for the next 3 hours at least.

Now that our heroes have finally seen the haggard face of the enemy, they head back to the police station to collect their thoughts and most likely a change of underwear. Once they have a fresh pair of Hanes-Her-Way’s strapped around their dainty undercarriages, it’s time to jump to some pretty drastic conclusions that happen to be correct while being based on very little actual evidence. But at this point, who gives a shit because everyone involved in both making and watching this movie obviously just wants it to wrap up. They might as well have an orchestra start playing this movie off the stage like it’s a goddamn Oscar speech. Anyways, in his infinite wisdom, Dolph concludes that Professor Moneyshot is obviously an alien and his rival, Kyle Grease, is obviously another alien who happens to be on their side. Of course, from how little they know, it’s actually just as likely that they’re rival slave traders who are fighting over the opportunity to use the Earth to restock his respective harem, but hey, why worry about little things like major plot holes? But even though our heroes are quick to arm themselves with only a flimsy theory, they at least have the basic sense to know that they’re going to need significant proof before they dare utter it to anyone else, so they travel back to Dolph’s scientist friend to retrieve the deadly copy of Unleashed. Once they arrive at his lab, however, they find that he’s been on the receiving end of a remarkably gentle ass-kicking and that the disk is nowhere to be seen. Judging from this dude’s appearance, the weapon of unspeakable musical terror has apparently been recaptured by a band of Wiffle bat wielding Muppets from Fraggle Rock.

And while our heroes scramble to prove that their theory is only slightly above batshit insane, Professor Moneyshot and Kyle Grease have one last battle at a downtown convenience store. Needless to say, P-Money escapes unharmed again, but his greasy nemesis cannot say the same, as he stumbles away from the scene with a mortal wound only to hide in a nearby alley. Realizing that he is going to soon expire, Kyle Grease searches for one last desperate way to stop his prey before he succumbs to the sweet release of death. Moments later he finds what he’s looking for, as our heroes converge to investigate the latest incident only to find that the entire location has already been locked down by the FBI. Dolph and the Ben-Deuce plead with their respective superiors to be allowed access, but they end up being turned away empty handed after being assured that all is being taken care of, that it’s not their problem anymore. Just as the case seems closed for our heroes, however, Dolph hits the mother load moments later when he climbs into his car and discovers Kyle Grease sitting in his back seat. How the fuck the K-man got the impression that Dolph was not only a cop but the best cop to approach for help after having only seen him once is beyond comprehension, which is apparently why the movie doesn’t bother to explain it. But regardless, he’s joined by Man-E-Bens a moment later before driving to a secluded spot where they can talk to Kyle, and possibly proposition him for some rusty trombone action, with a little more privacy.

Fortunately for all involved, it very conveniently turns out that Mr. Grease can speak perfect English and does so while he identifying himself as a cop who may or may not be part of Tek Jansen’s Alpha Squad 7. He goes on to plead with the Dolph-Benben duo to stop Professor Moneyshot at all costs lest more aliens come to harvest their drug from the human populace, resulting in a wholesale slaughter the likes of which only an Ashley and Jessica Simpson duet could replicate. After receiving their word that they’ll stop P-Money, Kyle slumps back in the seat and lets out his death rattle, leaving us to wonder why the hell someone would send such an ineffectual cop across time and space. But just as the Ben2Ben begins to celebrate the fact that they have the actual body of an actual alien to prove their theory, Kyle Grease begins to glow brighter and brighter. At this point of the movie, I turned to Milobar (since he had already seen this cinematic travesty, whereas I had not) and said, “This motherfucker’s not going to explode is he?” Well my friends, that’s exactly what he did, all to the soundtrack of me bursting out laughing and choking on my Dr. Pepper. Seriously, what kind of sick practical joke is that? If Special K here knew that he was dying and was so concerned that the humans manage to stop his prey, why the fuck would he not mention that his corpse was about to go thermonuclear?

Now I'm just going to lay back and glow for a bit (giggle). Think nothing of it (giggle). And whatever you do, stay in the car (giggle).

But even with the destruction of the alien corpse and, by extension, their police-issued shaggin’ wagon, all is not lost. Just before scrambling safely away from the inferno, Brian was able to pull KG’s gun out of the car, leaving them with at least one piece of evidence that he ever existed. This of course leads to an argument between him and Dolph over whose captain to take the evidence to before the conversation is finally brought to an end with a pistol pointed squarely at Dolph’s face. Apologizing with so much sincerity that he might as well have demanded that Dolph get down to chew the lint out of his soiled ass crack, Benben runs a few blocks and finds his FBI director. After recounting his tale and presenting the evidence, the director assures Brian that the gun will be used for national interests as the military is going to make contact with the alien. And just to show his appreciation for what a fine job that the B-Cube did, the director pulls out a gun of his own and tries to shoot him dead in an attempt to take the weapon and destroy anyone with any knowledge of it. But just as we begin to cheer for his swift and brutal success, Dolph shows up just in time to find a convenient reason to kill an FBI director, an event which will undoubtedly be replaying over and over again in his mind later when he’s choking the one-eyed trouser snake, before collecting the alien weapon and his partner.

Exhibit E: No More Mr. Passively Disinterested Guy

With surprisingly few loose ends tied up at this point, it’s time for the film to reach its stunning climax in the form of a two part battle of glory and monotony. Equipped with Kyle Grease’s alien blast ray of death, our heroes go on the offensive and pursue Professor Moneyshot to a city park in the middle of the night. Searching through the darkness, they stumble upon P-Money’s drug stash just before he arrives on the scene to deliver a world class beat-down, casually tossing Dolph aside while the B-Cube stands uselessly struggling with the realization that perhaps it might have been a good idea to stop before they got there to figure out how the hell the gun actually works. To end this display of awkward fumbling so uncomfortable that it reminds me of every time I try to get a bra off, Professor Moneyshot fires another CD of Black Death (this time I’m guessing it’s the seminal 2 Unlimited album, Get Ready For This) which for some reason only manages to only knick Benben in the shoulder. And it’s a good thing that he managed to survive this attack for no apparent reason, because just as it seems like he and his partner are destined to succumb to a gruesome astro-death at P-Money’s hands, the Ben2Ben finally manages to fire off a few rounds out of the alien pistol, hitting his target square in the chest several times. End of story, right? The professor is totally dead, right? WRONG. Even though this is a fucking alien gun carried by the alien cop who was trying so desperately to stop his alien prey, these shots are about as effectual of a series of spitballs, as Professor Moneyshot is simply knocked to the ground briefly, looking more like he’s been stricken by the onset of rheumatoid arthritis than an actual weapon. But this still gives our heroes enough time to collect themselves and attempt to figure out some way to administer a death blow. But in that brief moment of looking away, the Professor disappears into the night, accidentally leaving behind his vials of endorphins.

Little known fact about extraterrestrials: they have outstanding parallel parking skills.

With those drugs that were discarded in hand, for some reason our dynamic duo decides that the situation calls for a coffee break at Dolph’s place. And why not, really? Once they’ve finished a plate of three day old Chinese take out and a few rounds of Super Mario Kart, they meet up with Diane and decide to get back to the business of saving the world, only to find two members of the White Boys waiting to be their waiters in restaurant Holy Fuck I’m Dead. They duck behind a nearby car to avoid the hale of yuppie gunfire, seemingly unable to escape the barrage, when Professor Moneyshot just happens to show up looking for his confiscated drug stash. And as he busies himself with killing the corporate dogs merely for getting in his way, our heroes take the chance to escape in a car, getting a brief head start before P-Money steals a sweet ride of his own and follows behind them. Beyond the ridiculous revelation that the Professor apparently knows how to drive a fucking Earth car, I can’t help but take that thought further and wonder if alien spacecrafts also have a stick shift.

So an explosive weapon does little more than knock him to the ground, but a blunt fucking pipe that wouldn't pierce skin unless you fell on it from a rooftop kills him? Sounds about right.

After this movie delivers yet another stunningly uninteresting chase scene to the Shitty Movie Night experience, the B-Dog finally manages to fire off a shot and hit the cop car that P-Money’s driving, causing it to go up in a massive explosion. However, as our heroes stop to jump out of the car and sniff their own farts in self-satisfaction, the Professor stuns them by walking right out of the inferno with no injuries to speak of to both his body and, amazingly, his clothes. After we share a collective groan with the small band of heroes, both realizing that this movie is going to have to go on even further, they get back in their car and take off again, stopping at some kind of abandoned industrial facility. Looking quickly at his surroundings, Dolph then leads his team up to a spot where Brian can set up to get the one clear shot that he’s aching for. They stand waiting for the alien to show up and moments later are obliged. But when the Gentle Benben takes aim and fires, he discovers that the space gun is out of ammo. Well ain’t that a bitch? With that window of opportunity slammed shut, Professor Moneyshot jumps up to greet them. Dolph attempts to stop him with both a shotgun and an explosive trap, both of which do absolutely nothing. So our heroes again turn to flight, running until P-Money eventually catches up and jumps down in ambush, knocking Brian away and grabbing Diane as a hostage. Realizing what he wants, Dolph starts to provoke the professor by smashing vials of his carefully collected drug, prompting P-Money to throw Diane away in anger. As the tables turn and Dolph holds the drugs hostage, he convinces Professor Moneyshot to put his gun down and fight him like a fellow non-emoting man. After the alien complies, Dolph carefully puts the drugs down, only to have P-Money fire a deadly CD of Death at him. But after bouncing around the room several times, it stops in what appears to be a fucking stereo speaker that Dolph produced from out of goddamn nowhere. Seriously, this is getting fucking ridiculous. But the mono-e-mono battle then finally begins in full, coming to a glorious climax when Dolph fights off Professor Moneyshot’s drug injector just long enough to eventually stab him in the neck with it, which appears to pump P-Money full of his own semen. As he stands there dazed and rapidly impregnating himself, Dolph seizes the opportunity to land a solid jump kick that sends the professor into an errant protruding pipe, impaling him through the gut. With his opponent screaming in pain, Dolph then casually grabs Professor Moneyshot’s gun and somehow manages to figure out how to turn it to full power, just in time to deliver one last exchange:

Professor Moneyshot: “I come in peace…”

Dolph: “And you go in pieces, asshole.”

That’s fucking awesome. I swear they must have only had that line in this movie just for that goddamn sweet set up. And with that utterance of cinematic splendor, Dolph fires on Professor Moneyshot and causes him to fucking explode. It’s goddamn amazing how much damage that caused, considering not long ago a direct hit to the sternum was causing less pain than a game of touch football.

With their foe vanquished and the world safe again, or heroes lock arms like old pals and walk away for about 1o seconds before the credits suddenly roll, bringing our story to an end. So yeah…um…I guess that’s it.

The Verdict:

Donkey: In the end, this movie turned out to be about as ridiculous as one would expect. A somewhat clever idea for the elusive perfect drug is ultimately washed out by tired action, an even more tired plot, and downright exhausted acting. It ends with a line of epic proportions and features a hilarious and unnecessarily explosive death scene, but doesn’t quite deliver as many laughs as some of our more classic entries. That being said, I Come In Peace does feature Dolph Lundgren battling a blonde mullet-sporting alien who emotes less than petrified wood that suffered severe childhood trauma, so it’s kind of like matching Dolph against his portrayal of He-Man from Masters Of The Universe. That has to be worth something. I give this movie four Bens out of five yuppie strokefests.

What We Learned:

Donkey: This movie should be called Predator 3: Dude, Where’s My Dolph?

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Rutger Hauer proves to be an even more frightening force of vengeance for the visually impaired than a seeing eye dog with rabies in…BLIND FURY.

Back To The Main Page.

If they had only cast Corey Hart, the ad campaign for this movie would have written itself.

Donkey: As anyone who has ever sat and listened to drawn out stoned conversations that’s nowhere near as intelligent as its participants seem to think can tell you, the subject of aliens can make a fantastic barometer of the human imagination. With no hard evidence of their existence to speak of, any discussion on the subject comes down to theory and conjecture. And while common sense coupled with an educational background only slightly more impressive than that of an irregular can of tomato soup dictates that with a universe anywhere near the size we believe it to be, life almost certainly exists somewhere else other than Earth in one form or another, what that life looks like is where things start to get interesting. If you subscribe to Star Trek’s remarkably uninspired view of reality, then all forms of extraterrestrial existence basically boil down to humankind, separated only by the severity of chemical fire that took place on the given species’ forehead. But if that’s not to your fancy, there’s always the E.T. outlook on the cosmos, where aliens are freaky phallic-shaped turd piles who have been sent across space and time to revitalize our love of peanut-based snack foods while simultaneously annihilating the integrity of our video game industry. But no matter what face and subsequent forehead you choose to apply to the unknown, one area where little imagination is used is the issue of their intent, as with very few exceptions the prevailing belief is that alien visitors would have their way with us like we were Jodie Foster on a pinball machine. There are two reasons for this indisputable logic. First, any alien race that visits Earth will quite simply be better than us, making it impossible to believe that we would be anything but completely at their mercy. After all, they will have managed to travel millions of miles and faced countless untold logistical perils to be here, whereas we’re fascinated when someone slaps a fucking paper towel on a stick and calls it a Swiffer. Seriously, anyone who has ever watched The Housewives Of Screeching Cunt County knows that we’re a species begging to be subjugated. And secondly, you know that if our positions were reversed, complete and total domination is exactly what we would deliver to them. As evolved as we may think we are, man’s first instinct when he sees something new usually tends to eventually break down to one eternal question: “I wonder if I could eat or fuck that thing?” So needless to say, alien interaction will likely be painful for us all. And if you happen to disagree, go right ahead and find yourself a Native American and ask him how exciting and prosperous it is to meet new friends from faraway places.

The Plot:

Donkey: Imagine one day that you wake up and realize that the world around you isn’t what it seems. You discover that you’ve been living a lie your entire life, and that your very reality has been controlled and manipulated by another race of beings for reasons you don’t understand. Then imagine that while you think you’re completely alone in this cold new reality, you soon discover that you have a capable, bald black dude for a sidekick and a small group of freedom fighters who see the truth and are willing to fight along side you. If you happened to be picturing yourself stuck in The Matrix and reciting your favorite lines from Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey, you’re not alone. But as it turns out, in this case you’re not actually being controlled by machines within virtual reality, but instead you’re being blinded by aliens whom are living among us. They barrage us with subliminal and hidden messages all for the purpose of…um…well that’s not quite clear. But obviously their motives aren’t exactly going to stand up and cook me a delicious ham dinner, so whatever they are, they can’t be good. Yes, They Live is kind of like The Matrix if you take out the action, the special effects, the story, the point and replace it with 1987′s second or third hottest wrestling sensation. Sound exciting yet? Count me in!

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Exhibit A: In A World Where Hulkamania Has Run Wild, Who Will Prevent Hulkamania From Running Over You?

All these job postings and not a single one calling for a guy who can pile drive a midget. What are the odds?!

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. Yes, to fill the role of the average man turned reluctant hero, John Carpenter chose a walking bicep who rose to fame by performing in a glorified soap opera about choreographed hugging between sweaty, shouting, mostly-naked men. Ah yes…that old tale. If that’s not a story that all of us common men share, I don’t know what is. After a few opening shots of him strolling along a highway, which is an accomplishment in and of itself since he’s wearing jeans so goddamn tight that I’m pretty sure I could give him an official sperm count just watching the film, Roddy finally makes his way into the city. With no time to lose, he heads straight to an unemployment office to look for a job, only to be turned away by an old bureaucrat that couldn’t have seemed less sympathetic to his plight if he had shown up to register an official complaint that his sweet mullet was getting him entirely too much poon. Undeterred, The Rowdy One wanders back out into the streets again and takes matters into his own meaty, corned beef scented paws. After a night spent next to a flaming barrel, watching through a window as some chick on a television practically masturbates while extolling how great life is when you’re famous, we reach the next day where the Hot Rod wanders up to a construction site and asks the foreman if they happen to be interested in employing a man who undoubtedly smells like cheese and flaming garbage to help lay concrete, do some spot welding, or put unsuspecting victims into a figure four leg lock. Obviously unable to resist a sweet offer like that, the foreman hires Rowdy and moments later he ends up shirtless, doing some random digging that, like Arnie in Total Recall or almost any movie that shows construction for that matter, appears to be little more than pointless busy work.

After a hard day of back-breaking and exceptionally inefficient labor, The Rodster once again faces the dilemma of where he’ll find a man’s most basic needs that night: hot food, a hot shower, and a Hot Carl. As he ponders his options, his foreman tells him to fuck off, making it clear that there’s no sleeping on the site allowed So things once again seem bleak for our hero. But just then a random black coworker named Frank offers to take him over to a nearby shanty town where he explains that there are showers and hot food for all. Sadly, no mention of Hot Carls, though. Still, two out of three ain’t bad, so after needlessly responding like a dick and basically pissing in the man’s face for being polite, Rowdy Roddy nevertheless ends up following his new found companion to the shelter where they bond over the finest hobo dinner that pity can buy. They share some obligatory small talk about his wife and kids back in Detroit before Frank lets loose on the crazy and begins to rant on about corporate tycoons and how unfair life is. Ever the optimist, Roddy declines to join in and states that he believes in America. He works hard and follows the rules and because of that, he knows that everything will come to him in time. And just then, somewhere, somehow, Uncle Sam stopped curb stomping brown people long enough to blow it in his pants.

I think I'm ready to take the blue pill now.

Exhibit B: Weird Shit Happens When The Homeless Gather – Who Would Have Guessed?

Oh, I can feel it coming in the air tonight...hold on...

As the day turns to evening once again, The Piperman begins to notice a series of strange things happening all around him. And we’re not talking things that can be just casually dismissed on account of it being the 80′s, like acid wash jeans, New Coke, or the general public still being quite aware of whom Mark Linn-Baker is, but some genuinely freaky shit. Our hero soon learns that there really is no such thing as a free lunch, even if that lunch happens to be a gruel made mostly from creamed corn and horse testicles. While people are sitting around in the middle of the shanty town, watching a TV perched on a crate outside that’s forcing me to wonder where the fuck they’re getting a cable feed from, a pirate signal hacks into the regular programming. Suddenly the homeless audience is faced with a random bearded dude who begins warning everyone that they’re all being oppressed. According to this dude, whom in no way seems like someone’s insane reclusive uncle who has been trading rimjobs for spare electronic parts down at the local Radio Shack, “They” are safe as long as they are not discovered. To maintain their secrecy, “They” keep us asleep, selfish, and sedated. Then just as the pirate signal cuts out and the regular cable signal returns, Rowdy notices a black street preacher and one of the key organizers in the camp, whom we’ll refer to as Gamey Phillips because I can’t be bothered to remember what his real name is, rush across the street into a small church. Roddy finds Gamey the next morning and asks what he and the preacher were he doing over there until four in the morning the previous night, catching the man off guard and causing Gamey to have to dance around his question with the grace of a club footed wino in an industrial wind tunnel. But his attempts to allay any lingering doubts that Roddy might have prove spectacularly futile seconds later, as the pirate broadcast once again hacks into a nearby TV for only a few moments, allowing the same voice of doom to plead that “the signal must be shut off at the source”, before cutting out again a moment later and causing Gamey Phillips to once again run off to the church as Roddy watches. Anyone with at least one functioning eye that wasn’t crusted shut by dried monkey semen could see that something fucked up is going on at this point, so Roddy follows across the street to with the mostly finely tuned sleuthing skills this side of a Junior Detective Set or a Bazooka Joe Decoder Ring. He’s greeted with the sound of a gospel choir singing as he approaches, but once inside the church he discovers that that he’s hearing a recording. The place is empty. Wondering what the hell he’s stumbled onto, the Pipemaster continues to investigate until he finds a secret door, on the other side of which he can hear Gamey Phillips and a group of men discussing their pirate TV signal. But before he can hear too many details of their conversation, the Hot Rod gets busted by the blind preacher who promptly finger-rapes his face with such ferocity that even I feel like having a cigarette once he’s done. Rowdy hastily retreats from the handicapped molesting, then returns to share his discovery and curiosity of what’s really going on with his pal Frank, who tells him resolutely that this situation is a lot like a hooker that uses her own puss as lubricant: it’s just best to just walk away and leave it alone.

What are we doing over there?! Well...um...I...uh....(fart)

It turns out that the circle jerk in the nearby church has attracted more than one wrestler’s attention. As night closes once again, Roddy maintains his surveillance from across the street when he suddenly spots a helicopter looming just above them. And he’s not the only aware of its presence, as a group of people come running out of the church and immediately take off in their cars just before the blind preacher, the creepy uncle pirate broadcaster, and Gamey Phillips wander out as well. They make it across the street and into the hobo camp just before cops begin to swarm. But as the shanty residents watch from across the street with mild curiosity as the church is ransacked, riot cops show up and turn on them with night sticks, shotguns, and a bulldozer, carrying out a swift demolition of the hobo tent city and mercilessly beating anyone that they come across. Roddy and Frank wander around observing it all with what almost seems like detached amusement before eventually joining the rest of the vagrants fleeing into the night.

They may take our lives, but they'll never take...OUR FREEDOM...to poop in a garbage can.

Exhibit C: Close Encounters Of The Turd Kind

Roddy hesitates as even he knows that black just doesn't go with flannel and filth.

We return again the next morning as the Rowdy One and a few others wander around the rubble of the demolished hobo village, scrounging for any items that are merely shit stained rather than destroyed beyond repair. Unable to suppress his curiosity, Roddy wanders over to the church across the street only to find it empty once again. After kicking in the same secret door that he found on his previous visit, he makes a very simple discovery that will change his life forever in the form of a nondescript cardboard box. Figuring that it’s either housing something of monumental importance or possibly a stack of hidden nudie mags, he grabs it and runs like hell until stumbling into an alley a safe distance away. While mentally prepping himself to give birth to a steaming batch of knuckle babies, he rips the box open to discover that it’s full of sunglasses and stylish ones at that. These are the best dollar store black plastic sun glasses that food stamps can buy. Still, free shit is free shit so he keeps a pair for himself before deciding to hide the box out of sight. With the exact level of intelligence that you would expect from a man who has gotten into headbutting contests with the canvas countless times, he decides that the best place to stash the box is in a garbage can under a wad of trash. Apparently the possibility that either this trash will be emptied at some point, or very likely rummaged through seeing as it’s about 30 feet from a flock of homeless people, doesn’t quite register as a concern. So with that, he dons his new set of sweet shades, strolls out of the alley, and discovers a whole new world.

Microsoft's new ad campaign is rather aggressive, but somewhat appropriate.

As Rowdy Roddy Pooper makes his way down a sidewalk, the first thing he notices is that when he looks through this middle finger to fashion that he has strapped to his face, his vision shifts entirely to grayscale. Alarming sure, but this could be a blessing in disguise. I remember the neon colors of the 80′s and, in retrospect, would welcome anything that spared my optic sensors from their resulting retinal-incinerating. But that’s just the beginning of the weird shit that he finds himself treading in, as he also begins to see things that aren’t there when he takes the glasses off, beginning with a nearby billboard. When he looks at it using only his own eyes, he sees just another advertisement for a home computer system so powerful that it could probably be eclipsed by a calculator watch. But through the lenses of his new shades, he sees that same billboard actually displays the single word, “OBEY”. Looking further down the road, he sees another billboard that, through his new found sunglasses, says MARRY AND REPRODUCE. That’s not really indicative of anything, though, as that could be a either subliminal message or an advertisement paid for by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But it’s at this point that he notices that these supposedly hidden messages are everywhere, forming a barrage of subliminal commands. This isn’t restricted only to signs either, as he wanders up to a newsstand to find that even magazines consist merely of page after page of commands. My personal favorite of his discoveries comes when he looks down at his money to find that the bills are just slips of paper which says THIS IS YOUR GOD. I haven’t heard a more profound truth in an 80′s movie since “Sloth love Chunk!”

This isn't actually a magazine of subliminal messages, but the official Republican National Party news flier.

Is it wrong that I think the skeleton with a fine head of hair is more attractive?

The strange messages embedded around him are startling enough, but when Roddy finally looks up at a nearby stranger through his black plastic goggles of awesomeness, the point of the film is finally revealed. Although the naked eye shows him to be a homely, unremarkable yuppie with the best haircut that a Weed Whacker and a quart of malt liquor can provide, peering at the man through Roddy’s mystic glasses of fortune reveals the man to be an alien. Well, more specifically he’s a walking skeleton with googly eyeballs and a complexion that could be best described as “not quite Oxy-clean”. It’s pretty fucked up, and at first the King of the Ring doesn’t know what to make of it. But after standing in stunned disbelief for a few moments, he looks around and sees that things are far more bizarre than he was could have possibly imagined as almost half the people around him appear to be the same Halloween rejects. Like a recurring Lou Dobbs nightmare, there are literally aliens everywhere. Wandering around in complete bewilderment, Roddy ends up in a convenience store where he stops to watch an alien disguised as a politician giving a speech on television when he gets bumped into by a nearby old woman. As she says, “excuse me”, he sees that she is another of the many aliens around him, so at this point, he does what every rational person would do in his situation and goes completely goddamn insane. He begins by telling this old lady that she looks like her “head fell on the cheese dip back in 1957″, which couldn’t make less goddamn sense if he ended the sentence by barfing up nearly solved Rubik’s Cube, before turning to another woman in exasperation. He declares her to be okay, but motioning back to the alien, says, “this one…she’s real fucking ugly.” Everyone around him recoils from this random outburst in shock, but Rod has only begun his ranting, as he continues on about how he can see this woman differently with his sunglasses on. Finally, the old broad realizes what he’s saying and begins speaking into a wrist communicator, saying that she’s got “one that can see”. Suddenly Rowdy Roddy Pimpstick realizes that all the aliens around him in the store have turned and are walking towards him, leaving him no choice but to just get the fuck out of there.

He's 5 foot 8...blonde hair...smells like rancid chicken in a used diaper.

As soon as he emerges back out onto the street, Roddy is pushed directly into an alley by two cops who are, of course, aliens. They try to take him away quietly by assuring him that what he’s seeing is no big deal, that they can work all of this out. But of course, Rowdy Roddy Piper wasn’t exactly cast because of his pacifism, so he leaps into action and delivers a beat-down of epic proportions that looks like it should involve King Kong Bundy. Honestly, up until this point if I didn’t actually know who Roddy Piper was already, I wouldn’t’ have necessarily guessed that he was a wrestling sensation. But as soon as this scene rears its head, there can be no doubts. And to really give the final fuck you to any possibility of going back to a normal life after this point, Roddy finishes his tirade by blowing both cops away with one of their own guns. That’s right bitches, as the Queen Mother is oft to say, it is so fucking on. Roddy prepares himself by grabbing a shotgun and a night stick out of the cops’ car and tries to dash away, but ends up having to duck into a bank. Of course, as all the patrons of that bank begin to notice a man walk in who looks like he’s armed well enough to carry out a South American presidential coup standing in the doorway, they freeze and begin murmuring amongst themselves. When it dawns on the Rod of Destiny a few seconds later that they all believe he’s robbing the bank, he straightens himself and, for no apparent reason, delivers one of the greatest lines in cinematic history marking what is easily the most famous moment from this film:

No, seriously, who has gum? I just ate garbage for lunch.

Piper: “I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass…and I’m all out of bubble gum.”

Brilliant. But as goddamn epic as that is, I have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. And like Woody Allen at a Neo Nazi rally, clarity won’t be showing its face any time soon as things explode at that point when a security guard takes a shot at him, only to have Roddy turn and casually blow him the fuck away. But he doesn’t stop there; no, the Rodded Wonder then starts shooting at random, killing any civilian alien that is within view, and with very little regard to the innocent humans that happen to be in the way. So even though this scene ends with Roddy fleeing the bank after the revelation that the aliens have teleportation devices in their wristwatches and flying robot sentries patrolling the streets, those issues pale in the face of his blossoming erection for violence. Within 5 minutes, he literally goes from down on his luck every man to cold blooded executioner who would rather give you a 12 gauge skull fucking than a smile.

This chick's voice is so gravely that she must have started smoking an entire Phillip Morris tobacco processing facility per day when she was 3.

Now that Roddy has gone He-man on our asses, it’s only appropriate that the final main character that the movie introduces us to at this point is Meg Foster, whom the astute reader would undoubtedly recognize as Evil Lyn from Masters Of The Universe. She enters the film walking to her parked car after work when she is suddenly car jacked by Rowdy Roddy, who is desperately trying to escape the police. With the very little choice that comes when staring down the business end of a gun, she obeys his commands and drives him back to her apartment, giving him a quiet place to regroup and plan his next move. Once there he tries explaining the lunacy of his glasses and the world they have revealed to him, but she’ll have none of it, as listening to his story would entail taking even a single moment away from dropping very obvious hints that he can feel free to rape her any time. Eventually she introduces herself as Holly Thompson, an executive at a local TV station. Seeing this as an amazing coincidence, the Rodmaster gets excited and tries to explain something about a hypnotic signal over the television feed. But his attempts to persuade her to listen to his ramblings are met with a very well-argued bottle to the back of the head, launching him out of a window where he falls about 3 stories to the ground below. As she calls the cops, he stumbles away, leaving his glasses behind with what is most likely a large percentage of his intestinal tract.

Exhibit D: When Shit Goes Down, It’s Time To Go Tag Team

After yet another night spent in an alley, assuring us that by now this guy must smell fucking terrific, Rowdy Roddy Pimpstick begins to realize that he won’t survive on his own and that there’s only one man that he can trust. So the next morning he stumbles back to the construction site and finds Frank, who is none too pleased to see him now that he’s a wanted killer. Roddy tries to tell him about the crazy shit that has happened, but Frank wants nothing to do with it. Alone, dejected and painfully aware that no one will ever believe his ranting without proof, Roddy heads back to the trash can in the alley where he had hid the box in the first place, hoping to snag another pair of the magic glasses. But once he reaches the trash can he realizes that – holy shit! – someone emptied it. Ridiculously dumb fucking luck is on his side though, as he looks up to see a garbage truck is sitting just down the alley, presumably having just collected its load. So while the garbage men argue over something retarded like who gets to eat the semi-rancid leftover Chinese food take out that they found, he jumps into the back and begins to sift around until eventually he finds the box of glasses. Before he can make his escape, however, the truck suddenly lurches into motion and dumps him along with its entire load of garbage back out onto the street before pulling away and leaving it all behind without so much as looking back, which doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

If these really were city workers driving this truck, there would be at least 4 more of them just standing and watching the others not working.

As Rowdy Roddy Pampers climbs out of the trash pile, box of magical sunglasses in hand, his moment of redemption is served to him on a silver platter. Despite not having any possible way of knowing that he count find Roddy there, Frank suddenly shows up in the alley with a week’s pay in hand, offering it as a sympathy parting gift. Roddy responds by of course demanding that Frank puts on the glasses and see the truth. Frank refuses, so the Rowdy One realizes that he’s going to have to make him see the truth by force, thus beginning one of the longest goddamn fight scenes known to man. It’s goddamn crazy. They two of them beat the shit out of each other for almost 15 straight minutes, featuring five straight lunging knees to Roddy’s balls and a mandatory ridiculous wrestling move, until Rodimus Prime finally forces the glasses onto Frank the Tank’s face. After a few seconds, Frank reacts to this new reality exactly as expected, prompting Roddy to utter, “Brother, life’s a bitch and she’s back in heat.” Wait…what? What the fuck does that mean? Who wrote this screenplay?

Left: Wrestling skills galore. Right: Lunging crotch slams. Not Pictured: Entertainment of any kind.

Exhibit E: We’re Not Alone. Until Everyone Gets Killed, That Is. And They Yeah, I Guess We Are Alone.

Two men check into a hotel looking like this? It's a safe bet that you can sum up their visit in two words: angry sex.

Once united not only by exposure to the secret world around them but also in appearance, as they both look like they got into a fistfight with a grizzly bear after touching its sister inappropriately, Roddy and Frank decide to lay low for a while so that they can regroup. They check into a shitty hotel and settle down for an evening of deep philosophical discussion, with topics ranging from where “They” came from, how long “They” have been there, and how “They” get that soft flowing caramel in a Caramilk bar. After exercising a level of reasoning so painfully slow that you can literally hear the gerbils turning the wheels in their head, the two men decide that they can’t be the only ones who know about their alien overlords. After all, someone had to have made these horrendous glasses. So having established nothing but the obvious, they end the night recounting heartwarming tales, such as Roddy talking about his abusive father almost killing him, which prompts him to concluding that “there’s going to be hell to pay” because he “ain’t daddy’s little boy no more”. Ominous. Vague and more than slightly off topic, but ominous nonetheless.

Feel free to grab a gun, an alien wristwatch, and sign up for our beer league softball team.

The next day, as Frank returns from running to the grocery store to refuel on Frankenberry, light beer, and soiled preteen panties, our old friend Gamey Phillips, the organizer of the hobo village, shows up on their doorstep. Knowing that they’ve been enlightened to the truth, he invites them to a meeting that night hoping that they’ll join either join a resistance movement or at least stick around to hear his speech on how fun it can be to peddle exciting new Amway products. Seduced by the thought of no longer having to hide in the shadows and pass the time giving one another rusty trombones, the pair agrees and shows up at the designated site to join the small group of about 50 people. As the meeting begins, they’re all given new fancy contact lenses in place of the sunglasses, making their vision of truth slightly more subtle and significantly less of an assault on fashion. As Franky and the Rod try to slap these things onto their eyeballs like they’re pounding out stale pizza dough, it becomes quite obvious that they both have about as much experience with contacts as they do with surgically separating Siamese twins. The fabulous prizes don’t end there, though, as moments later they’re issued guns and the stolen alien wristwatches when they’re asked to help lead an assault team. The meeting then takes off into an argument about the methods that they should employ to face the alien horde and free the world. But just as it seems like the movie is about to devolve into a city council subcommittee meeting, Evil Lyn strides into frame and declares that the TV station that she works for is clear, that the alien signal must be coming from somewhere else. She and Roddy exchange a look before he walks over to greet her and undoubtedly thank her for dropping him several stories out a window when she begins to apologize profusely. But just as this awkward reunion seems to be reaching full climax and threatens to spray love pudding all over their stomachs, the wall behind them suddenly explodes and cops begin to pour in, guns blazing.

Ha ha! I've clearly never shot a gun before! Woo!

While their new found companions fall dead around them, Roddy, Frank, and Evil Lyn manage to make it out alive only to find themselves in the middle of a gun battle in the streets. Roddy leads Frank into a nearby alley while fighting off the alien police with reckless abandon, firing an assault rifle using only one arm like a complete jackass. Eventually they realize that the inherent downside to their strategy is that they’re fucking cornered, they desperately search for another way out as cops slowly start to move in. But just when it looks like our adventure will come to a startlingly realistic end, Frank manages to somehow fiddle with his alien wristwatch in a way that causes it to open a mystery portal in the ground. Not bothering to question their luck, despite not having a clue as to where they’re going, that jump down through the opening just before it closes behind them only to find themselves in a tunnel system beneath the city.

Blindly praying that each corner they round won’t bring them face to face with their ultimate doom but rather reinforcements in the form of Corey Feldman in a green rubber suit, Frank and Rowdy Roddy Penis Pump run through the underground tunnel system until they find something far more retarded than anyone could have imagined. Without any warning, they stumble into a fancy dinner party. Yes, that’s right: a formal affair with full catering…underground. Unnoticed, because apparently this secret alien meeting with the rich human conspirators who facilitate their existence has security that rivals the board game section of your local Toys R Us, our heroes wander right in and stop to calmly listen to the extraterrestrial agenda. But after a few moments, they’re finally greeted by what is apparently an old friend. I quite literally had to go back over this movie 3 times to see who the hell he is, but it turns out this guy, whom we’ll call Hot Chili Peterson was a resident hobo in their long lost hobo village whom had maybe one fucking line before this point. But regardless, he has apparently cleaned up and bought in with the enemy, unaware that no matter who you swear allegiance to, it will take months of bathing to rid himself of that compost and ass smell that we like to call “hobo fresh”. Thinking that Frank and Roddy have similarly betrayed humanity, he treats them like new recruits and shows them around the underground complex.

Wow. The Ninja Turtles have done a lot of renovating.

Remember me? How about now? No? Yeah, me neither.

There are two main points of interest in their tour, the first of which is a transport station that the aliens use to rocket through the cosmos between the Earth and their home planet. This chamber has a direct view into outer space, showing a distant planet, which is awesome when you stop to consider that a moment ago they were supposed to be in an underground complex. The second stop is the control room for the alien signal that they broadcast over the airwaves, which comes complete with a news studio. Suddenly Fox News makes a whole lot more sense. And this last discovery is just too good to hide the erections that it’s giving them, which of course reveals them to be insurgents much to the protests of Hot Chili Peterson, who tries to convince them just to play along and join him in living the good life. But before the dynamic duo can give him their response in the form of a led powered lobotomy, a guard wanders into the room an interrupts them, giving HCP a chance to use his alien wristwatch to escape. That’s the least of their concerns at the moment, though. In the belly of the beast and apparently alone in their quest to save the world, our two heroes decide to go ape shit, running around from room to room blasting any alien they come across. Working their way through what now appears to be a regular office building, they deduce that the signal must be pumped out on the roof, so they decide to head in that direction. As luck would have it, on their way up they run into Holly. But as Roddy runs ahead in renewed excitement, Holly puts a gun to Frank’s head and kills him. Meanwhile Roddy finally makes it to the roof where he finds the transmitter, only to turn and find Holly holding him at gunpoint. She calmly states that he can’t win, and Roddy’s response once again comes in the response of a semi-automatic scalp massage. Once he’s disposed of his last obstacle, he turns to blast the transmitter just as an alien security force flies onto the scene in a helicopter and begins firing. But just before Roddy is struck by their gunfire, the transmitter goes up in a spectacular explosion. In his moment of ultimate triumph, Rowdy Roddy Pant Stain does what all of us would do and gives the explosion the finger. Their facade ruined, as apparently this signal is what was keeping every single alien and subliminal message hidden, the movie then closes with everyone finally seeing the aliens for what they are. And as any good action movie would do, the film ends on a titty shot where some chick is slowly riding a dude, just to look down and see that it’s an alien. Enjoy the space herpes, lady.

There's not enough penicillin and crab shampoo in the world after seeing this.

The Verdict:

Donkey: I actually like John Carpenter movies. The Thing, Prince Of Darkness, Big Trouble In Little China, In The Mouth Of Madness…all quality films. But on this movie I’m truly torn. On the one hand it’s not nearly as good as his others, but on the other hand its not a terrible movie either. So like many before it, this movie just can’t deliver the comic genius of epic failure that goes hand in hand with so many true Shitty Movie Night classics. On the plus side, Roddy Piper turned out to be a surprisingly decent action star who delivered some incredible lines that wouldn’t make less sense if they were scrolled in dookie on a toilet stall wall. But even this can’t save a movie featuring aliens that seem much less threatening than the corporate entities that actually do control our lives. I give this three stories of plummeting hilarity out of five sticks of violence preventing bubble gum.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Seriously, sunglasses are bad ass. Whether it’s revealing the cold, hard truths of the universe or tapping into the ultimate fighting power, ala DOA: Dead Or Alive, they are easily the most powerful accessory available to humankind. Well, except for maybe the ascot.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: a whimsical look at what is quite literally an explosive combination of aliens and drug dealers, all under the unblinking, unfeeling, unemotive eye of Dolph Lundgren in…I COME IN PEACE.

Back To The Main Page.

Prepare for a 90 minute penis measuring contest.

Donkey: There are few relationships that are more interesting than that of the coworker. Much like family, whom you have no choice but to allow a certain level of access into your life merely because somewhere along the line two people shot out of the same woman’s crotch, coworkers are usually uninvited participants in your life that, more often than not, simply don’t deserve the amount of company that you are forced to keep with them. In those very rare best cases they can turn out to be lifelong friends, while in the worst cases, sworn enemies with whom you’ll battle until the end of time. But most of them fall in that broad category of mildly irritating people that you would simply never choose to purposely spend 40 hours of your life with each week. When looking back on their quirks and exploits with the safety of hindsight, they can be a truly hilarious. I’ve met some real classics in my time, like the fellow cook whom on my last day on the job before returning to university thought that the best way to send me off was to try to convince me to go behind the restaurant’s dumpster and smoke crack with him (an interesting side note: I went on to get a degree and last I checked, he’s still actually in that dumpster). But during the time when you’re actually spending all your days with these people, they can make you so blisteringly angry that you strongly consider the merits of a forced sterilization program to be carried out with a dull butter knife strapped to a malfunctioning Weed Whacker. And we’ve all had them, whether it’s that middle aged guy that calls endless meetings that seem to have no other purpose than to show off the fact that he knows how to use PowerPoint, the cocky young fuck who insists on using buzz terms like “leverage”, “synergy”, and “ruptured hemorrhoids”, or that older woman who forgoes any semblance of showering in favor of apparently swimming laps in a pool of perfume every day, making her smell like an outhouse threw up while going down on a fucking garbage truck, giving you the added bonus of making sure that her stench will linger long after she’s actually left the building.

So as we sit back and enjoy Tango & Cash, a tale of two disgruntled coworkers, won’t you join me in recalling all those people that you’ve worked with over the many years with fond regard and just take comfort in one small comfort: Thank God I never had a gun.

The Plot:

Donkey: Despite sounding like a cleverly disguised brothel or possibly the next televised dancing competition serving as an intravenous lifeline to briefly sustain the inevitably terminal social relevance of some obscure celebrities or disgraced Texas Congressmen (CAUTION: Modern science has proven that watching the eye-raping hip gyrations of Tom DeLay for 30 seconds will cause complete testicular ascension and/or nuclear taint explosion. We cannot endorse witnessing this event under any circumstances.), Tango & Cash is actually one of the critical pioneers of yet another action movie cliché of the 80’s: the buddy-cop film. But unlike its more notable forbearers such as Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours, or possibly Cops & Robbersons, this film has the courage to dismiss the successful formula of pairing two completely different character types together that answers the age old question of “what would The Odd Couple be like if they were heavily armed?”. Instead the studio executives involved in this film apparently held a marathon 30 second brainstorming session where they concluded, “Hey, you know what would go with kick ass? An equal or greater amount of kick ass! BRILLIANT!”

Enter Sylvester “Tango” Stallone and Kurt “Cash” Russell. One is a take-no-prisoners cop who breaks all the rules in search of justice, discount sporting goods, and 45 caliber boners, while the other is…um…yeah pretty much the exact same thing. So what is the difference between the two, you ask? The answer is simple: Personal grooming. Stallone is the prissy button-down, banker-looking, possibly gay cop from the rich part of town, while Russell is the blue collar, mullet-sporting, possibly gay cop from the city’s mean streets. But working separately for years, they each become prominent enough to earn not only their own personal pride parade floats, but also the attention of Jack Palance, the haggard figurehead of the LA crime scene. In an attempt to neutralize them, as they’re apparently the only two productive cops in the entire city of LA, our heroes and are set up for a crime that they didn’t commit. Locked in a viper pit of convicts that they themselves arrested in the first place, our heroes become unwilling partners as they must join forces to break out of prison and wreak their unholy vengeance upon those that set them up. It’s all perfectly bad ass as long as you happen to forget that killing people by the boatload when you’re escaped felons isn’t exactly legal.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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.

Exhibit A: The Good, The Bad, & Unnecessary Self-Promotion

Sure it may seem like he's putting himself in mortal danger, but every truck driver knows that even a rig is no match for the sheer girth of the 1989 Chrysler Le Baron.

As one may expect from any hero-based story, our festivities begin with an introduction to our main characters. And as anyone who has followed along through our exploits thus far would expect, those introductions are goddamn ridiculous. Thus we begin with Stallone, playing the part of Ray Tango. We see him for the first time as he’s chasing a runaway rig down a long desert highway, just as he dismisses his police helicopter backup in favor of a much better tactic: engaging the rig in a high impact game of chicken using goddamn face. Yes, he speeds off past the truck and into the distance before slamming his car to a halt, getting out, and standing in the middle of the damn road. At that point, with either too much courage or too little brain function to acknowledge that he is likely about to become a steroid-filled red blotch to be casually removed by windshield wipers, he calmly pulls his gun and faces the rig as it slowly bears down on him. He fires a few shots into the windshield and front tires as it gets closer, prompting the criminals inside the truck’s cab to declare that “this guy’s crazy!” But instead of putting their heads down, hitting the accelerator, and giving Tango a 90 MPH makeover, the thugs instead decide that the smartest thing to do in this situation is to slam on the breaks, bringing the rig skidding to a halt conveniently within 10 feet of their target. Then after a few awkward seconds, the two thugs suddenly come crashing through the windshield of the truck and land at Tango’s feet, almost making it seem like they didn’t fly out as a result of their sudden stop so much as a sincere and overwhelming desire to hump Stallone’s leg. This, of course, sets him up for his first epic line of the movie:

Stallone: “Glad you could drop in.”

Man, I'm glad we actually came to a stop. That was rough. Say, do you want to go get a coffee? No? Well how about....WAAAHHHHH!!!!!

Once the rest of the police force, including his captain (played by a familiar face that just happens to belong to the dude who was Frank in Double Impact) finally arrives on the scene, they all demand to know what’s going on, claiming that they can’t find anything illegal on the truck. When Tango explains that this truck is running coke, the other cops scoff, dismissing him as “a city guy” and demanding to know who he thinks he is. A “city guy”? How fucking far did he chase this truck? Do cops in the furthest suburbs of LA think their days of ticketing soccer moms give them some kind of hardcore street cred over the downtown forces, or did he actually chase these assholes all the way to Alabama? But before he can respond, another cop chimes in, setting up Stallone’s second epic line and what might be the single greatest moment in the movie:

Random Sans-Mustache-Ergo-He’s-Not-Bad-Ass Cop: “He thinks he’s Rambo.”

Stallone: “Rambo is a pussy.”

But wait…that’s him! Stallone just essentially called himself a pussy! HA! That’s so goddamn meta that it feels like Sly completely broke through the fourth wall just so that he could stab me in the eye with his junk! I haven’t seen that kind of completely unnecessary self promotion since Julia Roberts played Julia Roberts in Ocean’s Twelve, which may be the single biggest moment of ego masturbation in cinematic history. And with everyone standing in stunned silence, Tango pulls out his gun and fires on the truck’s cargo tank, gambling that it’s not actually filled with a flammable substance whose eruption would destroy them all (even though he was told that it was only seconds earlier). But of course, it begins to spout a stream of coke. Take that, other cops! Today we spell redemption T…A…No, seriously, did he just reference his own character from another movie?! Fuck me.

A mullet AND aviators? Goddamn. This guy couldn't be any more 80's cop if his life were soundtracked by Banarama.

While that extreme cornholing of our collective psyches would suffice for most other movies, this film then has the balls to go back for some psychological sloppy seconds, courtesy of Kurt Russell, playing the part of Gabriel Cash. He rolls into the film on his way home from work, accompanied by some surprisingly and rather inappropriately whimsical music. Seriously, the score for this scene sounds like it should be the theme song for a dancing purple dinosaur with questionable motives rather than for a relentless killing machine whose sole function in life is to perform involuntary steel-toed boot lobotomies. After walking into his apartment, looking forward to a quiet evening of red wine, bubble baths, and Brazilian Fart porn, he stands reading the paper in his kitchen when someone bursts out of a closet and shoots him in the chest a couple of times. It seems like it may be the shortest role in action movie history as Kurt is blasted out a window and onto his fire escape, but mere bullets are no match for his glorious mullet powers. Cash quickly fires a gun strapped to his boot, causing his Asian assailant to flee. And since this movie is basically dares you to find any common sense in it, the assailant forgoes the easy route of, say, the front fucking door and instead jumps out a second story window where he bounces of a car, landing with such ease as to suggest that the feat were less physically taxing than an underwater jazzercise session at your local seniors’ home, before hauling ass down the street. In hot pursuit, Cash ends up engaging this Asian bloke in a tired and predictable chase scene, somewhat reminiscent of Big Trouble In Little China, where the two of them run into a parking garage only to have the assailant steal a truck and attempt to hit Cash with it. But after jumping out of the way, rather than just declaring that the son of a bitch must pay, Kurt instead commandeers a vehicle of his own and begins a vehicular game of tag. After a few moments of sheer boredom, the movie tries to get our attention by showing that the chase is causing enough commotion for two people to stop fucking in the back seat of a car long enough to sit up and see what’s going on, giving us a completely unnecessary titty shot. Moments later, the scene finally comes to an end when the Asian aggressor crashes his truck long enough that Cash has the chance to pounce and be arrest him.

Just to prove that our heroes don’t corner the market on abject stupidity, the introduction to the film’s third pivotal player, an aging crime lord played by Mr. Napier himself, Jack Palance, also stumbles onto the screen with all the grace of a three-legged hippopotamus with an inner ear infection. Back on the highway where Tango had brought the rig full of coke to a hilariously retarded stop, we see a limousine pass by the crime scene that police are frantically establishing around the truck. That limousine is hauling Captain Wheezy and his mini-boss subordinates, the heads of two local crime families, James Hong (the Chinese guy who has literally played every Asian guy in every movie made since 1964) and some random dude that is destined to have a bright career in hemorrhoid infomercials. Palance looks out the window at his confiscated shipment of coke and curses the names of Tango and Cash, declaring them the proverbial crotch fungus that itches his balls, and vows to his delegates that he will do something to fix the problem. If you guessed that this is foreshadowing to him finding a way to give them herpes, you’re incorrect, but award yourself 100 bonus points for coming up with a scheme no more fucktarded than his turns out to be.

They say crime never sleeps and that may be true, but judging by these villains, at the very least it takes a break to hit the Early Bird special at the Country Kitchen Buffet.

Exhibit B: Who Could Have Guessed That Being Reckless Dicks Would One Day Backfire?

So young, so naive...before she was raped by the unstoppable handsome of Dean Cain. Damn you, Dean.

With our introductions complete, both cops return to their respective offices, too busy basking in the glow of their own self-satisfaction to notice they’ve becoming entangled in the first threads of a web of deception. It begins at the Beverly Hills office, where Tango takes a break from lecturing his stock broker and then his younger sister (played by Teri Hatcher before anyone knew, forgot, and then remembered who Teri Hatcher was) to quickly chat with his captain. After being asked why a rich wanker who dresses like a banker would bother working as a cop, Tango delivers a single word response: “Action”. Seriously? That might be recorded history’s fourth worst reason to be a cop, falling just behind “free handjobs from hookers”, “penance for all those children buried in my backyard”, and “I’m Batman”. Are there honestly no flags that go up in anyone’s mind when someone in the LAPD says they’re just in it to shoot people? That whole Rodney King thing makes a whole lot more sense every day. But instead of being horrified, Tango’s captain simply shakes his head and tells him about a drug deal that in supposedly going down that night. Tango, mentally cancelling his plans to dress up like Dame Edna, put on some Joan Jett, and dry hump his favorite Popple, declares that he’ll be there. Meanwhile, across town in the slums, Cash arrives back in his police station to a heroes welcome, which when you’re a bad ass from the mean streets means that you’ve earned a reception somewhere between passive indifference and flat out mockery. After acknowledging his greatness by mentally smelling his own armpits while remembering all the times he gave nerds a swirly in a high school toilet, he jumps straight into investigating the case of “who made the reservations for me at Chateau Dirt Nap?” He begins by bursting into the station’s washroom where he finds his Asian attacker is being carefully guarded while taking a piss. Despite being warned that this guy doesn’t speak English, Cash dismisses the other cops for some private time so that he can lay the Asian dude out on the floor and put a chair across his throat, demanding to know who is trying to kill him. But the answers that he gets are in the form of details of a drug deal, which just so happens to be the same drug deal that Tango will be showing up for that night. Call Admiral Akbar and check for an Adam’s apple because I smell a trap!

Had this dude not relented, Cash was prepared to deploy the harshest of interrogation techniques: the Hot Carl.

That fateful night begins at the industrial meat locker/failed discount electronics retail outlet that serves as Jack Palance’s hidden base, where he meets with his two associates to reveal his master plan just before its to be put into motion. He explains that merely killing Tango and Cash would not only be the quick and easy thing to do, but it would be the only solution that actually makes any goddamn sense if you don’t end all your sentences with an ampersand and long, sardine-flavored belch. So naturally, he’s not going to do that. Instead Jack declares that their revenge should be much more diabolically dim-witted. He pulls out two mice to convey his point, stuffing them into a large glass maze while describing his plan as holding “a game that only we can win” before yammering on about a massive shipment of drugs and guns. At this point the details really aren’t that important, as any man that constructs a giant maze for two mice just to explain a very basic plan to two of his subordinates is obviously a few Fruit Rollups short of a molester van.

He's either supposed to have an English or an Australian accent in this movie. It doesn't really matter though, since he just ends up sounding like he's gargling balls the whole time.

With that completely redundant moment of grandiose illustration at an end, the movie then turns to a dark building where we watch the master plan unfold. Tango and Cash arrive on the scene separately, each thinking that they’ll be wading into the darkness to bust up a major drug deal. At this point it’s entirely necessary to point out that apparently neither of them has the common sense of even the most mentally challenged of police officers, who wouldn’t dream of trying to break up so much as a Magic: The Gathering card exchange between two high school students without a full SWAT backup. I mean, there’s being brave and then there’s just being Darwin-award winning stupid. At best – AT BEST – if that drug deal only consisted of two men exchanging two briefcases, they’re still both likely to be armed, which still means that they outnumber and outgun one damn cop. So really, at this point they both deserve to die. Regardless, after catching sight of Jack Palance’s head goon, a man that we’ll simply call Dr. Flint GiggleTrousers, played by the dude from Blade Runner who joined Rutger Hauer on a quest to ask his creator about incept dates and why the hell he was designed without a chin, our heroes begin running around the dark building in futile pursuit. Eventually, after sneaking around just long enough to suck all entertainment value out of the scene, our heroes finally meet face to face with one another. But rather than being happy that they’re not about to meet certain death alone, they immediately start a pissing contest before running off and storming into the room that they suspect the deal is going down in. But rather than the deal, they instead walk in to find a lone dude who happens to be wearing a wire slumped over dead in a chair. And before the two champions of steel can figure out what the hell is going on, cops suddenly flood into the room around them, led by an FBI agent. After establishing that they’re all cops, one of the officers notices a gun on the floor behind our two heroes. When he picks it up, Cash identifies it as his gun, which had been stolen from his locker. This is another one of those situations where actually following the correct procedure and filling out the paperwork saying that your gun was stolen might have actually really helped, rather than just doing the equivalent of screaming “WHO STOLE MY GUN?” at a ham sandwich.

That's right, now you show us yours. Um...yeah...badge. That's what we meant. Badge. Totally. No one said penis.

As Tango and Cash are swiftly arrested on suspicion of murder, their fate is sealed when a doctored audio tape is delivered to the cops by the evil Dr. Flint GiggleTrousers. On it, a fake conversation between Tango, Cash, and the dead dude that was found in the chair details a situation where our heroes were attempting to sell confiscated drugs when they decided to execute the dude instead and, one can only presume, snort about 17 pounds of coke between them. With this damning evidence coming to the light of day, our boys are quickly taken to trial where a lineup of people come out of the woodwork to testify against them, including an audio expert who verifies the authenticity of the tape. With no chance to clear their name in sight, Tango and Cash enter a plea of guilty, hoping to get as little as 18 months in a minimum security prison. But of course, Jack Palance has other plans for them…

Exhibit C: Stop! Or My Ass Will Chafe!

After pleading guilty and bringing their trial to a shocking end, when Cash eloquently says that the entire proceeding fucking sucks, our heroes of glory and ball sweat are sentenced to serve time in their sought after minimum security facility. But of course, this wouldn’t be much of a movie if they spent 18 months sipping 20 year old Scotch while playing croquet with CEO’s caught misappropriating funds, so instead they soon find themselves being unloaded at a maximum security prison. And as their respective captains receive word that they didn’t arrive at the facility they were expected at and begin to search for their whereabouts, Tango and Cash do what all of us would naturally do upon we realizing that we’ve been mistakenly thrown into a cutthroat den of sodomy, and jump straight into the shower. If nothing else this gives us a completely unnecessary ass shot of the two of them, presuming that someone actually wants to see that, before they stand around arguing about who it was that has managed to frame them so successfully. And once they’re finished polishing up their sweet ruby starfishes and spent an unnecessarily long period of time pointing out how small each other’s dicks are, Tango and Cash are finally marched into their cells in general population where they are greeted with a hale of litter and flaming shit. Things don’t get much better once they are finally stuffed into their cells either, as Cash quickly discovers that he is bunking up with a huge black guy who looks like he could forcefully remove a pair of pants from an unwilling victim using no more effort than it would take to crack open a box of Shreddies, while Tango finds himself staring down the face of pure evil in his new cellmate…Clint Howard? What the fuck?

Since jumping directly into the shower was already stupid enough, the boys figure they might as well practice their rendition of Guys And Dolls.

What mousse do you use, because I just can't seem to get that kind of bounce.

Undoubtedly wondering if their days of actually making noise when they fart will soon be coming to an end, T&C settle down for their first night in prison. But the inevitable soon rears its ugly head when they’re both dragged from their cells and tossed down a laundry chute together. They slide down what one has to imagine is at least a couple of stories before finally landing hard, head first, on a cement floor with miraculously few adverse affects only to find themselves surrounded by a room full of thugs. At this point it definitely seems like they are not going to be the only things forcibly thrust into a chute tonight. But just as they try to formulate a futile strategy that they can only hope might result in them being raped the least, Jack Palance calls out from the shadows, unable to resist gloating over the hell that he is subjecting his enemies to while still remaining safely anonymous. Instead they end up facing his henchman, Dr. Flint GiggleTrousers, as he steps in front of Tango and Cash just long enough to wave a straight razor around their throats before setting the pack of drooling sodomites on them. Undaunted, Dance Slippers and Hard Currency start kicking as much ass as they can manage until they’re finally overrun. Hung up with heavy industrial chains over a couple of tubs of water, our heroes are then threatened with electrocution, as an electrical line is waved causally around the water at their feet. But before the villains can finish the job, prison guards suddenly bring the festivities to a halt. And before we can ask why the hell the guards, who were clearly bought off for this trap to have been set up in the first place, would bother to break things up, we learn that the assistant warden is an old friend of Cash.

After their narrow escape from death by severe rectal bleeding, Ballroom and Loose Change meet with their assistant warden ally only to be warned that they have no choice but to escape, as he won’t be able to save their puckered virgin asses for much longer. He ends up showing them blueprints for the prison ventilation system, outlining the one shaft that they could use for their getaway. He promises to leave all the supplies they’ll need just outside its entrance while having the giant fans blocking their path shut down at a certain time, giving them a small window for victory. With those plans in place, Cash visits Tango’s cell just before their scheduled moment of destiny, asking him to come along for garbage detail…wink, wink. But with their freedom almost within their grasps, Tango refuses to go, concluding that this whole scheme is obviously going to be a trap. Being a consummate team player, Cash simply deems Tango to be an idiot and leaves him behind.

Oh hey, shit, there's Waldo!

Quite used to going it alone, like a middle-aged Kinkos night manager with a Babylon 5 t-shirt collection and a waistline expanding faster than a muskrat trying to birth a Buick, Cash attempts to carry on with the slapdash escape plan only to discover that – hey, guess what? – It really is a goddamn trap. He busts into the ventilation system to find the giant fans turned off and the supplies left for him as expected, but with one added surprise: the assistant warden with a throat so sore, courtesy of a hunting knife, that even Robitussin would fail to provide any relief. Or as Cash describes it to Tango, “they cut his throat from ear to ear. Know what I mean?” No, actually, I don’t. What you just said leaves so much room for interpretation. Could you describe that a little less literally, perhaps in the form of a sonnet? And just as guards and prisoners alike come in to spring the trap, the giant fans behind Cash are powered back on, ensuring that there is no escape. But moments later, after nearly falling into the spinning blades of death and being copped into a mullet-sporting pile of coleslaw that would likely have been sprayed all over his fellow inmates, one of the fans suddenly grinds to a stop. Cash looks up in amazement to find Tango on the other side waiting for him. If you, like us, are wondering how the fuck Tango managed to get on the other side of that fan, then be prepared to be screaming at your TV in futility because there’s no answer coming. He just did, motherfuckers, and that’s all you need to know.

In the dark AND the rain? Pfffttt...maybe if you're a pussy. Real men would make this jump while on fire.

The two heroes make their way down the proscribed escape route with guards on their tails, until they finally arrive on a rooftop after scrambling through a random and unnecessary tube and weaving through a small power station that’s spitting sparks in their faces as rain falls around them. Faced with one last obstacle while their freedom stares back at them, Cash gets the most brilliant idea born unto humankind since someone thought to add bacon flavoring to mayonnaise: he runs and leaps off the roof, loops his belt over a power line that’s hanging just far enough away that while physically possible to make the jump, their odds of successfully probably wouldn’t be much worse if they just waited for Falkor the Luck Dragon to swoop down and carry them to safety, and zip lines his way over the prison’s gates where he falls to safety. After watching Cash go first and contemplating whether or not to follow his path of stupidity, Tango is just about to make the leap for himself when an old friend – the driver of the rig that he stopped at the beginning of the movie – pop’s up and stops him. They grapple for a while, fighting both each other and the utter pointlessness of the scene until Tango finally tosses him back into the power station to meet a shocking end, quite literally. With nothing left to stop him, Tango finally takes the Slip-And-Slide routeto safety, joining Cash just beyond the prison walls.

Exhibit D: Wonder Twin Power Activate! Form Of…Tranny!

After successfully pulling off the nearly unheard of feat of breaking out of a maximum security prison using nothing but an intense love of urban gardening and the power of teamwork, our dashing heroes of strength and genital warts do what is obviously the most appropriate course of action and decide to immediately go their separate ways. But before we think that they might die alone, leading hollow and closeted lives while lamenting that they had taken the time to learn how to quit the other, Tango explains that if Cash wants to find him, he just needs to look up his sister, who will in turn lead Cash to him. Meanwhile, back at Chez Palance, Sergent Bronchitis meets with his subordinates via shitty 80′s video conference, assuring them that everything is under control. And…that’s it. But this scene, which takes about 20 seconds, is quite indicative of every damn scene in this movie involving Jack Palance. With very few exceptions, he basically shows up just long enough to rub his nipples in delight over his own genius in front of his two pet crime family bosses while assuring them that everything is going according to plan. They could have shot his entire roll in this movie within a day, which is coincidentally about how long it takes to forget that he was ever in it.

Meeting adjourned, gentlemen. The doors are opening in a few minutes and I have to sell some of these TVs today or this Circuit City will close in a month.

Now that our unbridled heroes are back on the street, they waste no time in beginning the process of cracking skulls while undoubtedly engaging in some inappropriate fondling in search of those that set them up. First Tango visits the FBI agent who led that raiding party that arrested them on that fateful night, whom in turn admits that he was bought off to set them up rather easily before trying to escape, only to climb into the car in his garage and be blown to Receding Hairline Hell by a car bomb. Meanwhile, after visiting Owen, a friend in the crime lab, and loading up with guns, Cash visits the voice analysis expert that testified as to the authenticity of the forged tape that served as damning evidence against them. Within seconds he too admits ridiculously easily that he was paid off and offers a recording of the conversation he had when receiving instructions on how to frame them.

Now before you see some tits, who wants to hear me play Tom Sawyer?

With that incredibly minor amount of detective work done, Cash decides that it’s time to reunite with his begrudging partner in crime, so he journeys to the dance club that Tango’s sister works at. Of course, it turns out that she’s a stripper, so we get to watch Teri Hatcher dance. Or at least I think that’s dancing. Either that or this club has hired Teri Hatcher to do a performance piece on the dangers of epilepsy. Or perhaps she believes that she can fight off HIV with spastic contortions. Who knows? All I know is these Corn Chips are delicious. But just as Cash and Teri make their first eye contact and share a spark that could be due to attractive, recognition, or severe gastrointestinal pain, which is just before she starts playing random giant drums (what kind of fucking strip show is this?!), cops arrive on the scene. Not ready to return to prison and be forced to eat more luke warm cream corn or undercooked mashed potatoes, Cash dodges them by making his way backstage where Teri meets him and introduces herself. Looking for a way to sneak him past the converging cops and get him the hell out of that, she takes him into the stripper change room, giving us gratuitous titty shot numero dos. Moments later, the two of them strolls out of a back door and past a group of officers with Cash dressed in drag and following behind Teri Hatcher, looking less like a woman than George Burns in a cocktail dress. As the two of them climb onto a motorcycle, one of the randoms cops suggests that they have themselves a freaky three way. After getting two cigarettes flipped at him as a response, the cops shakes his head and concludes quite loudly that since these two women didn’t immediately jump at the chance to be disappointed by all two of the weapons in his sexual arsenal, they must be a couple of “dykes on bikes”. Awesome.

All I can think of right now is the female Gremlin from Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

After their successful getaway, Cash and Teri Hatcher end up back at her place where she gives him a back massage. And of course, just as she really gets him moaning in delight, Tango slides in through the front door and immediately thinks that Cash is plowing his sister. But as he sits back and contemplates the moral implications of making a Chinese finger trap out of a family member, he sees the shadow of someone hanging around on the patio. And unlike fucking his sister, loitering is something that he just cannot abide. Swiftly jumping into action, Tango dives through the patio door only to find that it’s Mr. Lahey, his own captain. As Cash and Teri Hatcher come out to see what the hell is going on, the predictable “I can’t believe you’re banging my sister” argument begins on the lawn, only to be interrupted moments later when Tango’s captain informs them that they’ve only got another 24 hours before the whole department is going to be on their ass as the feds have taken over the case of finding them. Realizing that it’s time to get down to business, Cash hands over the tape that he got from the voice analyst, and in return the captain gives them the address of a one Dr. Flint GiggleTrousers. That’s right. Strap in. It’s on now, bitches.

Exhibit E: The Best Revenge Is Living Well. Oh, Except For Maybe Killing Everyone. That’s Kind Of Better. But After That, It’s Living Well.

After a painfully unnecessary and awkward attempt at a bonding moment between brother and sister, Cha Cha and Coin Purse finally get down to the business of exacting their brutal revenge. They arrive on the scene of Dr. Flint GiggleTrousers’ apartment, where Cash bursts in to catch his prey off guard, preferably half way through dropping a deuce. Instead he finds the evil henchmen ready with an ambush of his own and ends up looking down the business end of a gun barrel. But just as all seems lost, Tango pulls the old double whammy and pops up just behind the villain, putting a gun to his head. From there they take the goon up to the roof for interrogation time, hanging Dr. GiggleTrousers over the side of the building by his feet. But when he still refuses to divulge either the identity of Jack Palance, the man who has set them up, or the recipe for his signature spinach dip, our heroes change tactics and instead opt to tie Flint up and strap a grenade to his face while playing the world’s most transparent game of good cop/bad cop. But of course something this simple is enough to make the supposedly hardened criminal not only break, but also piss himself as he finally relents and gives them Palance’s name.

Not wanting to say anything to ruin the tension, Cash suddenly remembered that this was actually his grenade filled with Reese's Pieces.

With the identity of their enemy finally known to them, Macarena and Small Bills decide that it’s time to suit up and kick some ancient, wrinkly, and most likely soiled ass. But before they can do that, they know that for an idiotic job, they’re going to need some idiotic equipment. So with an ideal friend to turn to, they once again visit Owen in the crime lab, cementing his role as this movie’s Down syndrome version of Q from the 007 series. He begrudgingly issues our boys a shitty SUV equipped with ridiculous guns plastered all over it and an onboard computer that would rival the finest Collecovision that you could find in your local flea market. Looking at this monstrosity, one has to hope that Chez Palance is within a 1o mile radius, or these assholes are going to have to gas up about 4 or 5 times. Seriously, that thing looks like it gets about 3 feet to the gallon.

The only way that this truck could possibly make them look like bigger douches: a bumper sticker saying "Honk If You're Horny".

After presumably making those dozen refueling/Skittles and Big Gulp refill stops, Tango and Cash soon find themselves overlooking the Palanace compound, surveying the dangers that lay ahead. With their moment of destiny finally facing them, the boys mount up and launch their assault, thus beginning the epic final battle. After bursting through the front gates and racing around with no discernable pattern or strategy, they end up being chased by random trucks and dune buggies (wait…dune buggies?…yes, dune buggies) in a scene that basically consists of a shitty demolition derby highlighted by an absolutely ridiculous amount of arbitrary explosions. The climax finally comes when our champions eventually come face to face with a goddamn Bigfoot truck, which is just indescribably stupid. Who the fuck actually owns a goddamn Bigfoot truck? And why is that in a crime lord’s compound? Do they actually think that fucking thing is practical, or is Palance just making sure that he’s prepared in the off chance that he has to entertain an arena full of rednecks? At this point Cash reveals that they’re almost out of gas, which makes sense considering that they have been driving around for about 4 minutes. So either my predictions on their fuel economy is dead right, or they were too fucking stupid to actually fill up before arriving on the scene. Regardless, they continue to take out everything around them in a escalating series of giant explosions until they’re suddenly sandwiched on either side by the next entries in the series of fucking ridiculous vehicles that Palance has on his lot, two huge industrial mining trucks. Faced with this opponent, they finally manage to fire off enough brain synaptics to realize that having a Hemi isn’t going to save them, so the dynamic duo bail out the windows of their own truck and instead fight their way into the cabs of the industrials ones. Once at the helm, they finally bring the scene to a close by ramming directly into the largest building on the compound.

Climbing out of the wreckage that they created only to find themselves surrounded by guns and drugs, Achey Breakey and Chedda spring into action, standing back to back so that they can Uzi the shit out of any guards, random goons, hapless janitors, or visiting relatives that manage to wander onto the scene. After finishing with the pawns, they then make their way up to Palance’s office just as we see him start the building’s automated self-destruct countdown sequence, basically ruining any feeble attempts at suspense that may have built around the climax of the film. Not only do we know that Palance plans on dying at this point, but he’s also given us a convenient timeframe in which he plans on doing it. When Tango and Cash finally burst into the room, they end up killing James Hong and the head of the Random Ass Pain family, Palance’s two mini-crime bosses, before coming face to face with the one and only Dr. Flint GiggleTrousers as he holds a knife to Terri Hatcher’s throat. They stand in awkward tension just long enough for another dude to walk into the room, then break off to fight individual battles, at the end of which Tango knocks the random dude out and Cash finally delivers on the promise they made on the rooftop, throwing Dr. GiggleTrousers down a flight of stairs while cuddling an active grenade.

Stop right there boys! Let me tell you about the complete history of the mirror! It all began back in ancient times when...

With all obstacles finally cleared out of the way, Mambo and Bad Cheques make their way into the final room where this time it is now Jack Palance’s turn to hold a gun to Teri Hatcher’s throat while standing in a room of mirrors. So just to interject for a moment to review, this asshole built his an evil fortress equipped with a miniature maze for mice, a self-destruct system, and a room of goddamn mirrors. Fuck, I wish they had fought on further and inevitably found the ball pit room, just past the hallway of compactors and random acid pits, and to the right of the bathroom filled with spitting cobras. Making his last stand against the only two men who would dare to stand in his way, Palance drones on and on about something that nobody gives a shit about while both his opponents sit back, figure out which mirror he’s actually standing behind, and simply shoot him directly in the goddamn forehead. Problem solved! But they’re not quite out of the woods yet, so they grab Terri and run, making it out of the building just in time to give us a diving-away-from-the-explosion shot. Not bothering to ponder how incredibly lucky they are that the timer on the self-destruct sequence wasn’t so much as 30 seconds shorter, the three of them sit in the dirt where Tango and Cash bicker about which one of them is the better cop like two teenagers desperately wanting to ask the other to make out before finally ending the movie with one of the single greatest images you could possible go to credits on: a high five of glory that slowly morphs into a front-page newspaper high five of redemption! FUCK YEAH!

Like any good porn knows, you always end on the money shot.

The Verdict:

Donkey: While stacked with random moments of shitty magnificence, this movie surrounds those gems with deliberate attempts at comedy that fall flat on their ass, stereotypical action that is less exciting to watch than an Alzheimer’s patient repeatedly check his mail for Christmas cards in July, and two main characters lashing at each other with barbed tongues so much that you could easily mistake them for two cats cleaning each other’s assholes, which would be less homoerotic than their relationship, by the way. Seeing as this movie begins by showing us the downfall and resurrection of two supposed Super Cops rather than telling the story of what they actually did to earn those reputations, you can’t help but come away from this movie feeling like you missed the best part of it – a part that isn’t there in the first place. Instead you have two action heroes who are happy to wander around in the shower, bare-assed and quite content to tell you that they know that you like it. I give this movie four one-armed pushups at the Oscars out of five “Hey, I played Rambo!”s.

What We Learned:

Donkey: You know how when some of your favorite bands split up, start mingling, and form so called “Super Groups” that are never as good as their original bands were in the first place? Well that’s not limited to music, my friends.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: a classic treat as we wrestle with classic dialogue and Rowdy Roddy Piper in…THEY LIVE.

Back To The Main Page.

This poster actually captures the reaction that I have the moment I see a picture of Eric Roberts, particularly with an open shirt: HIGH FIVE, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Donkey: High school is a confusing time for most of us. Between involuntary erections, gym teachers that are far too enthusiastic about watching you shower, and a social structure that looks like it had a paranoid schizophrenic in the dementia stage of syphilis as an architect, the whole ordeal can be about as fun playing table tennis with a paddle made of gorgonzola cheese. And while I’m sure that most of the trials that I experienced were pretty standard fare, the one source of infinite confusion in my life that few others were forced to deal with was directly related to this week’s film.

As I sat in my law class for an hour each day of the final semester of grade 12, I found myself glancing back at the rear wall of the classroom every so often with a furrowed brow at the spectacle that awaited me. That particular teacher, for reasons I’ll never know, decided to decorate the back wall of his classroom not with educational material or faux-inspirational pictures that made you want to stab the person sitting next to you in the jaw with your pencil, but with movie posters. And while I, of all people, can appreciate a good movie poster, these weren’t posters of movies that either had anything to do with law or were even landmark films in some way. No, these were obscure, low budget affairs like Kickboxer 6: King Of The Taco Bell Drive Thru, that quite frankly I’m shocked even warranted a poster of any kind, let alone the conscious decision to purchase one. But the one that really drew my eye was the poster that you see above, advertising the adventure of unbridled failure known as Best Of The Best. At the time, I had no idea what this movie was about, and that poster really doesn’t help: a small picture of Eric Roberts, slapped over the image of two people giving an epic high five, finished off with a title so obscure that it might as well be called Movie: The Movie. What the fuck is that? I couldn’t imagine what the hell Eric Roberts was supposed to be the best of, but he seemed pretty happy about it. Eventually as high school itself began to fade into the rearview mirror of my distant memories, this movie went with it. But as the assault known as Shitty Movie Night continued on our fragile collective grip on reality, this film was once again dredged to the surface, mocking me with its promise of obscurity and the sheer mantastic aura that is Eric Roberts. A more fitting film for our enjoyment I couldn’t imagine.

The Plot:

Donkey: Much like searching for dignity at a Cosplay convention, the plot of Best Of The Best is as short as it is pointless. Eric Roberts, Chris Penn, and several other actors that have absolutely no business pretending to be sandwich artists let alone martial artists, team up with one token Asian guy that actually has an air of legitimacy, forming the US National Karate Team. Guided by the vast karate knowledge of Darth Vader himself, they must navigate their way through countless hours of non-karate related training montages in order to prepare for the ultimate sort-of-karate related tournament that no one has ever heard of, all the while entirely unprepared for the true prize that awaits them: the power of love.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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. So forget your Police Academy XII: Mahoney Vs Dragon Ninja, The Ninja Babysitters Club, Surf Ninjas Get Crabs, or any of those other useless imitators spawned in that decade, and strap in for a guided tour of awesome featuring THE Eric Roberts, star of film, stage, and my pants.

Exhibit A: The Unlikables

The movie starts off with a scene that anyone who was able to stomach their way through the American Ninja Quintilogy with us will recognize as mandatory for all 80’s martial arts movies: a large group of people practicing a painfully basic kata simultaneously with all the speed and grace of a kindergarten class doing their post-nap time stretches. This is our first introduction to the killing machine that is the South Korea karate program. From this exceptionally unimpressive display, they choose five of their best fighters, one of whom wears an eye patch, clearly marking him as the most dangerous man alive due to his obviously being a hybrid pirate-ninja. Once their team is chosen, a blood-chilling chant of “Korea” begins, complying with the government regulated cheer and merriment levels.

While our evil (re: not white) combatants gather on one end of the Earth, we’re slowly introduced to the heroes on the other, beginning with the two main characters of the film:

If I didn't know better, I'd swear that someone was trying to make the case that the wrong Roberts was cast as the Pretty Woman.

Eric Roberts: Working an automotive assembly line by day and teaching his son to ride a bike by night while crying like a school girl and wearing a V neck sweater so goddamn inappropriately low cut that you’d think he was applying for the head waitress job at Hooters, Eric Roberts is an aging contender whose bum shoulder is the only thing standing between us and the destruction that his flowing mane would unleash upon the world. After receiving a letter inviting him to try out for the US National Karate Team, the fires of competition deep within his loins begin to rage anew, surpassing the existing fires of Chlamydia. Ready to spray his burning passion all over his opponents’ faces, he gives his mother a heartfelt speech about his need to compete before getting a little tender and turning to the real man of the house. Pouring on sentiment, Eric asks his son for his official permission to try out for the team after warming him up by reading him a bedtime story titled Faded Glory: Your Father’s Only Three Steps Away From A Serious Alcohol Problem.

I may have already won a million dollars?! HELL YEAH!

Tommy Lee: Fresh from hitting the skins for Motley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood video, our next hero also decides that it’s time to return to the passion of competition, challenging Vince Neil to see who can contract Hepatitis C after plowing through a gaggle of shady groupies the fastest (hint: As Pamela Anderson can tell you, Tommy ends up winning). Oh, wait…wrong Tommy Lee. In this film, he’s a random Asian dude who’s teaching valuable life lessons to a class of very small children in his dojo of smiles and sunshine when he’s delivered the same message asking him to try out for the US National Karate Team. It’s right about at this point, with all this warm and fuzzy bullshit that we really began to reminisce for the days of invitations being delivered in near-fatal shuriken form.

With those initial introductions finished, the movie wastes no time in getting down to business and taking us to the Qualifying Tournament of Fate and Pop Tarts, where we’re introduced to what will become the rest of the US team:

He couldn't look any less like a martial artist if he was wearing a Donald Duck costume.

Chris Penn: Not seen since his quite literally mind-expanding role in Fist Of The North Star, the late Chris Penn makes his triumphant return to Shitty Movie Night playing the role of the unlikely martial artist and fifth degree douche bag. Strolling into the tournament sporting a cowboy hat, a blaring Boombox, and a shit-eating grin, Chris not only looks like the absolute last guy that would take up the discipline of martial arts – or anything that required discipline of any kind, really – but he proudly flaunts a personality that would get him kicked out of any respectable karate club faster than David Duke at the Apollo Theater. In this tournament alone his conduct ranges from blatantly disrespectful to bordering on psychotic, as his most brazen acts include getting in the face of a ref and verbally molesting him after losing a match, then kicking another opponent in the face while he’s bowing to him. Obviously they’re building him up to be the bad-ass rogue fighter, but this is fucking ridiculous. He’d be kicked out of any respectable tournament so fast that he might as well go for the gusto and end every fight by dropping a steaming pile of victory in the middle of the ring before drop kicking a baby.

The Others: The final two characters rounding out the American team are Sonny and Virgil, an Italian and a Buddhist, respectively. They’re such under-developed characters that those single word descriptions quite literally carry them throughout the duration of the film. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t make either character even slightest bit less interesting if they had been substituted with goddamn houseplants.

Virgil and Sonny. Who? Yep, exactly.

Don't make me Force Choke you, bitches.

The tournament itself, as one would expect, consists of one glorious montage, treating us to the spectacle of our five main characters awkwardly slapping at faceless opponents in a manner that’s supposed to be impressive, provided that your experience witnessing a fight scene of any kind has been limited to watching your kid brother smacking his He-Man dolls into one another for 30 minutes before shitting his pants and breaking down into tears, all set to the greatest 80’s power ballads that K-Tel has to offer. Once the whole thing comes to a disappointing end, the coach of the US Karate Team, played by James Earl Jones, makes his final picks. That’s right: the coach of the national karate team is Darth Vader. While I can appreciate the gravitas that an actor of that caliber brings to your movie, who the fuck honestly thinks that he could be a karate coach? I love the man, but who the hell is he going to teach to fight when his mouth appears to be losing an epic battle to a box of doughnuts at least twice a week? Regardless, he’s visited by an old white man named Jenner, the financial backer of the team to whom he reveals his picks. But when Jenner voices doubts, Darth Cookie Dough assures him that while Jenner’s expertise is business, his is in choosing and training champions. Looking at our main characters, however, I’ve got to call bullshit. Picking Eric Roberts with his gimp shoulder is one thing, but who the fuck would pick Chris Penn for any task more complicated than human speed bump? Jim-E-J describes Chris as being a complete asshole that just happens to be undeniably powerful, which means that sure, he’s your man if you happen to be fighting in a back alley. But in a tournament that’s point-based, where you earn points just from one clean hit regardless of the damage it causes, raw power doesn’t really account for fuck all. So until these assholes are about to take part in Bloodsport, his ability to eat large quantities of soup has about as much relevance.

Little did the contestants know that they were actually kept in the dark to hide the fact that the judging panel consisted of Falco, that kid who played Urkle, a pack of chewing gum, and appropriately enough, Judge Reinhold.

It then comes time to make those selections official, as it cuts back to a ceremony where they announce the names of the five competitors who made the illustrious US National Karate Team, or as I like to call it, Team Rusty Trombone. To no one’s surprise, the five main characters introduced so far are the ones chosen, but what does catch us off guard is the fact that, for reasons I can’t possibly imagine, the ceremony consists of all the competitors sitting in the dark, facing away from the stage. Unless everyone that didn’t make the team is going to be given the consolation prize of a bullet to the back of the head or the celebration following the ceremony is going to involve a lot of KY lube, this seems exceptionally unnecessary. Of course, they attempt to build tension by leaving the announcement of Eric Roberts’ name until the end, and again, I’m not really sure why. As hilariously satisfying as I think it would have been to have followed the trials and tribulations of Eric Roberts thus far just to have him come up short and not end up being picked, only to finish the rest of the movie without him, I don’t’ think anyone would have the balls to attempt that kind of comedy.

After the selections are made, the five champions of might and magic head back to a locker room where after many a high five they get an introductory lecture from the Master of the Dark Side himself, who lays down what I believe are the traditional rules of the Sith: never be late and always function as a team. That only makes sense, as even more than his dual Lightsaber and striking facial tattoos, Darth Maul was famous for his punctuality. James Earl continues his lecture by concluding that “the only objective is to win”. That statement would probably mean a lot more to all of us if he specified winning…what exactly? This isn’t an Olympic team, so it’s entirely unclear as to what exactly they’re competing for, except for perhaps lunch money. But before they sign over their lives to the iron fist of his rule, he tells them that his assistant will be taking them out to a local bar for their last night of fun, encouraging them all to get laid and immediately turning the forecast from stern over to bizarre with a 70 percent chance of creepy. But after leaving his men to undoubtedly lose themselves in another flood of high fives, Jimmy Earl learns of one last addition to his team when he’s met by Old Man Jenner in the hallway. OMJ declares that he’s met someone that he wants the J-Dog to hire onto his team as extra help, describing this person as “a real sensei”. In turn, J.E. Jo’ exclaims that they don’t need any damned sensei, leading me to believe that no one in this movie actually knows what a sensei is. Seriously, this film is portraying a goddamn hot dog eating contest as accurately as any martial art. After all, if the coach of a goddamn karate team isn’t a sensei himself, what exactly does he think he is? A towel boy? A concerned well-wisher?

After further cementing his reputation of being a douche bag by spitting an uncalled for and spectacularly racist impression of an Asian man at Tommy Lee, Chris Penn and the rest of Team Rusty Trombone pair off and check into their assigned dorm rooms to get ready for their night of awkward attempts at debauchery. It begins with Eric Roberts and Tommy Lee as they share a touching conversation about Eric’s kid and totally dead wife before moving on to Sonny and the assistant regaling each other with their respective obsessions, which in the assistant’s case consists of a collection results of every major tournament in the last 5 years as well as statistics on every major fighter in the world, all conveniently stored on about a dozen floppy disks. Wow. With that kind of storage space, I’m going to go ahead and guess that his data on the world’s fighters consists solely of their name and the title of whatever Abba song that they remind him the most of. This grade school slumber party bullshit finally ends with Chris Penn, decked out in his finest ball-clenching cowboy gear, seducing Virgil to give up his meditation and join them at the bar with the promise of sweet poon. Once Virgil agrees, they finally all go out for the evening, ready to paint the town gay. Of course, when you put a gaggle of 80′s martial artists in a room with a bunch of drunken yahoos, particularly when one of them is as big of a taint stain as Chris Penn is in this movie, I don’t think it’s any surprise as to what happens. While the assistant sits at a table, playing on a computer that looks like a TRS-80 without using a monitor of any kind and Eric Roberts makes a call home to talk to his son, Chris Penn starts to dance with a drunken hillbilly’s girlfriend, pawing at her ass like it’s hiding the antidote. Just as Lord Vader himself walks in to witness the scene, the hillbilly defends his honor and throws a punch at Chris, which is easily dodged just in time for it to impact his own girlfriend square in the face. At that point, a full on bar fight naturally ensues, creating a convenient excuse for our heroes to wade through a mass of simpletons, beating them to death with wild abandon while Jimmy Earl watches with a grin. The best part of this scene comes about halfway through when Eric Roberts finally notices the fight and gets off the phone to join in on the badly choreographed action, walking out into the brawl and just nailing the first dude that he comes across right in the face without any kind of provocation or the slightest indication that this guy even wanted to fight in the first place. For all he knew, this poor guy just wanted to get the hell out of there, and now he’s got a shattered jaw to show for it. But once they finally kill or at least mildly inconvenience almost the entire bar, the pudgy Sith Master declares the battle to be over and tells his boys that it’s time to go.

Exhibit B: They Key To Perfecting The Deadly Art Of Karate Lies Somewhere Between Running Laps And Jazz Hands

Had they probed deeper they would have found out that she had only worked as a geisha for the last 12 years, which still would have made her the most qualified martial artist on the coaching staff.

The last character of our dream team is finally introduced back at the training gym the next day when Wade shows up and turns out to be Katherine Wade, one of those funny people that sports a vagina, much to everyone’s horror. After J.E. Jo’ explains that he’s quite reluctant to accept her help, she gives her extensive karate and Eastern philosophy focused background before declaring that without her help, “all his fancy high tech equipment won’t mean shit.” Of course, that sounds like a great argument until you actually watch the rest of the movie and realize that this team uses about as much high tech equipment as the Amish. Sure, they’ve got one punching bag that has a sensor detecting the speed of the appendage impacting it, but that’s about it. The Professor on Gilligan’s Island had more elaborate equipment than these cock swizzles. But of course, Darth Chocoholic relents and bows to her expertise, waiting until the team finishes their first training routines – running laps and doing punching sit ups – to introduce her as the new trainer on the team.

Right about now, it’s time for a set of dueling montages. So while the Americans refine their deadly track running skills, we turn back to the land of evil back rubs to find the Koreans ball-deep in a training routine of their own. They begin on the grounds of an ancient temple, doing such incredible things as switching between basic stances and knuckle push-ups while getting hacked at with a bamboo katana, before kicking it up a notch and running out aimlessly through snow before stopping to karate chop trees with their bare hands while standing shirtless in a blizzard. Not to be outdone, we cut back to the Americans as they practice punches with the refined technique of a drunken frat boy, then jump some rope, and finally top is all off with some yoga. Goddamn it, this is getting to be too much.

What appears to be a very traditional training exercise is actually the Korean team lost in the woods, desperately needing to obtain firewood.

Sure it looks like a display of sheer physical power, but she actually nagged these bricks into finally breaking on their own.

But just as it all comes to a head, the Americans decide it’s time to do some good old fashioned brick breaking, after it’s explained that their upcoming tournament with the Koreans will involve Eastern rules, wherein a tie is settled with a competition of strength and focus, or punching a stack of bricks to be more specific. And as Wade gets up to demonstrate how even a middle aged blonde woman who’s energy is already being sapped by a losing battle with menopause can successfully smash a stack of Styrofoam bricks like a true champion, all I can do is think about what bullshit this is. Only a goddamn American film could suggest that traditional Eastern tournaments are going to involve breaking competitions as an afterthought. That’s so American that they might as well suggest that ancient tradition calls for a tie to be broken by seeing who can chug a dozen Bud Lights before rubbing one out to a Victoria’s Secret catalog the fastest.

To serve as a brief reprieve from the extensive aerobic fat-burning plan that involves just about everything BUT practice their actual fighting techniques, we are forced to sit through another completely unmotivated and entirely useless scene where Chris Penn attacks Tommy Lee’s ethnicity over a shared team meal. So that means we’re about two thirds of the way through the movie now and Chris Penn has still proven to be nothing but an asshole. Why would I be cheering for this guy in the tournament exactly? And from there, we move to a classroom where the gang sits and watches footage of the Korean team in action. As they profile each of the five fighters on the opposing team, they announce which American will be matched against them, imploring them to study their nemesis and prepare to face them. The punch line to this nonsense comes in the fact that Tommy Lee is assigned the task of taking on Dae Han, the leader of the Korean squad and international eye patch model. From his wincing reaction, it’s clear that this news has either affected Tommy deeply, or possibly that he spent the morning slamming fistfuls of expired mayonnaise down his throat, but we’re not exactly sure why. The answer comes later that night as Tommy’s dreams transport him back into the past, returning him to the death of his older brother whom, you guessed it, was fighting Dae Han in a tournament just like he wil soon being doing himself. And while we’re supposed to be digesting the dramatic implications of this obvious plot twist, I can’t help but notice that in his flashback, Tommy’s brother is wearing enough padding while fighting that he could have easily paused from the action and played the back catcher position for the 1975 New York Mets, so it’s actually kind of an amazing feat that he managed to find a way to drop dead in spite of that.

The astute viewer will notice the two guys in the back, whom are never introduced or seen again in this movie. But only the truly elite will understand that they're there solely to infuse the team with unstoppable mustache power.

The next day we get back to the action and are forced to sit through, yep, more goddamn training. After showing the Koreans jogging in slow motion, we’re treated to the film’s title track practically belched out by a faceless 80′s hair band while another American training montage kicks into high gear, this time focusing on weight lifting. Yep, weight lifting. Eventually I think they’re just going to run out of ideas and we’ll see a montage where Chris Penn makes a sandwich. But then for just a brief moment, the movie actually shows something remotely relevant as we find Tommy sparring with Chris Penn, and of course, beating him pretty badly. Never one to miss out on an opportunity to make you hate him even more, Chris Penn graciously accepts defeat by screaming that Tommy’s a chickenshit for not finishing him off. I’m not really sure what kind of a finish he expected when you’re practicing with your own teammates, but I guess that’s proof that even he would rather die than continue on with this monotonous Body Break with Hal Johnson and Joanna McCloud. After being asked what’s wrong by Darth Deepfry, Tommy sulks off and hits a punching bag to the point of exhaustion until we leave this moment of clarity and return to the dense fog of more goddamn training. This time the montage alternates between the Americans taking on the most fearsome opponents they can handle in the form of punching bags while the Koreans shadow box, and then moves on to the boys once again meditating in a field before showing the Koreans praying while standing topless underneath a giant waterfall. And just when I think we can’t possibly take anymore, it ends with a long shot of the Americans jogging down a beach together. In slow motion. FUCK.

Exhibit C: Oh Right, I Guess We Need A Plot, Huh?

His begging was somewhat undermined by Eric's spicy bean burrito-fueled belching.

To finally bring some manner of actual story back into the glorified cardio workout video that we’ve been watching for the last 30 minutes, the movie decides that now’s the time to inject some pointless and shallow drama. It all begins when Eric Roberts gets a phone call that every grown man dreads. No, not the one telling him that he’s HIV positive. And no, not the one telling him that his girlfriend has missed her period. I’m talking about a call informing his that his son has had a terrible accident. Horribly shaken, he approaches Coach Vader to explain that his son has been hit by a car and been hurt quite badly. Pleading to be allowed to go back to stay by his son’s side, he’s resolutely denied by Jimmy Earl, who declares that if Eric leaves, he will never be allowed to return. But as hilariously and unrealistically strict as this seems, Eric naturally ignores him and goes home anyways, saying that he doesn’t have a choice. He ends up staying in the hospital with his son that night, until the kid finally comes out of his coma the next morning. After a weeping bedside scene, Eric Roberts leaves his son in the hands of the professionals and sulks back to Team Rusty Trombone where he begs to be taken back, having been gone for what appears to be a whole day. But showing all the flexibility and compassion of Strom Thurman in a meat locker, JEJ stands his ground, apparently deciding that missing what was probably morning of jumping jacks is unacceptable and reaffirming that Eric is still kicked off the team. But no sooner has he stormed out in anger and disappointment than Eric’s melodrama is immediately upstaged by an even more innocuous conflict. After staring down the business end of a Dark Sith spaz attack for pulling his punches, Tommy responds by letting loose a full power kick which not only destroys their impact detecting pad, but also briefly knocks Virgil, the poor bastard holding it at the time, out cold for a short time. So like Bruce Banner after reverting back to find himself clad only in torn but oddly in tact pants, Tommy flees in the face of his hidden explosive power, leaving them all behind with mouths agape.

As the scene moves outside, Eric catches up with Tommy for some reason, just as he’s getting on his bike, ready to quit Team Rusty Trombone forever. When Eric asks what the hell he’s doing, Tommy cries out that he can’t fight Dae Han, finally sharing pain of the fate that his older brother suffered while doing the exact same thing that he is now faced with. But after incredibly standard advice about not bottling up his issues and living for himself rather than his dead brother, which is so incredibly generic that Eric might as well have just rolled out a TV with Dr. Phil on it and let it do the talking for him, Tommy remains resolute and takes off on his motorcycle. And as he drives off into the distance to do some heavy thinking, everyone who suffered through Cool As Ice with us knows what’s coming: a long montage of random bike riding on a highway to nowhere. While all this is going on, Wade finds convenient plot-moving information and confronts Coach Vader on it, demanding to know how he could send Tommy to fight Dae Han knowing that his brother was killed in the exact same circumstance. In response, Darth Potpie explodes into a lecture about giving your all, saying that Tommy Lee’s brother didn’t take the situation seriously enough and died as a result of it. As he was the coach at the time, Jimmy Earl takes personal responsibility for that failing and declares that he’ll never let it happen again. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really answer why he chose Tommy Lee to fight Dae Han specifically, as there are four other men who could have done so just as easily. So yeah, I guess the answer to that question is hhhunnggghhh (POOP)!

I'm so out of here! But before I go, can you tell me if I've got something stuck in my teeth?

Um, coach...seeing as we're just two random dudes and the guy from Footloose, you might want to reconsider taking back the movie's stars.

With their two greatest fighters gone, leaving only the sociopath and the random fodder to carry the team’s load, the remaining three members of Team Rusty Trombone approach Coach Vader, asking if he would please change his mind about Alex, because they clearly need both him and Tommy Lee to win. Well, technically they need those two to even qualify to compete, but why nitpick? Conceding the point and somehow taking that very basic logic as a sign that his men have come together as a team, J.E. Jo’ tracks down Eric back at the dorm. Apparently he agrees to come back onboard, as the movie then skips to the next day where the team is at the airport, ready to depart when Alex walks in to much ovation and half mast Johnsons. Conveniently right around that time, Tommy Lee also has an epiphany at a gas station while taking a break from what is turning out to be a ridiculously long bike trip. He watches an older brother give his ice cream cone to his younger sibling who dropped his own and is so touched by that moment that he races back just in time to catch the team at the airport. Of course, knowing what brothers are like, if he had stuck around for another 30 seconds he probably would have witnessed the older brother changing his mind, punching the younger one in the face, and taking back the ice cream, so we’ll just be thankful that he left when he did. Finally reunited and ready to experience an colossal failure, the great Team Rusty Trombone shares hugs and reach-arounds before getting on the plane and flying to meet their destiny.

Exhibit D: Failure Has Never Tasted So Arbitrary

This is Scott Parkerson reporting to you live from Seoul, South Korea. I have no idea why the fuck I'm here. Back to you, Chuck.

As the movie arrives in Korea, we travel directly to the tournament, where the boys suit up in a locker room while a black announcer sets the stage by narrating the introduction to the tournament, expounding on how Tae Kwan Do is as important to the Koreans as baseball is to Americans before going on even further to explain that this is a tournament that involves a combination of Karate, Kickboxing, Judo, and Tae Kwan Do. What?! This is supposed to be a fucking karate tournament. It doesn’t take a goddamn PhD to realize that those are all completely different martial arts, and as we’ve been told multiple times up to this point, they are the US National Karate team, not the US Every Martial Art You Can Think Of team. Shit, these fuckbuckets can barely learn one martial art, let alone four. But after one final inspirational speech that ends with Darth Tub of Ice Cream telling his men that if they give everything they have in their heart, they can be the best of the best (fuck, I love it when they state the name of the movie in the actual movie itself), the competitors come filing into the arena to face one another in the long, long, long awaited battle.

The tournament officially begins with Sonny, the greasy Italian, facing his chosen opponent. As you’d imagine, he fights with all the grace of a one-legged dog coughing out its death rattle and ends up losing, giving the Korean team an 11 to 7 lead in points after the first match. Next up is Virgil the Buddhist, and he doesn’t fare much better, eventually crawling out of the ring after handing Korean a 20 to 9 lead. And of course, the last of our less than important competitors is Chris Penn, who after all the goddamn training that we had to sit through still fights like he’s quarreling with cousin Jed over the last bar stool. But despite this, he actually manages to become the most successful American to this point, battling his opponent to a tie. And so we move to the previously mentioned brick smashing tie breaker. Mustering all of his racism-fueled might, Chris breaks around 8 Styrofoam bricks, while the much smaller and theoretically weaker Korean dude breaks 9, proving in spades that the supposed raw power that Chris was recruited for came in about as useful as a passionate love for bee keeping. So just to recap, that’s 3 losses out of 5 fights so far and only one of them was even close. I’m not sure who the fuck it is they were referring to when they named this movie Best Of The Best, but it’s extremely apparent that it wasn’t any one of these assclowns. Maybe it was the catering staff…

What makes Chris Penn's loss in this contest even more humiliating is that the other guy used his penis to smash his bricks.

Only seconds before the fist smashed his nose across his face, Eric Roberts finally realizes that he's not auditioning for So You Think You Can Dance Korea.

With the lesser peons quickly out of the way, the movie finally picks up as Eric Roberts makes his way into the ring, even going so far as to show us a random bar in the US where a throng of drunken onlookers are cheering and drinking, proving this to be a monumental occasion for at least a couple of dozen people. It might even be important enough to rival the viewership of last year’s lumberjack championship. Just before the match finally starts, Eric declares that he’s going to kick his opponent’s ass. Really, Eric? I thought you were there to crochet him an ill-fitting sweater out of wool and an undeserved sense of self satisfaction. Once the fight actually begins, Eric starts to close the gap between the teams’ points fairly quickly before things start to even out in the second round. It continues to flow along fairly evenly until Eric gets knocked down and takes an axe kick to the back. It appears to be a fairly unremarkable moment until he crawls back to his corner and reveals that he’s injured that bum shoulder that everyone was warned about. But being a man of steel, brawn, and high fiber content, ignores the calls for him to quit, telling him that it’s over. He knows, just as the announce tells us, that the rules state that if he cannot continue, all the points that he had gained are forfeit, which doesn’t make any goddamn sense, but whatever. Instead Eric begs for someone to pop his shoulder back into place until someone finally does. But it’s not exactly like he’s back to peak physical condition at that point, so rather than letting it hang uselessly at his side, he demands that someone “tape it up” while literally screaming like a girl. They do exactly that, taping his arm to his chest before he heads out for the last 30 seconds of the fight with the use of only one arm. And not only does he manage to survive that time, but he actually manages to fight better than he did with two hands, capping it off by kicking his opponent out of the fucking ring. As his bout comes to an end, we see that the score has narrowed to a mere 29 to 22.

Much to my chagrin, the final match of the tournament is not between a back massager and 1975 Buick Skylark, but is instead, of course, between Tommy Lee and De Han. Tommy is tentative at first, so in return Dae Han starts kicking his ass, scoring three unanswered points before his opponent finally decides to wake up. Fulfilling yet another 80′s martial arts movie stereotype, once the fight actually begins to climax it consists of little more than a lot of needless jumping around and horribly telegraphed kicks. But Tommy Lee finally starts to kick some ass, ending the first round down a measly 6 points instead of a whopping 7. If that’s not fucking progress, I don’t know what is. Just before the second round starts, Darth Pudding reminds Tommy that they need to either make up those points or score a knock out. Alright, at this point this whole plot is pretty blatantly not making any goddamn sense. If he knocks out his opponent, why would that arbitrarily make up the point difference between the two teams? Even if you disregarded points and decided that specific match was a total victory, the Koreans have still won more matches than they have. Honestly, at this point I’m surprised it isn’t stated that they only way the Americans can win is if Tommy Lee performs the infamous Triple Lindy. But the second round starts with a little more spice, as Tommy Lee takes two illegal hits, first to the balls and then to an eye. But that only spurs him on further, as Tommy continues to make up ground closing the gap by hitting Dae Han with a flurry of 5 punches and/or kicks that for some reason only count as 1 point. But after his flurry of pain reduces the point difference to one and leaves Dae Han standing dazed, just begging to be hit with one final killing blow, Tommy has a flashback of his brother’s death and begins to let his anger boil to the surface. Spotting the signs of his coming eruption, Eric and Jimmy Earl start yelling “no” from the sidelines, knowing that Tommy not only intends on murdering his opponent, but also actually believing that he somehow can do just that with a single strike. But rather than somehow proving the incredibly unlikely, Tommy manages to maintain enough control to resist the urge and simply stand there, letting the time run out. When the buzzer finally sounds to bring an end to the match, the Korean team scurries out to drag De Han back to his corner, while a somber Tommy walks back to Captain J.E. Jo’, who tells him that despite standing back and allowing his team to lose by a single point, he actually won that match. So yeah, all that and they lost. Wow. What a massive waste of time this entire ordeal has been.

Don't worry, dude. That asshole would never let me play with his Legos, so we're cool.

The tournament then comes to a glorious close with the traditional medal ceremony, where the two teams stand lined up and facing one another as the Americans are forced to watch the gold medals get hung around the Korean team’s necks. But while his teammates begin to celebrate their victory, De Han limps over to Tommy Lee. Barely containing his sobs, Dae Han tells him that to save a life in defeat is to earn a victory in honor, which we’ll just go ahead and translate into “thanks for not destroying my ass”, before declaring that his brother was a great fighter. He continues to say that he deeply regrets Tommy’s loss, and offers himself as Tommy’s brother, which, again, I’ll just go ahead and translate into “want to build a fort out of some couch cushions?”. In a move of ultimate humble respect, Dae Han then puts his medal around Tommy’s neck while they both bawl like kids flocking out of Transformers: The Movie after watching Optimus Prime die. Finding the ability to forgive somewhere just below his ability to make a delicious quiche, Tommy embraces Dae Han and all is right in the world again. Much like the audience in that stadium, I find this so touching that I’m pretty sure this movie just molested me. The Korean dude that Eric Roberts fought is inspired to honor his lesser opponent as well, walking up to him and saying that he knows everything about him before also putting his medal around his neck. Eric Roberts replies by saying that he knows all he ever wants to know about his opponent, which I think is supposed to be a compliment even though it seems like a really shitty thing to say. The last three Koreans then follow suit as well, only much more quickly and with less fanfare since no one gives a shit before the movie draws to a close with them all stand together, holding each others arms up in the air just before the credits roll. So I guess when you’re not actually the best of the best, you can always hope for sympathy.

That's right folks...in the Special Olympics, everyone's a winner.

The Verdict:

Donkey: Best Of The Best has the truly great quality of not falling completely flat on its face because of a lack of budget or talent, but entirely because of the very premise on which it builds. Eric Roberts is the somewhat leader of the US National Karate team which spends almost no time actually practicing anything that is even close to actual karate while under the watchful eye of a man whom clearly doesn’t even know how to spell karate, before heading over to Korea to fight in a tournament that they never actually explain the point of, where they face off against only one other team and manage to lose quite badly by any reasonable measure. Fuck. This movie really did push me to the very edge of literary skills, as it’s hard to write any kind of coherent exposition on it when the only thought running through my rather stunned mind for an hour and a half was, “BULLSHIT!” But while I applaud it’s aggressively insane plot, the problem is that watching a movie that consists just as much of random exercise montages as anything else gets painfully boring. I have to give this movie three and a half inappropriately low cut sweaters out of five confusingly dead brothers.

What We Learned:

Donkey: People in the 80′s apparently thought you could basically become a full fledged ninja after doing little more than panting your way through the Sweating To The Oldies series.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: a break from the pain, as we approach the end of the year in reflection of what we have endured and assist you with the approaching holiday season by delivering…A SHITTY MOVIE BUYER’S GUIDE OF BALL DRAINING GLORY.

Back To The Main Page.

If a movie could be judged purely on its poster alone, this one would be bad-ass. Unfortunately that all changes the moment you press play.

Donkey: There are a lot of things about growing up that suck. Eating an entire meal consisting of candy is discouraged. Kicking and screaming in a department store until someone buys you a toy will earn you some strange looks, possibly even criminal charges. And in certain countries, coloring outside the lines is punishable by gang rape. But there are certain things that do get better with age, and one of those things is the ability to handle disappointment. When I was a kid, I sat in my bed one Christmas Eve and silently decided that what I wanted most in the world was a Chewbacca action figure. Of course, making that decision on the spot meant that I hadn’t shared that information with my parents, and for some reason I decided that because I had been good that year, if I didn’t get Chewbacca then Santa Clause didn’t exist. Don’t ask me why I had suddenly jogged down that path of reasoning, but nevertheless, there I was. So the next morning when I woke up and there wasn’t a Chewbacca to be found, I truly came to realize that Santa Clause didn’t exist. Of course, if I had paid closer attention, there were actually a lot more telling signs of the truth than that. Like the time that my mother told my younger brother that Santa wasn’t getting him the Play-Do Barbershop set that he wanted because, and I quote, “Santa thinks that’s stupid.” Or even more obviously, if I had bothered to look carefully enough I would have noticed that all the tags on our gifts had “From Santa” written on them in my mother’s handwriting. But regardless, the sting of disappointment is crippling when you’re young and a dream is destroyed.

That’s a sting that I felt again some years later, when I first laid eyes on this week’s movie, Darkman. Having never heard of it when it was in the theaters, which wasn’t surprising as I didn’t go to the theaters much as a child, the first time I laid eyes on it was in a video store. After being enticed by the cover, I read the synopsis on the back of the box and saw a lot of promise, deciding then and there that I had to see this movie. I mean, come on. Look up at that cover. Pretty bad ass, huh? But this was back in the day when video stores were actually really popular and didn’t carry 4,276 copies of most new movies, so getting your hands on a copy took a lot of dedication. But I stuck it out, checking weekend after weekend until I finally managed to finally grasp it in my eager paws and convince my parents to rent it. Needless to say from the tone of this diatribe thus far and the fact that it made an appearance on this site, the movie turned out to be one massive punch in the balls. And while I’ve developed a thick, cynical, yet highly exfoliated skin since that day which would allow me to handle this all too frequent stomach-churning pain, I was undeniably devastated. So before we get started, I’d just like to say from the bottom of my heart: Fuck you, Darkman.

Whew. That feels a little better. But that being said, it’s time to share my disappointment…

The Plot:

Donkey: After becoming unknowingly entangled in the dark underworld of a zoning commission bribery scandal so shocking that it wouldn’t be deemed worthy of even a three sentence blurb next to the tranny escort ad section at the back of a local newspaper, Dr. Peyton Westlake is attacked and left for dead by a gang of ruthless, bloodthirsty thugs, so common in the real estate development world. Horribly burned, mentally unbalanced, and unable to feel pain – which comes in handy not only in battling enemies but also in protecting him from the sting of his own horrible acting – Peyton is fortunate enough that he just happens to be performing research in the field of synthetic skin at the time. Morphing into the shameful lovechild of The Watchmen’s Rorschach and The Saint, Peyton is reborn as Darkman, the masked enigma out for revenge or possibly large quantities of aloe.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Exhibit A: Evil Rides The Short Bus

I'll see your henchmen and your cars and raise you henchmen IN cars IN a box! Checkmate, motherfucker!

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. Anyways, this dude plays a criminal mastermind named Durant. After rolling up to a warehouse meeting with what appears to be a group of evil longshoremen, he and his small gang are frisked and stripped of all their weapons, which happens to include brass knuckles and nunchuks. For those of you keeping score, yes, that means that this gang should then consist of a retard leading a 1920’s street hoodlum and a ninja, but sadly that is an image that will have to stay doodled in the notepad that I use during meetings at work as it’s not the case here. Once determined to be clean, they’re taken inside to meet the black businessman leader of the longshoremen who happens to be named – awesomely – Black. He declares that he has no intention of selling his property and kindly offers to remove the gangs’ balls for them. In response, Durant motions to one of his thugs, a man who looks kind of like Jerry Cantrell if Jerry had dedicated his life to the skin-flute rather than the guitar. Jerry in turn pulls the wooden leg off of one of the other thugs and reveals it to be a hidden gun, which he starts firing randomly. After waiting for a dozen or so of his men to be gunned down, Black yells for his crew to “take them down”. Suddenly two cars bust out of massive wooden crates that are just sitting in the middle of the warehouse and starting tearing around the place, driving with no particular purpose as more crusty dockworkers fire Uzis out their windows. So just to be clear, those were just sitting in there the whole time? “Killer and Bonecrusher, you two patrol the perimeter today. Ice and Jawbreaker, you two pull the Chevys into the crates and just…wait.” After an incredibly brief and confusing firefight, all the longshoremen, who clearly outnumbered Durant’s men by over ten times, are dead while not a single man in Durant’s gang is sporting so much as a paper cut. But to end the scene in style, Durant has Black dragged over to him where he proceeds to cut his fingers off one by one with his cigar cutter.

Exhibit B: The Recipe For A Hero, Now With 25 Percent More Ass

Who knew that the same product that you made an imprint of your penis with just to freak out your friends would actually have a scientific use one day?

From there the movie has us sit through a standard roll of introductory credits, which appear over the finest fog that a Hollywood smoke machine budget can buy while a theme song by Danny Elfman reinforces the Batman rip-off image of this film so blatantly that Darkman’s nemesis might as well have been called The Not-Joker. We’re then introduced to the title character, Peyton “Darkman” Westlake, played by Liam Neeson, who for some reason spends the entire movie trying to shed his Irish accent by coupling a ridiculous voice with acting that alternates between animated, manic cheer and spine-shattering rage, almost like Grover with a Meth addiction. He begins in his laboratory where he’s carrying out research on manufactured synthetic skin, producing it with the sweetest unrelated computer displays and holographic technology available in 1990. In other words, he’s spliced together a SNES, a modified version of Sega’s arcade game Time Traveler, and one of those shitty Pin Art toys found in novelty shops to create rubber masks. Thrilling! But his success in creating the skin is short-lived as its cells consistently rupture after 99 minutes causing them to melt like ice near the flaming wreckage of Joey Lawrence’s singing career.

But when you work hard, you’ve got to play hard, so after Peyton and his lab assistant scratch their balls in confusion for long a few moments, the movie jumps straight to that evening where he kicks back and watches a slideshow with his girlfriend Julie, played by Frances McDormand. I’m not exactly sure what would possess two people to voluntarily engage in an activity usually seen as a torture that’s inflicted by visiting relatives who want to share their horribly depressing vacation memories, but somehow it gets the two of them so turned on that they make the semi-passionate yet hip-sensitive love of a bored elderly couple watching the hours slip away in a retirement home. Tasty. But the plot wastes no time in thickening, as the next morning while they get dressed, Julie yammers to someone on the phone about a memo that she found and suspects that she wasn’t supposed to see. And just as is so obviously going to happen, she departs for work and accidentally leaves it by Peyton’s bed, laying on foreshadowing that couldn’t any thicker if the title of that memorandum had been “YOUR ASS WILL GET KILLED FOR HAVING THIS: A 30 Caliber Corporate Report On Capturing Market Share”. Following her out as she tries to catch a cab, Peyton suggests that they get married with as much romantic flare as he would probably use to suggest that they order a pizza or she gets checked for herpes. Understandably unmoved by this, Julie she says she has to think about it, leaving Peyton to continue the streak of abject failure that he’s established so far.

Hold on to your hat, baby. After this we play an erotic game of Bridge.

If being a remarkably shitty movie villain is a crime, even he knows that he should be in jail.

Our tour of Obvious Periltown, USA continues in the next scene as Julie arrives at work and practically begs to be killed by confronting her boss, a slimy little man named Strack, by saying that she had found the memo detailing bribes paid to the zoning commission. As a brief side note, that might just be evidence of the dumbest goddamn crime that I’ve ever seen someone implicated of in a movie. Seriously, I would have preferred if Strack had been a politician accused of gerrymandering, because redistricting your constituency for personal gain couldn’t possibly be any less interesting than this, plus it would give me a more credible reason to use the awesome word “gerrymandering” rather than just sneaking it into a paragraph twice with flimsy justification. Suck it, bitches! But Strack treats this matter as seriously as it deserves by immediately admitting to the crime with less guilt in his voice than if he were detailing how he had extra bacon with his breakfast that morning, asking her to understand that his dream of a massive real estate development down by the city’s old waterfront is worth facilitating with the occasional distasteful act. So in other words, he’s telling her that he’s sucked a lot of dick lately. But rather than just shutting the fuck up and letting the issue drop like any rational person would, Julie insists that doesn’t change the fact that she’s holding the evidence of a crime before going on to let him know that she left it at Peyton’s place. Trying one last time to make her see reason, Strack warns that he’s just trying to protect her from a rival named Durant, a drug dealer/real estate developer, who is competing for the riverfront property and will do anything he can to get it. Of course, if we’re to go by the precedent that Strack has set, this threat probably won’t amount to much more than a strongly worded letter or possibly a motion with City Council, but we’ll just pretend it sounds pretty menacing anyways.

Having established the extremely mild, not entirely noteworthy threat that Peyton has unwittingly stumbled onto a collision course with, the wait for the resulting flaming wreckage turns out to be a relatively brief one. Later that night a mishap with a fuse results in Peyton and his lab assistant discovering that light is the catalyst that is destroying their fake skin. But before they can celebrate their rather modest accomplishment with high fives, awkward glances, and clumsy reach-arounds, Peyton turns to answer a ringing phone and comes face to face with Durant and his gang. Surprisingly, rather than offering to resolve their differences through non-violent conflict mediation as so many villainous gangs in movies are apt to do, the gang instead decides to beat Peyton within an inch of his unremarkable life while demanding that he reveal the location of the memo. But of course, Peyton doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about since he was too busy that morning scrubbing medicated chap-stick and Ben-Gay off his junk to notice the memo that Julie left behind. Eventually they manage to find it on their own anyways, but just like strangling a hooker in the back of a cargo van, once you’ve started the job, you might as well take it all the way. So after attempting to perform a root canal on the lab assistant using a revolver, electrocuting Peyton’s hands with the most glorious claymation I’ve seen since a box of dancing raisins sang Christmas carols to me, and pushing his face into what appears to be a vat of corrosive acid that I can’t imagine any credible reason for having, the gang finally leaves Peyton broken and battered to grapple with a homemade bomb. But just to make things as unnecessarily complicated and unlikely to succeed as possible, the “bomb” in this case is a drinking bird toy that is seconds away from striking a lighter next to a spewing gas tank. As Peyton crawls towards the idiotic apparatus of doom, Julie approaches the building along the street outside, convincing herself to marry this retarded muppet just as a massive explosion rips through the lab above her. She stands in stunned silence, too busy mentally cancelling all the wedding invitations to notice the screaming, flaming form of Peyton that rockets out of the goddamn blaze and lands in the river across the street. I can’t quite describe the hilarity of this moment, but rest assured that we were forced to skip back and watch it several times while laughing our asses off while making the attempt.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!

After employing the most exceptionally mediocre effects that could be found in 1990 to morph Julie from standing before the flaming building to standing in front of Peyton’s grave, the movie briefly glimpses at Peyton’s funeral that quite noticeably does not have a single person in attendance other than her, indicating that Peyton must have been a far bigger taint stain than we had suspected. I mean, shit, even a psychotic pedophile that smelled like burnt cheese is still probably going to be mourned by the guys down at the candy shop and clown costume boutique for having been their best customer. But with that peek into the distinct lack of mourning of his passing, the film turns back to the screaming rocket that was Peyton, bandaged from head to toe and strapped into a rotating bed in a hospital after having been dredged from the river. A young doctor explains to a group of students observing him that Peyton was brought in without any ID and has burns over 40 percent of his body, so to prevent him from screaming constantly or becoming enticed by the Honey Mustard barbeque smell of his own extremities, they have severed strategic sensory connections so that he can longer feel pain or smell deliciously cooked meat. But the doctor continues by discussing some of the side effects of this procedure, warning that a lack of tactile sensation causes the brain to amplify other inputs, resulting in him being susceptible to heightened rage, loneliness, and spurts of adrenaline that give him super strength. So just to be clear, they have decided to bring him back from the brink of death to carry out the rest of his very limited existence as a manic depressive flame-broiled chicken wing on steroids. What a goddamn treat! I guess the best we can hope for is that they washed the KY off their hands from butt-fucking their Hippocratic Oath before they operated on Peyton, or he might also end up with a nasty case of Pink Eye. And just to prove my point, the doctor walks away with her students in tow, joking that she’d “give him a 9 on the buzzard scale”. But that mocking stirs something deep within Peyton, whose eyes snap open to experiences a whacky series of visions, prompting him to break out of his restraints and escape out a nearby hospital window.

Darkman awoke the next morning, not understanding why he spent the entire night dreaming about pissing his pants.

Lost, confused, and doing his best impression of an Egyptian Mummy that has recently attacked a family cookout, Peyton wanders through a torrential downpour, stumbling through an alley where he finds a trench coat that most assuredly smells like a chemical toilet on Undercooked Indian Food Night before walking out onto the street where Julie is very conveniently strolling along by herself. But of course when he stumbles up and grabs her from behind, what was supposed to be a heartwarming reunion that touches our heart more profoundly than the episode of Full House where Uncle Joey teaches the girls about sharing through mullet-fueled mishaps is shattered when she cries out in terror, somehow unable to recognize him through the jacket, bandages, and 11 herbs and spices. Of course, it doesn’t really help that his speech is more slurred than a rabid bulldog with a mouthful of cottage cheese. Dejected, Peyton takes refuge in an alley that night, choosing for some reason to sleep directly beneath a downspout that’s hitting him with so much water that you’d think he was auditioning to be a mesquite scented Slip-N-Slide. I realize that he can’t feel pain, but that’s not going to stop him from choking up a deep-fried lung during a fatal bout of pneumonia.

With the full realization that life as he knew it no longer exists, it’s time for Peyton to transform from an exceptionally underdeveloped and unsympathetic character to the masked crusader of mentally challenged vengeance, Darkman. And to do that, he’ll need to follow the same basic steps that all truly great and exceptionally asstastic heroes abide:

Step 1: Set Up A Base Of Operations, Preferably Outside Of Your Mom’s Basement

After waking up and exploring the ruins of his old lab the next morning, Darkman salvages through scorched equipment that, by right, shouldn’t function in any capacity. Seriously, I’ve accidentally bumped an external hard drive off a two inch drop and had it stop working, so computer equipment that has burn holes in it should fail at every task so badly that it can’t even catch on fire again. Regardless, Darkman loads all of it into a rickety shopping cart, or the Darkmobile, if you will, and hauls it to what appears to be an abandoned industrial factory. With a nod of satisfaction, he begins the process of setting up his shitty version of the Batcave, which we would call…the Darkcave? That’s so fucking stupid that even Aquaman would be ashamed to call it home, which sounds just about right. After managing to get electricity flowing again by throwing a few switches, which is quite a feat since you’d think any power company not run by a team of chimps in business suits and Richard Greco would have stopped supplying power to an abandoned building a long time ago, he attempts to construct a mask of his own face using a damaged photograph. But in order for his machine to complete the mask using the incomplete image, he must replace the damaged section of his face by mirroring the other side, a task that would take a modern computer about two seconds. True to the reality of 1990, his machine tells him that it will take 571 hours to complete the process. Sweet. Just don’t try to check your email while it’s working or that shit will lock up for another 3 months. With nothing but time on his hands, Darkman returns to his research into maintaining the synthetic skin’s integrity in the sunlight as random objects fly around him in the background for no goddamn reason. Apparently Sam Raimi takes the concept of time flying by just a little too literally. But just when we think that life will return to normal for this loveable chemically imbalanced charcoal briquette, he has a little breakdown in the middle of his research when his hand accidentally catches on fire after coming too close to a nearby open flame that he keeps running for reasons I can’t imagine. Looking down at his flame-broiled paws, he begins to blubber about how they took his hands, crying out dramatically. Yikes. If he gets that upset when noticing that his hands have been ravaged by fire, I don’t want to be there when he looks down the front of his pants.

Step 2: REVENGE!

Untalented.

Victim 1 – Nepotism: While spying on Julie, and possibly trying to rub out a batch of baby batter, at an absolutely random formal dress party where she confesses to Strack that the bribe memo that they had discussed earlier was TOTALLY NOT SUSPICIOUSLY destroyed in the fire at Peyton’s place, Darkman notices the presence of Durant and one of his henchmen, played by Ted Raimi. I love Ted Raimi. Without appearing in his brother’s movies, Ted Raimi’s film career would be such a runaway success that he’d have to fight tooth and nail to be stocking feminine hygiene products part-time at a Wal-Mart. But upon seeing the villains again for the first time, Darkman has another brief series of flashbacks of his near death experience. Enraged, he follows as Ted wanders out into an alley alone for some reason, before grabbing him by the face and taking him down into the sewer. Unless Ted’s got a scat fetish or is in fact a Ninja Turtle, things aren’t looking good for him. But even we couldn’t have seen what was coming, as after interrogating him for all the information he can pertaining to Durant’s crew, Darkman smashes Ted’s head up through a manhole, holding his screaming face at street level until he’s eventually hit by a car. Wow. Even if you believe that Darkman could manage to muster the strength to pop off a manhole cover, the force of the impact would smash Ted Raimi’s head as flat as his acting abilities. And here I thought death by drinking bird was as turderiffic as it could possibly get.

Darkman's ultimate revenge: making them all smell his skid marks.

Victim 2 – Generic Fat Guy: Soon after his first successful hit, Darkman witnesses two other members of Durant’s gang swapping a briefcase of money with one another over lunch. It’s confusing enough that they’d be handing money to themselves, but they take it even further and prove to be criminal masterminds by not only exchanging large sums of money in a public place while seated right next to a fucking window, but also compounding their brilliance by discreetly swapping briefcases under the table on the goddamn window side, making it perfectly visible to Darkman as he takes pictures of the exchange using random camera equipment that we have no idea how he managed to get his hands on. Formulating an unnecessarily complicated plane, he focuses in on the recipient of the money specifically, a short fat Telly Savalas-looking motherfucker named Pauly, snapping off enough pictures of him for both the skin replication process and his vigilante scrapbooking seminar. After successfully creating a mask identical to Pauly’s face and sneaking into his apartment to drug him with ether while he sleeps, Darkman then stands by a mirror, taking off his bandages to reveal not only that he looks exactly like Pauly, but also what may be the single biggest flaw with this movie. Even if you overlook the fact that he somehow manages to mirror the voice of his victims perfectly, which is already bullshit on a stick, how does a guy who is 6 foot 4 inches tall put on a simple mask and suddenly have not only the identical face but also body of a fat dude just over 5 feet tall? Regardless, he returns to the same restaurant again and takes part in an identical cash exchange, with no one being the wiser as to his true identity. Naturally, Durant notices some time later that the cash has gone missing, so he breaks into Pauly’s apartment and demands to know where the money is just before finding two first class plane tickets to Rio, registered to Pauly and the already deceased Ted Raimi. Pauly, who wakes up on his bed fully clothed in a leisure suit, of course pleads ignorance before being tossed out the window and falling to his death.

Step 3: Shallow Inflection Followed By Half-Hearted Attempts At Redemption

I like to do my brooding in front of a backdrop from the Wal-Mart photography studio, too.

After an absolutely horribly blue screen shot of Darkman sitting on a rooftop between two gargoyles while reflecting on the monster that he’s becoming, because apparently a basic nighttime roof shot is too goddamn hard to film without the use of shitty special effects, Darkman returns to his lab to continue his research before spazzing at a random stray cat and dancing the most hated-filled jig that he can muster. I would describe this jaw-dropping display as ridiculous, but then I just remember Toby McGuire’s dance scene in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3, which is about as painful as being attached by schizophrenic drifter wielding a rusty chainsaw laced with hepatitis C, making this look far more reasonable by comparison. But his Temper Tango does little to sate his bloodlust, so be begins smashing random shit with a pipe, all the while having more flashbacks, until finally reigning himself in long enough to notice that his super computer has finally completed the reconstruction of his own facial image. Finally able to look like himself again, at least for 99 minutes at a time, Darkman immediately seeks out Julie, finding her while she’s visiting his grave. He approaches her, revealing that he’s not dead, and after some initial hesitation, they embrace as he mumbles some incoherent nonsense about needing time. From there they end up sharing a hot cup of insanity at an outdoor café where, using all the power of terrible, terrible acting, Peyton asks what she’d do if the explosion had left him horribly scarred before ignoring the fact that she dodges the question and giggling like he’s watching Hey Vern! It’s Ernest.

If I only had a brain...

Step 4: More Fucking REVENGE!

Whoa, hey...if you're going to do a close up, shoot me from the right. That's my good side.

Victim 3 – Well, Nobody Actually: After that brief romantic interlude that makes a strong case for abstinence, Darkman returns to his quest for blood, once again using methods that really beg an explanation despite not getting one, as he taps into Durant’s home phone line to listen in on a call about collecting on a debt in Chinatown the next day. But rather than just knocking on his door right at that moment and killing Durant with insanity-fueled super strength, it’s time once again for a needlessly complicated plan as the movie cuts to a security camera in a random convenience store that captures Durant clearly identifying himself directly into the camera while robbing the clerk. Predictably, the cops show up at Durant’s door the next day and arrest him while Darkman takes his place, joining the rest of the gang as they visit a man in Chinatown who claims to be unable to pay the money he owes. And while the real Durant finally posts bail and rushes to catch up with the rest of his crew, Darkman sits and listens to this Chinese guy ramble on and on incessantly, unsure of what he should do. By the time the old man finally finishes blabbering, Darkman sits down and simply demands the money by the time he finishes a cigar, cutting it down to a mere nub before holding a the match under his hand and burning himself without flinching. Somehow this convinces the old man, who is standing with his own bodyguards, including the guy who played Professor Sub-Zero in The Running Man, to relent and agree to hand over the cash rather than simply shoot them all in the head. Moments later as the real Durant jumps out of a cab and runs into a revolving door on his way into the meeting, Darkman attempts to exit out of the door at the same time. This leads to a few seconds of comic hilarity that hasn’t been fresh since the silent movie era as the two Durants (or Durant Durant, if you will) look at one another in confused silence before jumping out of the door and grappling in a predictable and stale “don’t shoot me, shoot him” scene. But after slapping down the real Durant and reprimanding the other gang members for not shooting when told to, Darkman’s ruse comes to an end when his stopwatch strikes the 100 minute mark and face begins to melt. With no other choice, he simply runs like hell, vanishing in a crowd and leaving the gang very confused as to what the hell the point of all that was. Fucked if I know.

Worst Double Mint commercial ever.

Step 5: Don’t Forget To Try To Get Laid

How the fuck are we supposed to react to a shot this bad?

At that point the movie turns to a carnival where Darkman is showing Julie a delightful, fun-filled afternoon, provided that you would consider laughing like a lobotomy patient at nothing in particular to be fun. Realizing that the time he has left in his face skin is quickly running out, Darkman declares that he should go to. But for reasons I can’t imagine, Julie begs him to stay, pleading for them to have more time together. But before Darkman even bothers to come up with an excuse as to why he can’t stick around for much longer, he’s distracted by a freak show a short distance away. After some careful inflection, he shifts gears faster than a NASCAR driver with a cocaine addiction, deciding to win her a doll at a nearby carnie game. After knocking down the stack of bottles and asking for a pink elephant as a prize, the carnie shrugs him off, saying that he was disqualified because he wasn’t behind a line painted on the ground. At that moment the scene starts to get abruptly dramatic as Darkman begins to rage internally, like he just walked in on someone raping his mom. And yet the tension that his behavior attempts to build is completely undercut by the carnie’s ridiculously calm dismissal of him, creating this drastic juxtaposition that only highlights how irrational both characters are. But the moment comes to a head seconds later when the carnie calls Darkman a weirdo. This sets off, quite literally, an explosive response inside Darkman, who responds by grabbing the carnie’s hand and breaking his fingers. Or at least that would be what he was doing if it weren’t horribly fucking obviously a rubber hand that he’s simply bending. As he, the carnie, and Julie all scream at the completely uncalled for level of aggression, Darkman finishes his ‘roid rage by tossing the carnie through the back wall of his game shack before ramming a stuffed animal in Julie’s hands and cursing at her for good measure. But before she can react to his clear insanity, he reaches the 100 minute mark of wearing the mask and his face once again begins to melt, prompting him to run off into the crowd while screaming for her to forgive him. Apparently quite willing to enter into an abusive relationship with a smoked turkey bone, Julie chases him all the way back to his factory lair where he runs in blubbering like a school girl who just found out that unicorns aren’t real. And once she enters the building behind him, she finds his equipment and his Peyton mask, looking around desperately for him as Darkman sulks quietly behind a nearby stack of crates. Before giving up her pursuit, she yells that he should have told her, that she could have helped him. Lady, unless you’re into getting punched out by a walking corpse in a clown wig, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t help him.

Oh yes, right. Exactly like this.

Psssttt...I love Right Said Fred.

From there Julie heads straight back to the office where she tells Strack that she can no longer see him as Peyton is now back in her life. This of course, implies that the two of them were seeing one another up to this point, which in turn means that her moral standards were so strict that she couldn’t ignore this dude bribing a zoning commission, but she’d still fuck him despite it. That kind of hypocritical integrity makes me grow a big rubbery one. But as Strack steps away for a moment to answer a phone call, Julie snoops around his desk and finds the cursed memo. Yes, that’s right. The villain in this movie is enough of an intellectual powerhouse that he not only drafted the details or bribery that he was carrying out into memo form, but after having someone killed to retrieve it, he then just left said memo sitting around on his desk despite the fact that he knew damn well what his new girlfriend would think the moment she saw it. Trust me; try to follow the logic necessary to see his motives and you’ll end up shitting your pants while repeatedly singing the chorus of David Lee Roth’s Just A Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody. But to his credit, at least Strack as consistent in not bothering to hide the slightest detail of his scheming, as he once again openly admits to everything, explaining that he had Durant and his men kill Peyton so that word of his bribery would not leak and jeopardize his development project. And to needlessly emphasize his point, he opens a set of retractable blinds covering a huge bay window to reveal the construction of his site, with several skyscrapers almost complete. She looks out in awe like she’s never seen this before, despite the fact that you couldn’t get within several miles of the building that they’re standing in without seeing the construction of multiple skyscrapers a short distance away. With nothing left to say, Julie flees as fast as possible, leaving Strack to call Durant into the room to deliver the news that Julie has discovered their alliance and that Darkman is still alive.

Step 6: No Seriously, Even More Fucking REVENGE!

Victim 4 & 5 – The Random Leftovers: With nowhere else to turn, except for maybe to the police or pretty much anyone else would could actually help, Julie returns to Darkman’s lair, yelling up at him as he watches from a window. But just then, car loads of Durant’s men suddenly surround her as goons start firing up at him. They grab Julie and throw her in a car, taking off as Darkman runs along rooftops trying to keep up. But before he has the chance to undoubtedly fail in his pursuit, Durant shows up in a helicopter, firing a grenade launcher at Darkman, apparently not the least bit concerned that his lack of subtlety should likely draw the attention of every cop not shoving a doughnut down his throat within a 300 mile radius. After managing to outrun explosions for a rather ridiculous amount of time, Darkman finally ducks back inside his factory lair just as two of Durant’s goons come in to get him. He decides to fuck with minds a little bit, running around and laughing at them from the non-shadows that shouldn’t really be able to hide anyone since it’s the middle of the afternoon. Finally he lunges down on one of them, leaving only the Jerry Cantrell wannabe. But as Jerry stands nervously looking around, a man wearing a mask that is I guess is supposed to look like him comes running in his direction. Jerry knocks the mystery dude down and pulls off the mask to reveal what is supposed to be Peyton. But after shooting the supposed Peyton dead, Jerry realizes that this dude is wearing yet another mask. When he pulls it off, he finally sees that it was actually his fellow gang member, bound with duct tape over his mouth. As Jerry stands back up to absorb the situation, Darkman wanders up in yet another Jerry mask, smiling at the real Jerry like a child molester before finally containing him and leaving him to die in a fiery explosion.

Sweet Jesus...is my hair really that tragic?

I'd like to humbly suggest that it would be harder to judge the distance necessary to dangle him in traffic like that than it would be just to fly 10 feet lower and drag his ass along the pavement.

Victim 6 – The King Of The Special Olympics: While all this is going on inside Darkman’s lair, Durant has his pilot land the helicopter and is about to get out when Darkman starts to grapple with him. The helicopter rises back into the air just as Darkman gets kicked off, falling to his doom only to catch a random hook that the helicopter is hauling around at the end of a long cable. I’d ask why the fuck that would possibly be there, but at this point that would be like complaining that the corn inside the shit you’re eating was canned instead of frozen. Anyways, Durant spends the next 10 minutes flying all over the city, making incredibly lackluster attempts to shake Darkman off the hook or ram him into shit. This scene goes way too long and is completely unremarkable until finally they lower the helicopter low enough that Darkman is forced to run along the roof of an truck head towards him in oncoming traffic while Durant begins to fire grenades down at him. But the idiocy comes to a crashing end moments later when Darkman manages to the hook to the trailer of a random truck, just before it’s about to head into a tunnel. With no chance of escape, the helicopter smashes into the entrance of the tunnel as Durant himself meets a fiery end.

Victim 7 – The Real Estate Developer Of Madness: That night a very healthy looking Durant meets with Strack and Julie at the new construction site, heading up to a high, unfinished floor that is nothing more than a steel framework. As they all jump around on steel girders, Strack yanks the mask off of Durant to reveal Darkman before delivering a speech conforming to the exceptionally high level of ridiculousness that we’ve come to expect from the film and then revealing that he brought Darkman up there to recruit him. But of course Darkman’s response is to lunge at Strack, initiating a struggle that only last a few seconds before the one random thug that accompanied them tosses Julie off the side of the building. She falls several floors, but before she can meet her much deserved end, the ropes used to bind her hands together catch on some steel rebar, leaving her dangling like a damsel tied to a set of train tracks. Getting down to business, Darkman takes out the random goon using one of the many random hooks that happens to be hanging on ropes. But as he turns to face Strack, he discovers that Strack has managed to get his hands on a rather massive rivet gun, which he begins firing at Darkman while slowly approaching him. I have such a hard time believing that Strack could actually lift a rivet gun like that, let alone actually fire it without flying off his tenuous footing from the recoil, that he might as well have been firing guinea pigs at Darkman and I wouldn’t have found it to be any more idiotic. But finally as Strack closes the gap, he hits home, riveting one of Darkman’s hands to the Steel beam behind him. But then of course Strack makes the mistake of passing on the opportunity to put a rivet right between Darkman’s eye, opting instead to taunt him about being a freak. And since we know that basic taunting is the trigger that sends Darkman over the edge into a blind rage, he rips his hand free and begins to attack, but is forced to cut his attack short when he’s interrupted by a scream from Julie as her rope binding gives way and she begins to fall. Jumping into action far too slowly to possibly save her, Darkman swings over on another random hook rope just in time to catch her. He then swings back while Strack renews his rivet barrage and kicks Strack in the chest, flipping him backwards and catching him by the foot. As he dangles there by a single Hush Puppy, Strack tries to convince Darkman that he can’t drop him, lest that it make him as bad as he is, which is a fact that Strack doubts that he could like with. Darkman drops him, saying simply that he’s learning to live with a lot of things.

Though he had Darkman at his mercy, Strack hesitates just a moment too long when the smell of smoked meat reminds him that he skipped dinner.

Step 7: Realize That You’re Too Cool For School

Call me...fortunate to have not been in this movie.

With his quest for revenge at an end and his basic purpose on this Earth essentially nullified, Darkman and Julie then share an uncomfortable elevator ride down to the street floor, passing the time with awkward chit chat where she assures him that he’ll perfect the synthetic skin and everything will be alright. But Darkman responds that there’s more to it than that. He’s changed, become a monster. That’s a fact that he can live with, but he doesn’t think anyone else can. She gives him one last hug before he finally walks away and assures her that Peyton is gone. Still not wanting to accept the goddamn obvious, Julie chases after him only to find herself running headlong into a crowd of sidewalk commuter traffic. You know, considering it was pitch black when Darkman dropped Strack to his death, it sure got to be morning awfully fucking fast. Either that’s a much longer elevator ride than I would have ever guessed, or they stopped to play back to back games of Risk and Monopoly to pass some time before coming down. But as she tries in futility to find him in the crowd, we see that Darkman has slipped into a quite random face, looking back before fading away into the crowd. It turns out that he’s a monster alright; He’s Bruce Campbell. But as he makes his exit, Darkman gives one last narration, declaring that he’s everyone and no one, everywhere and nowhere. Call him…Darkman. Or Ash. Or a Fifth Degree DoucheKnuckle. Either way, really, since you’ll never see him again regardless.

The Verdict:

Donkey: Watching this movie again, years after the initial pain, hasn’t done much to lessen the blow. This movie is still one massive disappointment. With a concept that should have been rather interesting and a character that could have had some real depth, this movie delivered on absolutely none of its potential. The story is a Tour de Force of goddamn boring, with villains that range from completely forgettable to ridiculously inappropriate. I mean, a real estate developer? Really? I think that’s giving bloated sacks of a inadequacy like Donald Trump far too much credit. And the hero of the film vaults between completely underdeveloped and intensely dislikable. What did we even know of Peyton before his tragic turn? Was he a wife beater? A drooling child molester? An avid World Of Warcraft gold farmer? Who fucking knows. And while I’m generally a fan of Liam Neeson’s, his portrayal of this part was astounding, acting like a man who was too busy huffing laughing gas to notice that he got his dick caught in his zipper. Overall this movie isn’t good enough to actually enjoy on its own merits and isn’t bad enough to give us too many laughs. I give it two jigs of rage out of five crushed rubber carnie fingers.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Violently insane homeless people might, just might, be super heroes. Think about that the next time they ask you for change.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: a week off to pack our bags in preparation for an amazing adventure the following week in a tropical paradise filled with incorrectly-used nunchuks, soft-core porn, and contaminated snakes. But get ready to pay a steep price, as admission only comes with the purchase of a…HARD TICKET TO HAWAII.

Back To The Main Page.

Stephen King's literary talent must be spinning in its grave right now.

The Plot:

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Exhibit A: Hasta La Vista, Government Pension

Hey guys, I think I can see my house from here.

With password security like this, I'm surprised the perimeter fence isn't a series of rotating doors.

Jesus, Arnie, light a fucking match! Thank you!

Killian didn't know what he was in for when a staff member offered to show him his "Royal Albert", but he learned soon enough.

Even while being attacked, Amber had to see if she could find a reason why anyone in Minnesota voted for this guy.

Just in case the shirt, hat, and sunglasses weren't enough, Arnie also made sure that his trip through security would be quick by eating 5 lbs of baked beans.

Arnie: “Go ahead. It won’t show on this shirt.”

ICS presents their most daring show yet: Racial Tension In A Small Room.

Random dancers: every bit as timeless as acid wash jeans.

Maybe if you had laid off the steroids, one of the bulges in that suit might not have been so much smaller than all the others.

Killian: “Only in a rerun.”

Please observe my giant codpiece of doom! Ha ha!

While the others were practicing their katana strikes, he was working on his defense and puck protection. Who's laughing now?

Exhibit E: Mini-Boss 2 – The Lumberjack And The…What The Fuck Is That?

A relentless killing machine, yes, but Buzzsaw's real passion was for ice sculpture.

I know it's hard to tell, but he's actually lighting a sign that says, "Clap if you love All-You-Can-Eat Buffets".

Seriously, I'll walk away from this fight right now if you just have some Ex-Lax on you.

Arnie: “That’s alright. Keep it.”

Quick, hit him with a red shell!

Arnie: “He had to split.”

Flame on, bitches.

Exhibit G: The Final Boss – An Unremarkable Middle-Aged White Guy

SMELL MY FINGERS!!!

It takes a remarkable effort for something in this scene to be more tragic than those leopard print pants she's wearing, but sweet God did he succeed.

Hey...you made it back. Tell him what he's won, Lou. A toaster oven!? FUCK!

The Verdict:

What We Learned:

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: an obscure adventure featuring one of the greatest shitty movie actors of all time in…ALIEN APOCALYPSE.

Back To The Main Page.

Insert jokes about Arnold winning a recall election here.

Donkey: Strange things happen to people in dreams. Some of us soar like eagles on wings of steel. Some of us relive that moment in our childhood when we got caught in our mother’s high heels and lipstick. Me? I’m usually looking through the eyes of Optimus Prime, battling against an evil horde of iron gorillas riding 1985 Chrysler New Yorkers while firing potato salad canons, side by side with my trusted ally, Conrad Bain. But what would we do if we could implant our own dreams artificially? Who would you be? What would you do? And how badly would the porn industry tank if you could insert realistic dreams of having sex with anyone you want? Those were the questions that came to us as we watched this week’s movie, the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger flick, Total Recall.

And as a brief side note, if I could implant any dream world imaginable directly into my brain, I’d settle for a world where Dean Cain was never born. That motherfucker is hogging up all the handsome.

The Plot:

Donkey: Take the governor of California, make him a common every day schlub, and give him the technology to dream about being a relevant man of action instead of a useless monument to vanity, and what you’ve got is the basic premise of Total Recall. The movie features Arnold Schwarzenegger as everyman Douglas Quaid, who dreams of getting off Earth and joining a mutant rebellion on Mars. Sadly for Arnold, though, he’s being held back by his hot wife, Sharon Stone, whom just wants to sit around and have freaky sex all day. Before you pass judgment, remember that when you’ve taken that many steroids, your balls are likely small enough to make regular sex a more daunting task than weightlifting a small, three bedroom house. But luckily for Arnold, a business exists that can solve all his problems. It’s called Rekall, and it implants memories directly into your brain, giving you the perfect simulation of any experience you’ve ever desired. But once Arnold visits Rekall, things start to go horribly wrong. Is it all a dream, exactly like the one he paid for, or is he really a secret agent capable of saving an entire planet? I don’t want to blow it for you, but if this isn’t a dream then reality is more disappointing than a Kris Kross reunion tour.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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.

As the movie opens, we see Arnold and a mystery woman, walking along the sunny shores of Mars. Or at least it would be a shoreline if Mars had any water. Instead it’s just a random mountain in an ocean of dirt.

Blombo: Climbing mountains of Mars just wouldn’t interest me, even if we had the technology to do it.

Donkey: Come on. Look at that scenery. There’s hills of red rock providing a subtle contrast to the valleys of…red rocks. Who wouldn’t want to be out there? Hell, I’m going to run home, pack my Speedo, and build a rocketship out of oil drums, adult diapers, and sly winks. If I’m lucky I’ll be able to take off tomorrow and beat the future crowds.

I think they're taking the Red Planet thing just a little too literally.

Milobar: Arnie and his companion are strolling along a cliff, because that seems pretty safe. And to prove that point, moments later the ground gives way beneath his feet, so he ends up falling and smashing his face on a rock.

Donkey: With the glass visor of his helmet proving to be more fragile than the credibility of the Mormon faith, Arnie’s precious face is exposed to the harsh environment of Club Mars. As he thrashes around, Arnie’s eyes begin bugging out of his head so drastically that they appear they’re mere seconds away from exploding. I imagine this is what it would be like to sit through an entire Nickelback music video. But just as it appears that the movie is going to come to a tragically hilarious end by the two minute mark, and I double check to see if this movie is actually called Total Recall: Whoops, I Spent The Budget On Coke And Nickel Slots, the movie cuts to show Arnold jolting up in bed, shouting his way out of the painful nightmare. But before he can leap out of bed and settle himself down by injecting his shrunken testicles with horse tranquilizers and benchpressing a compact European car, his wife, played by Sharon Stone, sits up to calm him.

Milobar: Does Sharon Stone end up showing her boobs here? I can’t remember.

Blombo: Nah. She made her entire career around dropping the laundry, but she doesn’t do it in this movie. It’s classy Sharon Stone in this one. As Arnold tells his wife that he was dreaming about Mars again, she asks him if “she” was there again, referring to his mystery companion. Why would you tell your wife that, you fucking moron? I’m not married but even I would know better than that.

Please try not to notice that my breasts are bigger than yours.

Donkey: Come on, what possible harm could there be in telling your wife that you’ve been dreaming about banging the same strange woman night after night for an extended period of time? The only way that could be better would be if it were another man. But after a rather forced display of jealous rage, Sharon tries to flee the bed, only to be restrained in Arnie’s meaty grasp.

Milobar: Come on, baby. I’m going to beat the shit out of you like I do with my real wife.

Donkey: As they finish the scene with Arnold trying to put his morning wood to stomach turning use, we transition to him making a laughably predictable breakfast protein shake and watching the news on his TV/wall of the future! The news story is chronicling ongoing civil unrest on Mars, as the military, led by a man named Cohaagen, is battling against of group of rebel mutants. Not the awesome shoot-lasers-out-your-eyes or clawed-Canadian-crankiness kind of mutants, but the freaky, deformed, try-not-to-stare-in-public kind.

Milobar: This news story is ridiculous. Soldiers pin a guy against the wall and shoot him in the chest at point blank range, all within five feet of the camera. Would they really be showing that on TV?

Donkey: Apparently all that ultra-violence is giving Arnie another hard on, as moments later when Sharon Stone joins him for breakfast, he tries convincing her to move to Mars.

Blombo: Move to Mars? After seeing that?

Milobar: Come on. Think about all the great things on Mars.

Donkey: Yeah. There’s hanging out in cold, lifeless buidings, walking around on a cold, lifeless planet…that shit just sells itself. As Arnie pleads his case for purposely moving into an active warzone, he pulls out one of the greatest arguments possible when you essentially have no point: he wants to move to Mars because he feels like he was meant to do more than what he’s doing. He wants to BE SOMEBODY.

Milobar: I want to be the governor of California.

Donkey: I love that complaint whenever I hear it. “I want to be somebody”? What the hell does that even mean? In other words, you’re a narcissists and you want to have some reason for people to know who you are, thinking that will somehow justify your inevitably meaningless existence. Well guess what, Arnie? There are easier ways to do that than fighting in an interplanetary war. Try posting something on YouTube first, preferably in a Tron suit or dancing around with a lightsaber.

Milobar: That’s why I like to punch random children. Every time I do it, I’m making a significant difference in that kid’s life.

Blombo: That kid will never forget you.

Donkey: With breakfast out of the way and Sharon having temporarily talked Arnold out of purchasing a condo on the front lines of the Mars battlefront, the movie turns to his daily commute as he tottles off to work. But as he laments over all the people he could be killing at that very moment, Arnie is presented with an alternate solution to his violent dreams. As he rides the commuter train, he sees an ad for a business called Rekall, which artificially implants memories directly into the brain. Of course, it would be hard to miss the ad on that train, since there are a so many goddamn televisions around him that you’d think it was a mobile Circuit City telelvision department rather than a public method of conveyance. That seems a little excessive to me.

And yet, they still can't seem to find the money for Universal Healthcare in the future.

Milobar: It seems like they’d be stolen pretty quickly, or smashed at the very least.

Donkey: But with his journey at an end, we next see Arnie working at his day job, where is he apparently a manual laborer.

Blombo: Where are his safety goggles and hard hat?

Milobar: He doesn’t need them. He’s badass.

When they want to show that Arnold leads a tedious, meaningless life, they don't fuck around.

Donkey: This peek into his current profession is outstanding. He’s one of about a half dozen guys just jackhammering random rocks in a big fucking hole in the ground. What the hell are they doing? Just digging? Doesn’t a bunch of dudes with jackhammers seem like one of the least efficient ways possible to dig a hole? The only way that could be worse is if they were plugging along with pickaxes. This is supposed to be the future, after all, and we wouldn’t do something that stupid now.

Milobar: They’d use dynamite or a digging machine of some kind.

Donkey: As they toil away at their pointless task, Arnie asks his best friend his opinion on the idea of going to Rekall. His friend advises against it, telling him not to mess with his brain, which is probably one of the only intelligent things said in this movie. Of course moments later we see that Arnie has completely ignored his friend’s sound advice as he goes into Rekall anyway.

Blombo: So construction in the future is done far worse than it is now, but you can change the color of your nails by tapping them with pen, as we see the receptionist doing as Arnie walks into the office of Rekall?

Donkey: Now that’s a future that I want to be a part of. As he checks in for his appointment, the receptionist calls back to a salesmen to let him know that Arnie is there.

Bob, are you in your office today?

Milobar: That’s an awesome videophone.

Blombo: The best part of it is that she uses it to call into the office that’s on the other side of a huge window right next to her. So she could actually see more if she just turned her head than she can on that phone’s display.

Donkey: I’d love to see how that salesman tries to avoid phone calls in that case.

Blombo: Don’t call me now. I’m masturbating.

Donkey: As they sit in his office and discuss options, Arnie insists that he’s only interested in a trip to Mars.

Milobar: It just doesn’t seem to me like a memory implanting business is something that would operate on people off the street. If they can implant memories, then they can put anything in your head. You would think that there would be some serious repercussions to that kind of thing.

Donkey: Yeah, that seems like the kind of thing that you might want to regulate. Maybe even get some Timecops on the case. Still not convinced that this entire procedure is safe, Arnold asks the salesman about all the horror stories that he’s heard. The salesman tries to ease his fears, opting to show him random statistics that he doesn’t explain, yet are supposed to apparently mean something.

Milobar: Check out these arbitrary numbers.

Donkey: Thinking his client is certifiably insane for wanting to go somewhere that’s clearly as exciting as a four night vacation in a Vietnamese tiger cage prison, the salesman tries to spice up the experience by offering him a vacation…”from himself”! Not only can he go to Mars, but he can do it with a predetermined alternate identity.

Blombo: Or I could just rent a movie and save myself a lot of trouble.

Donkey: Arnie immediately passes by the option of “Millionaire Playboy” and “Jackass Austrian Governor of a Major US State” and goes straight for the option of “Secret Agent”. As the salesman proceeds to lay out the exact plot of the events that will follow in the movie, Arnie once again gets a boner at the idea of killing lots of people on flimsy moral grounds while showing his muscles to anyone that will put up with him. So moments later we see that he must have agreed to the procedure, because he’s sitting in some kind of bizarre future chair while being injected with shit.

Milobar: They give him injections with this large gun that makes him cringe like he was just hit by a baseball bat. Why would that have to be so painful? It took a chunk of skin out of his neck, for God’s sake.

Donkey: As he’s strapped to the chair, waiting for the sedatives to kick in, the technician begins asking him about his preferences for his upcoming adventure. Specifically, they ask him about the love interest that will be tugging him along by the balls for the duration of this affair. They start by asking what sex that person should be. He declares that he’s heterosexual.

Don't worry Mr. Quaid. The mannequin will come alive for you alone, leading to a truly hilarious 80's romantic comedy!

Blombo: Hetero? Who are you kidding?

Donkey: Next they show him what are supposed to be types of women to choose from. Sure, why not? I like my women to clearly be mannequins.

Milobar: The technician asks more and more specific questions about what kind of woman Arnie wants this mystery date to be as the sedative begins to kick in. Maybe you should have asked him these questions BEFORE you drugged him up.

Donkey: Quickly! Before you fall asleep, make important decisions!

Milobar: Just before he passes out, Arnie looks up at the monitor that shows the sum total of his selections. It’s the exact picture of the chick in the movie that they show.

Donkey: As the scene fades to black and the procedure theoretically starts, the movie cuts to the salesman back in his office, talking to another perspective client. As he chats with her, you can see the technician and her assistant yelling on his videophone as it rings, trying to get his attention. Once the salesman gets the call and rushes to the operating area, he finds Arnie thrashing around in the chair, exclaiming that they’ve blown his cover, that people will be there any moment to kill them all. The Governator manages to get an arm free and starts strangling anyone he can get his hands on. While he’s busy choking the salesman to death, the technician and her assistant pin down Arnie’s leg and inject it with another dozen or so sedative shots.

Milobar: Why didn’t they just sedate him in the first place?

Donkey: And it’s a little thing, but I can’t help but notice: she repeatedly injects him in the leg with that injection gun, and yet the fluid level in the vial at the top doesn’t go down at all. So what was she pumping into him? Air? Dreams of rainbows and unicorns?

As the head of the third largest economy in the world finally drifts back to sleep, the employees at Rekall begin to argue amongst themselves as to what’s happening and what it means, as he is clearly acting out the part of the role that they set up for him, yet the technician claims that she hasn’t implanted the memories yet. So is he a spy? A raving lunatic? And you have to love how these people kept their cool under pressure. They’re busy either calling one another a “dumb bitch” or giving out a good slapping. You’d think that they would have come across a freak out or two in their line of work and would be prepared for it. Fuck, these people are so professional.

Finally the folks at Rekall decide to throw Arnie in an automated cab called a Johnny Cab, refund his money, and pretend that they’ve never heard of him. He wakes up moments later, wondering where the hell he is as an animatronic cabbie stares back at him with lifeless eyes. What is the point of the Johnny Cab having facial animation if that animation doesn’t match the expression of what it’s saying, let alone any actual human emotion at all?

Can I offer you the Jell-O Pudding Pops? DAWWWWWWWW!!!

Milobar: And how is he awake already? They shot Arnie up with so much sedative that there’s no way he would have woken up. He’d probably be dead.

Blombo: Or at least sleeping for a couple of days, not an hour.

Donkey: Once he reaches his destination, Arnold gets out and is greeted immediately by his BFF/coworker who is accompanied by four other random thugs and asks how his trip to Rekall went. Even though he claims that he can’t remember a thing, they immediately pull Arnie off into a corner, chastise him for “blabbing about Mars”, and try to kill him. But not willing to go gently into that good night, Arnie pulls some fighting moves that wouldn’t even inconvenience someone let alone render them unconscious, and proceeds to kill every last one of them through a combination of neck snapping, pointblank pistol shots to the chest, and unnecessary pectoral flexing.

Milobar: I love how the camera pans up as Arnie stands there looking at the blood on his hands, to a street above him. It’s a fairly busy street with a bunch of pedestrians, and it’s right goddamn there. Nobody noticed all that gunfire?

Donkey: Arnie rushes home and walks in as Sharon is practicing her tennis serve with a holographic trainer, and an exceptionally effeminate looking man at that. After regaling her with the events of his day so far, she tries to convince him that killing a group of dudes was all in his mind, that Rekall had fucked with his head. But Arnie shows her the blood still coating his hands as proof. As he goes to clean up, he commands her not to call anybody. Of course, she’s at their videophone at the time and had Arnie stuck around only a moment longer, he would have seen that she was already in the middle of calling the movie’s, and indeed life’s ultimate badass, Michael Ironside. But it’s a good thing it was Michael that she called, because I think he might actually qualify as nobody.

Don't worry honey, I'll get the phone...JESUS JONES!

As the movie transitions into the washroom where Arnie is washing the blood off of his hands, he stares at himself in the mirror. I’d like to think it’s in retrospect of the horror that he had just experienced, but it’s far more likely that he’s fantasizing about finding a way to make out with his own reflection while Peter Cetera’s The Glory of Love plays in the background. Once he finishes, he walks back out in his apartment to find the lights out and someone in the dark, who has a silhouette that looks an awful lot like his wife’s, shooting at him with a pistol. And even though he’s standing in the very doorway that he was expected to come out of, she still manages to fucking miss him multiple times.

Milobar: That’s why you never give a woman a gun.

Donkey: After a brief display of rolling around on the floor like an elderly hospital patient and finally grabbing his not very mysterious attacker, Arnie turns the lights on to confirm what was painfully obvious to everyone but him: his wife is trying to kill him. As he reels from the news, she proceeds to start kicking his ass the old fashioned way. I love how many times Arnie gets hits in the balls in this movie.

Milobar: Twice in twenty seconds in this scene alone, and yet it doesn’t stop him. You know, when you get hit in the nuts like that, you don’t just keep fighting like a ninja. That shit hurts.

Donkey: No shit. Say what you will about him being able to take one hit, but two direct shots to the nuts like that is going to drop a man.

Milobar: Once he finally disarms Sharon and manages to subdue her, she reveals to Arnold that she isn’t really his wife. He’s been implanted with the memories of their eight year marriage, while they’ve actually been together for a mere six weeks. So did they implant her with memories too? Because it would be pretty hard to keep that eight year back story up with any consistency over an extended period of time.

Donkey: Grappling with a concept that’s too complicated for the one muscle in his body that Arnold didn’t bother to exercise, he decides it’s time to chill. And even thought she just tried to kill him a moment later, Sharon sits down next to him and they share a quiet moment.

Blombo: Let’s have some Orange Pekoe tea.

Milobar: As Sharon tries to keep him distracted, Arnie glances over at a monitor displaying the lobby of his apartment building and sees Michael Ironside and a cadre of men coming to get him. And yet even though he killed his best friend a moment ago without a moment’s hesitation, when he realizes that his wife has betrayed him again and truly wants him dead, he opts to simply knock her out and let her live.

Donkey: Moments after Arnie has made his getaway, Ironballs and his men storm the apartment and find Sharon on the floor. To prove what a manly mannish man he is, Ironballs kicks one of his men away as he tries to help Sharon up. Don’t you dare help a woman up! She’s going to lay there until she gets her lazy ass off the floor herself and makes me a sandwich!

Milobar: He quickly orders his men to pursue Arnie, pausing only long enough to quickly make out with Sharon, whom is apparently his girlfriend. Oh, Michael, that’s gross. You don’t know where her mouth has been.

Right about now, Sharon is wishing she'd waited to find out who was playing Richter BEFORE signing on for this film.

Donkey: Hers?

Milobar: Hey, I know where his has been: nowhere. Because no one would be willing to kiss that shit.

Donkey: Goddamn, I really didn’t need to see Irontaint’s tongue as they lock germ farms. But the movie goes back to Arnold where he see him trying to flee from Irontaint’s men, whom are in hot pursuit, following the signal of the tracking device that they have planted on their prey. The Terminator of State Budgets runs through a hallway with a glass wall that is actually a giant x-ray machine, which reveals to the dozen security guards stationed there that he and his skeleton are carrying a gun. The guards jump up and block him at either end of the machine, but none of them seemed even the slightest bit prepared when he makes a daring getaway by jumping through the glass wall and then simply running past them.

We've got you surrounded! There's no escape! Oh...unless you do that...

Blombo: And they’re still standing there dumbfounded when four more guys come running past with guns, not making a move to stop them.

Milobar: Hang on, I’ve got to go look up, “dude jumps through glass” in the handbook.

Donkey: Arnold finally makes his escape on a commuter train, but not before he stops on an escalator and ducks behind some poor asshole on his way to what is likely a lonely dinner for one. And that dude gets fucked up. As Ironside’s men shoot, he gets hit once, so Arnie says what the hell and uses him as a human shield, where he takes about a dozen more shots and practically gets cut to pieces.

Blombo:And yet none of the bullets go through that guy and hit Arnie.

Donkey: Watching this entire chase and the massive public spectacle that they’re making, I can’t help but wonder why they’re even bothering. If you’ve got a tracking device planted on the guy so you can follow his movements, why would you be chasing him like this? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to watch and give him a false sense of security, see where he goes, and attack him there?

Blombo: Wait until he checks into a hotel and attack him at night.

Donkey: As they’re getting in their outstanding future car to give chase, his cohort makes a comment about being glad that it wasn’t his girlfriend that was fucking a walking vat of human growth hormones, and Michael Ironside gets pissed off. Apparently he never thought of that. On that note, I’d like to take a moment to explain something to Michael Ironside. You see Mikey, when two adults love each other, or are at least acting out the facade of pretending to love one another while coming to grips with their own denial and self-loathing, they like to express that love physically. Sometimes that means holding hands. Sometimes it means having sex. And sometimes it means taking a dump on your partner’s chest. So what I’m saying is, before you touch Sharon too much, buy some disinfecting wipes.

Blombo: As Ironside and his henchman try to track down Arnie in their car, they get a call from Cohaagen on their mobile videophone. I love watching older movies that predict the future, because we have such better technology here in this room than there is in this movie. My cell phone is a piece of shit and it’s still nicer than anything in this movie.

Milobar: Apparently in the future you can still turn a dial and lose the reception on something, because that’s what Ironside does to get rid of Cohaagen when he starts nagging too much.

Donkey: That’s especially awesome when you remind yourself that this is a videophone, not just an image projected in one direction. So Cohaagen is quite literally watching him reach forward, turn the knob, and fuck up the feed while he blames it on something as fucking retarded as sunspots and then hangs up on the call.

Blombo: It’s even better when the dude behind him is laughing.

Milobar: Why the hell are future cars always so blocky in these movies? There’s eight millions sharp corners on that thing.

Donkey: Apparently the concept of aerodynamics is so 1987. Once Ironscrotum and his sidekick get rid of Cohaagen, they return to their tracking of Arnie and locate his homing beacon at a hotel somewhere in the city.

Blombo: Wow. That’s not Google Maps they’re using.

Donkey: As the movie turns back to Arnold on the run, we see him checking into a hotel room. And there’s nothing like a hotel room with slatted doors so that you can walk by and verify who’s spending a quick twenty minutes with a hooker. As soon as he checks into his suite, Arnie gets a call from a strange dude on the room’s videophone.

Blombo: Is that dude Patrick Duffy?

Donkey: I wish. But then you run the risk of fucking up the entire experience of watching this movie in a theater when it was released, as everyone would be compelled to shout out, “TVs Patrick Duffy!”

Milobar: I don’t even know who that is. This guy is apparently an old friend of Arnie’s from The Agency who tells Arnold to do exactly as he’s told. And the first thing is to take care of the bug that they’ve got implanted inside of him. How? By putting a wet towel on his head, which apparently fucks the tracking device up.

Blombo: So would the tracking device also be that fucked up if it was a rainy day? And wait a minute…how the hell did this dude find Arnold?

Milobar: What good timing!

Donkey: And what a good buddy! They were such good friends in The Agency that Arnie asked this guy to find him and bring him the briefcase if he was ever in trouble, and this guy literally drops it by a pay phone on the street outside the hotel and runs away like he just came from an Expired Chicken buffet. You know, you could stick around a give him a little more help than that. Maybe even just talk to him and tell him more about what’s going on.

Blombo: “Boy, it looks like you’re in trouble. See you later!”

Donkey: But now it’s time for comedic relief. Arnie runs outside to retrieve briefcase left for him, only to have a bag lady pick it up just before he gets there. At first he asks politely, and then he simply pulls the case away from her. She, of course, calls him an asshole. So his natural response is to turn around and give this shitty ethnic bow, making fun of the towel that he has wrapped around his head like a turban. Mmmmm…offensive.

Milobar: Just then Ironside and friend pull up, searching for him as he steps out into the street. There he is, right in front of us!

Donkey: That’s pretty goddamn convenient, considering they aren’t supposed to be able to track him at the moment. But before he can be snatched, shot, or quizzed on his substandard economic policy, Arnie recognizes his assailants and jumps into another Johnny Cab. After a few minutes of wrestling with it’s aggressively docile demeanor, he simply rips the robotic cabbie off of its stand and takes over the conveniently placed manual controls of the car, making a speedy though ham-fisted getaway.

Blombo: That car should be in Back To The Future.

Donkey: Actually, I’d rather they were all driving around in DeLoreans. That would be sweet.

Milobar: It is the car of the future! Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.

Donkey: Once Arnold has made a successful exodus, he stops the cab at an old cement factory. As the dismembered cabbie asks him for the cash owed for the trip taken, Arnie responds with a pithy quip and walks away. Little does he know that if you don’t pay the fare in a Johnny Cab, the cab tries to run you over. And then explodes. Seriously.

Milobar: Just like a real cabbie.

Donkey: That would have been an outstanding meeting at the assembly plant. “So, team of engineers, if someone skips out on the fare, what should we program the taxis to do?” ” Say…how about we kill them?”

Blombo: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just make sure that they get the person’s Visa number?” “No, don’t be stupid.”

Milobar: That’s pretty much what I’d program it to do.

Donkey: Might as well take it one step further. Not only will it kill you, but it will hunt down and eat your children.

Milobar: Once he finally finds a place to stop and rest, Arnie starts going through the contents of the briefcase. Monopoly money? Old, laminated ID from the 1980′s? What am I supposed to do with any of this stuff? It also has a laptop in it, which when opened starts playing a prerecorded message left by Arnie to himself.

Donkey: As Arnie’s alternate identity gently breaks the news to himself that he’s not him, but himself, we see Ironpants and his comrade still roaming the city in their car when they get a call from one of their associates, who informs them that their monitoring picked up an explosion at the old cement factory. What the fuck were they monitoring? The whole city?

Milobar: We picked up an explosion in the old cement factory, some screaming on the west side, and a really loud fart in Beantown. Which should we check out?

Donkey: As Ironpanties and his men all converge of the cement factory, Arnie learns from the recorded version of himself that he’s actually a secret agent (no shit, huh?) who was working for Cohaagen when he discovered that he was “playing for the wrong team”. I think that means that Arnold has finally come to grips with his homosexuality. But without saying as much, Arnie continues to explain to himself that he has enough information in his head “to fuck Cohaagen good” (in tantric sex positions), but that if he’s listening to this recording, that means Cohaagen got to him first. So wait…if Cohaagen thought he was a traitor and “got to him”, why is he still alive? Why would you give him a new memory and not the gift of two bullets to the head?

But rather than question this blatant hole in the story that he’s telling himself, Arnie instead sits back and follows the directions on how to get the tracking bug out of his head. He reaches into the case and pulls out a device that the recording tells him to shove up his nose, and that it will pull the bug out because it’s self guiding. When he hears the crunch, he’ll know that he’s there. How the fuck is that thing supposed to be self guiding? It just reaches straight up and a claw comes out. That’s not exactly guiding.

Blombo: And why would you have to shove it up there? Couldn’t you just slowly push it into your nose?

Milobar: As Arnie starts to pull it out, the bug starts stretching out his face in ways not possible with human physics. I love how big that fucking thing is. There’s no way that could have been smaller?

Now he understands the pain we felt when we watched Jingle All The Way.

Donkey: Yeah, he’s pulling it out his nose and damn near starting all the way up there next to the brain. You know, that’s bone he’s got to get past. You might be able to tell me that skin could stretch like that, not even the Terminator can stretch bone.

Blombo: Once it’s all the way out, the round casing that it was in pops open to reveal the bug inside. Why is it in a casing? Why not just put the beacon up there?

Milobar: Because then it wouldn’t be so hard to get out.

Donkey: Wouldn’t Arnie just have had constant sinus congestion with that thing up there? Doctor, it’s been two months and I’m still feeling congested. Particularly right in this area of my head, where I feel this hard bulge that’s glowing red and humming.

Blombo: Just as the recording tells him that next step is to get to Mars and check into a certain hotel, Arnie looks up and sees Ironside’s men approaching in the darkness. That’s quite subtle, trying to sneak up with flashlights waving everywhere.

Donkey: He quickly gathers up all his shit and smashes the laptop before running off, leaving it to malfunction in the most improbable way imaginable: repeating the command to go to Mars over and over. As Ironslats and his men finally arrive, they realize that they’ve lost him and wonder where to search next.

Blombo: Shit, where do you think he’s gone?

Milobar: Get your ass to Mars! Get your ass to Mars!

Blombo: Man, I wish this thing would shut up so that I could figure out where he’s going.

Milobar: The movie then turns to a ship landing, and Arnie arriving at the customs desk of Mars in a massive lady costume. It’s the goddamn future, where the fly between planets, and yet they still stamp your passport manually. That’s awesome.

Donkey: Just as the giant, creepy lady is making her way through customs, Ironjunk and his sidekick stalk right past her, having also just arrived on the planet. They discuss the security situation and the continuing fight with the rebels just as the mask portion of Arnie’s disguise starts fucking up after saying its first sentence. How the hell did he manage to travel between planets if he couldn’t answer more than one question? And as Arnie’s disguise begins to malfunction worse and worse, he draws the attention of everyone around him, including Ironjunk. Just then he reaches up and hits a release that starts to unlock the mask from his head. The ear of the mask starts to eject straight out on a metal bar that appears to be at least six inches long.

Oh THAT'S why a tube that long can come out of there...it's a fake head underneath.

Blombo: Wait, where the hell is his head supposed to be if that thing is coming that far out of the side of his mask?

Donkey: As a full contingent of military personnel stand and watch Arnie reveal himself without making a move to arrest him, he finishes the spectacle by throwing his mask at them. As the mask continues to talk to the soldiers, even though it couldn’t get out more than two words a moment ago, it self destructs in an explosion of stupidity. This serves to not only throw the soldiers in every direction and allow Arnie to make a break for it, but it also shatters one of the windows of the dome around them, causing the room to decompress as it’s exposed to the outside climate.

Blombo: And of course, some dude has to press a button to bring down the safety shields that seal off all doors and windows.

Milobar: Naturally they don’t close on their own.

Donkey: Which makes sense, because just adding some type of pressure sensor into the building that would close the safety doors in the case of a massive loss of pressure like that is an unrealistic expectation for the future. And of course, just before the final door seals, Arnie manages to slip under and escape.

I'd be this pissed off if I had been in Captain America too.

Moments later the movie takes a break from the action to bring us a tedious scene where Cohaagen lectures Ironside for being an idiot, and warns him to just do what he’s told or he’ll end up getting his ass erased. Goddamn. Wake me up when the movie gets back to killing people in terrible ways set to a shitty, upbeat soundtrack.

Milobar: You’ll erase my ass? But then how would I shit?

Blombo: Butt plug? Super glue?

Donkey: Things start picking up again soon as we see Arnie checking into the hotel that he told himself to travel to.

Milobar: I’d like a room, please. Here, take my poorly laminated ID card.

Blombo: As he checks into the hotel under the assumed name that he told himself to use, he seems confused, but I’m pretty sure he should know how to check into a hotel. He must have done this at least once before.

Milobar: The clerk at the front desk informs Arnold that he left something in a safety deposit box during his last visit, and asks if he’d like to access that box now. Arnold agrees and discovers that what he had left behind for himself was a flier for a brothel,  with a note on the back telling him to go there and ask for Milena. That’s awesome. That’s exactly what I would keep in my safety deposit box, if I had one. Fliers for hookers, so that one day when I die and someone gets my estate, they’ll look in there a say, “what the fuck?!”

Donkey: As he heads to the brothel to get himself a rusty trombone, he hires a delightful black stereotype named Benny to drive him around in his cab. And just as he’s getting in, there is an explosion that kills dozens of people, men all over the place start unloading automatic assault rifles, and yet everyone around him is acting like this is just an every day thing. You know, if that was a regular occurrence, nobody would be there.

Blombo: Once Benny gets the cab going, he turns a corner and almost runs into a tank-like drilling machine. That massive driller is pretty fucking dangerous to have just driving around like that.

Milobar: Finally they arrive in the poor, mutant district of Mars and find the brothel that the porn flier advertised. Arnie wanders in and once again we visit the majesty of a future bar! He immediately goes to the bartender and asks for Milena, but they attempt to distract him with a woman who has what all men want. Three titties!

Donkey: Seriously, that is such a shitheaded idea.

Right after writing this into the script, the screenwriter giggled for fifteen minutes and then took some time to play with his He-Man dolls.

Blombo: And they look terrible. It would have looked better if they’d just used hers and put a fake one in the middle. But it’s nice to know that there’s still Depeche Mode playing in shitty bars in the future.

Donkey: Not the slightest bit distracted by this display of male idiocy, Arnie insists that he must see Milena. Once their eyes finally meet across the bar, he walks over to her where he is stopped by another mutant, whom we’ll lovingly refer to as Vaginaface. He makes it clear that he’s not happy to see Arnold and his rippling scrotum muscles. Arnie suggests that the freak walk away or end up going sphincter first to Mutant Heaven. I love how he goes from mild mannered, every day chap to threatening to kill people in a bar within a matter of a couple of days.

Milobar: Arnie and Milena end up going to a room, but rather than getting a sweet tug job, she ends up giving him a slap to the face. This just doesn’t seem like it should be a room in a whorehouse though, as once again the doors are perforated so that everyone can see inside the room.

Blombo: I’m surprised that no one’s standing outside, looking in, and masturbating.

Donkey: Now that they’re finally alone and it’s clear that Arnold isn’t going to get his nose pinched while a cucumber gets shoved up his ass, he tries to figure out what his relationship to Milena is. It turns out that they were involved, but she says that despite the note that he left for himself saying that he had switched sides, he was still working for Cohaagen. She makes him sound like quite the dick. And the plot thickens…which means that at this point it’s about as dense as bad breath.

Blombo: If he was such a dick, why did she like him?

Donkey: After that brief exchange, Arnie heads back to his hotel with blue balls and a hankering for tacos, only to be interrupted by a mysterious visitor. It turns out to be a representative from Rekall, the company that Arnie went to for the memory implant. He explains that this is all part of the package that Arnie had chosen, the Secret Agent, remember, but that something was going wrong. He has to come out of the fantasy now or risk having his mind be lost forever. And just to prove that he’s not lying, the mysterious stranger opens the hotel door to reveal Sharon Stone, who has come to reassure Arnold that she really is his wife and that she wants him to come home for more home cooking and yeast infections. The mysterious stranger then makes a lengthy, impassioned speech and demands that Arnie take a pill, which will symbolize his desire to return to reality and break him out of this dream. But when Arnie notices that the dude is sweating, he concludes that he must be lying and shoots the mysterious stranger in the head. What? That’s pretty flimsy logic to kill a man over. He could have just been warm after doing a lot of passionate shouting.

Blombo: So if he thought this guy was lying, Arnie must have thought that this was a trap set up by Cohaagen. But why would anyone bother doing this? If this wasn’t a legitimate attempt to tell him that he was in a dream, what would be the point? If they know where he is precisely enough to send this guy in, why not just send in a squad to capture him? And how does someone read this script and not go cross-eyed?

Donkey: Sharon backs away from Arnie, telling him that he’s really done it now. And then there’s a huge explosion that smashes out a big hole in the wall about five feet behind him, and yet it doesn’t even knock Arnie off of his feet.

Milobar: He just bends over like he’s farting really hard.

Oh boy! I sure hope someone doesn't come throught that wall and sodomize me...Anybody?

Donkey: After being subdued by the wall demolishing squad and kicked in the balls one last time for good measure by Sharon Stone, Arnie gets dragged out of his room and down to a set of elevators. As they stand waiting, the doors to one of the elevators open and Milena steps out while opening fire with a fully automatic weapon. Can anyone tell me how the hell she would even know what was going on up here? What would have happened if a family of four from Iowa had been waiting for the elevator on that floor, getting ready to go search for the closest TGI Friday’s? Who’s the fucking hero then, Milena?

Blombo: With all the men dead, it’s time for Milena and Sharon Stone to engage in a catfight for the ages. And just as Sharon starts to come out on top, Arnie shoots the knife out of her hand with a pistol. As she slowly reaches for another knife, she reassures him that he doesn’t want to hurt her because they’re married. She finally begins her lunge toward him, but he shoots her in the head and quips, “consider that a divorce”. Sweet.

Milobar: That’s my advice to several couples that we know. Just fight it out and whoever gets their hands on the gun first can shoot the other in the head.

Donkey: Moments later, Ironsack and his pal show up and discover Sharon dead. After far too brief a moment of remorse, considering that Ironsack will never find a woman anywhere near that caliber that will ever touch him again, they chase after Arnie and Milena, who eventually make it to the base of the hotel.

Milobar: Of course, Benny just happens to be there again, so they jump in his cab. As they head back to the brothel, he mentions that they’re going in circles. That’s how this movie is making me feel. Like I’m fucking spinning in circles. As they’re racing to the safety of the slums, Ironside and his pal chase behind them in another car. Ironside hangs out the window, shooting a pistol, only to lose it. But he’s got another gun that he pulls out, and this one if fucking massive. Of course, I don’t know why he didn’t use this assault rifle before now.

Just don't knock this gun out of his hands or he'll pull out a Stinger Missile.

Donkey: As they arrive in the slums and close in on Three Titty McGee’s House of Herpes, Benny exclaims that they have no brakes, setting them up for a rather unnecessary crash. No brakes? Why are there no brakes? Other than windows being shot out, the car wasn’t really damaged during the chase. And as they escape the remains of the car on foot, Benny joins them, exclaiming, “now they’re after me!”

Blombo: I don’t think they would have been chasing him. If Benny had just run in the other direction, I’d bet that they wouldn’t have recognized him.

Donkey: Once the three of them finally make it into the brothel, Vaginaface beckons them into a secret passage, which is immediately covered the moment they disappear in its depths. Just then, Ironslacks and a battalion of soldiers show up and demand to know where they’re hiding. Our favorite three-titted hooker tries to distract him, but he is resistant to her pseudocharms and simply shoots her dead. Suddenly all hell breaks loose as both hookers and soldiers begin to fire randomly upon one another. I love how many shots there are of women being randomly killed in this scene.

Blombo: They’re hookers. They don’t count.

Donkey: And to level it out, they start showing soldiers are getting shot in their bulletproof vests and yet still somehow dying. I’m going to guess from a broken heart, or an uncontrollable lust for Tang.

Milobar: As the fighting begins to get really intense, Ironside gets an order from Cohaagen to fall back and leave the area. Once they do, blast doors come down as the area is sealed and the air supply is shut off. The air supply in this case consists of three fans. I’m honestly surprised that they have fans and not just two dudes standing there, blowing air around.

Donkey: As the community of poorly created freaks stops to take note that the stakes in this shitty get of chance have been raised, it moves back to the Three Autistic Amigos as they make their way through catacombs that the secret passage had led them to. They see the bones of what are supposed to be the first settlers of Mars, when Milena makes the comment that these settlers worked while Cohaagen made all the money, then sat back and watched as the cheap domes made all the children into freaks.

Blombo: Cohaagen is that old?

Donkey: Yep. Apparently he took control of Mars when he was twelve.

Milobar: After he built ED209 and left OCP, that is.

Donkey: As they continue to make their way through the tomb, Arnie and Milena stop to try to suck each other’s fillings out. Now seems like a really good time to start smooching. Why not? Suddenly a fake wall opens beside them and they’re greeted by the underground mutant resistence, who have been expecting them. Just once I’d like to see an underground resistence that isn’t quite literally based underground. When they see Benny, who they don’t recognize, they demand to know who he is. Benny soothes them by taking off a fake hand, revealing an insect-like mutant arm, and assuring them that he’s on their side.

Milobar: Your arm’s all fucked up? Okay, you must be trustworthy.

Donkey: Clearly he is. As they’re led inside the secret mutant liar, Arnie is taken aside to meet their reclusive leader, Kuato. He’s taken into a quiet room by an ordinary dude, which seems like the perfect place for a good dose of some date rape. He asks this dude if he’s Kuato, but the dude says no. He then turns away and opens his shirt, gets a look on his face like he’s in the process of finishing an orgasm that’s been building for the last hour, and then turns back to reveal the true Kuato: a fucked up little midget that is embedded in his abdomen. I don’t quite understand how that works in this case. Is that his twin? Did a baby melt to him in a freak microwaving accident? And why does he cum in his pants when he lets the little guy out of his shirt?

I bet he thought his fetish for eating babies would never come back to haunt him.

Blombo: You know, it wouldn’t be any dumber if that thing popped out of his ass.

Donkey: Yeah. And why the fuck is that little guy so slimy? Oh, right…the whole cumming in the pants thing…

Milobar: Kuato and Arnie have an incredibly brief conversation, and then jump right to Arnie taking Kuato’s hands and falling under an insultingly simple hypnotic spell. Open your mind! Open…Your…Mind! And your pants!

Donkey: As Arnie delves into his suppressed memories, his free floating mind wanders back to a secret underground alien machine that Cohaagen and Ironvag found in the bowels of Mars. Though no one knows exactly what it does, they think it might melt the planet’s ice and create air. Enough to actually manufacture an atmosphere. I’m glad that they think that’s all they need to actually create an atmosphere, but apparently this movie dropped out of second grade science class.

Blombo: Melting ice to make create steam, which creates oxygen?

Milobar: And then you get an atmosphere. It’s just that simple. But as they’re discussing the possibilities of the machine, Cohaagen dismisses it, saying that it’s just as likely to be an alien trap. The machinery is fucking huge, and it would have to be to melt the entire ice supply of the planet. So that would be quite the elaborate trap.

Donkey: As Arnie and Kuato come out of their joint trance, Arnie doesn’t notice his slightly stretched anal cavity but instead discovers that the ground is shaking only seconds before Cohaagen’s army comes crashing through a stone wall in the room. Nobody else heard that and thought to come investigate before this point? As Cohaagen’s army begins their systematic extermination of the rebel mutants, Arnie, Milena, Benny, and Kuato run for safety down a hallway that ends in an airlock.

Milobar: No one thinks it’s rather selfish of them that these four people are the only ones who make it out alive?

Donkey: As they try to wiggle themselves into suits and escape out onto the surface, Benny pulls out a gun and puts a couple of new holes in Kuato. Betrayal! Who could have seen that coming?

Moments later, Arnie, Milena, and Kuato’s corpse end up back in Cohaagen’s office, as he examines the body of his elusive nemesis. So this is the dead mutant? He smells terrific. Let’s keep him in my office for not particular reason for a while longer. With his enemy crushed, Cohaagen addresses Arnie and reveals the big surprise. Well, the second biggest surprise, just behind the fact that Arnie’s made it this far into a movie without peforming unnecessary military push-ups. It turns out that Arnie had been dancing along to Cohaagen’s tune the entire time. He had willingly undergone the memory implanting process and engaged in this fake pursuit all for the purposes of flushing out the resistance and getting to Kuato. But, as Cohaagen says, don’t take my word for it…the Reading Rainbow!

Milobar: Levar Burton? Cohaagen puts on a tape featuring the old Arnie corroborating the whole story. Why would they have wasted the time required to make that video, all for the purpose of showing it to the guy whose memory you’re about to erase?

Donkey: Because it’s asstastic. Everyone loves completely pointless gloating. With that revelation out of the way, Arnie and Milena and dragged into a lab and strapped into the memory implanting chairs. Before the process begins, Ironchump asks the technicians if he’ll remember any of this. Isn’t it kind of obvious that he won’t? That is the whole point of this procedure, isn’t it? Hey, if he’s not going to remember anything, I’d like to put my balls in his mouth for a while so that he’ll wake up with my pubes in his teeth and not know why. As Cohaagen leaves them to their fate, but is kind enough to invite them to a party later that night, the memory implanting process finally starts. It goes on for a good thirty seconds until Arnie finally manages to free himself from the chair. Wouldn’t that thirty seconds have been enough to at least do some damage?

Milobar: Once he’s free, Arnie naturally starts battling the technicians.

Donkey: Of course. Because what underpaid lab tech wouldn’t leap at the chance for some hand to hand combat with a walking steroid infomercial when he has no vested interest in doing so? And just as things start heating up, one of the techs pulls out an axe, which is promptly taken away from him by the Governator.

Seriously, Chuck, if we're going to keep an axe in the lab, let's get one that Paul Bunyan would use. What could it hurt?

Milobar: An axe? Why the fuck was there an axe in that room?

Blombo: Put out the fires.

Donkey: Yeah, electrical fires are definitely extinguished best by an axe.

Milobar: As Arnie and Milena end up escaping over the corpses of the techs, I can’t help but think that maybe, like the first time he visited Recall, they should have just sedated Arnie before trying to wipe his memory.

Donkey: As Cohaagen finally gives Ironpuss his official permission to kill Arnie, because his unofficial attempts up to this point have been SO successful that he’s bound to succeed now that he’s played Mother May I, we see that the mutants are struggling to breathe through their ugly, ugly faces. And no one brings this to light quite like Vaginaface, who’s struggling to draw in the necessary fuel to pull his hilarious, trademarked burp-queef.

Just don't piss this guy off when it's that time of the month.

Blombo: My vagina face!

Milobar: Someone put a dick in my vagina face! I can’t breathe!

Donkey: That’s the key to unlocking his psychic powers. If he met a woman with a cock on her face, they would be unstoppable. And as those mutants die slowly, Arnie and Milena escape into a series of underground tunnels. Just as they appear to come to a dead end, lights come on behind them and they see a giant drilling machine moving towards them, piloted by none other than their old friend Benny. So Benny was just hanging out in that thing in the off chance that they should happen to run by?

Blombo: As Benny tries to slowly screw the two of them into the cave wall, Arnold finds a hand drill and punctures the fuel lines feeding the drills on the front of Benny’s tank. Once that happens, Benny curses and throws it in reverse. Yeah, backing up seems like a good idea. Even if those drills aren’t turning, just keep driving forward and crush them.

Milobar: As the machine backs up, Arnie runs to its side and rams the drill through its door, slamming the drill into soft gamy flesh as he yells the classic line, “Benny…screw you!” Once they turn away from their attacker, they see that the wall they were being pushed into has collapsed and revealed a conveniently placed path to the alien oxygen machine. As they run towards it, Arnie mentions the fact that the entire core of the planet is ice.

Donkey: Why not? And if you melted the entire core of a planet, that would have no significant consequences, right? As the two of them approach the machine, we see that Ironchump and another platoon of soldiers are already inside waiting for them. How does a team of twenty five men not kill two people? And yet, somehow you know that they won’t.

Sensing trouble as he approaches, Arnie uses a hologram device that he got at the beginning of the movie to create a hologram of himself that walks right into their midst. The soldiers stand in a circle around the hologram and empty their weapons shooting at it, which should have resulted in almost every single one of them being chopped to confetti.

It's amazing how often physics and other elements of 'science' are brutally raped in a 'science' fiction movie.

Milobar: And yet not one of them dies. They just stand there like idiots while Arnold pops around a corner and takes half of them out with an assault rifle.

Blombo: And then moments later, they can’t be bothered to stay consistent in their own stupidity as Milena uses the hologram to stand between two more soldiers. As they both turn to shoot at her image, they end up shooting each other dead, which was the whole point of the hologram in the first place.

Milobar: And this brings us to the greatest moment in this film.

Donkey: It truly is. As Irontwat realizes that his men are on the business end of a 45 caliber make-over, he tries to escape on a nearby industrial elevator that has no walls. Arnie jumps on after him, of course, and a great battle ensues. It shouldn’t last more than twelve seconds, seeing as Arnie has juiced up so many muscles in his body that his toenails have biceps and Irontwat looks about as capable of fighting as a soggy french fry, but they stretch it out regardless. As the elevator approaches the pinnacle of its ascent, Arnold tosses Irontwat, leaving him hanging over the side of the elevator and clinging on for dear life. Seeing that the elevator is about to go through a tight opening to reach it’s top, Arnie braces Irontwat so that he can’t move. Looking up and realizing his fate, Irontwat lets out a blood curdling scream and waits as the elevator goes through the narrow opening and rips his arms off. He falls to his doom as Arnie is left standing with a pair of severed forearms in his hands. But of course, Arnie can’t let his nemesis die without shouting one of the single greatest lines ever mutter out a semi-human mouth:

Arnold: “See you at the party, Richter!”

Blombo: That just blew my mind. Arnold tosses the disembodied arms aside and realizes that the elevator has brought him right up to the controls of the alien machinery. I don’t understand why didn’t they just trash this machine? If you don’t want anyone turning it on, just destroy it.

Donkey: You would think that would be the best plan. Since the activation panel for this whole thing is a stone with an indentation for an alien and/or human hand. Hell, one of their soldiers could have activated it by accident when they discovered it. So at least pour cement over the handprint console or something.

Blombo: As Arnold approaches the hand activation, flood lights suddenly switch on and he’s greeted by Cohaagen. Why’s he here? What about his party?

Milobar: That is his party. Once Milena shows up a moment later and Cohaagen is disarmed with a couple of gun shots, Arnie looks down and sees another threat. A bomb? Shit. It’s a good thing that I can just pick it up and throw it.

Donkey: Arnold tosses the bomb down what appears to be a ventilation shaft. Moments later it goes off and apparently opens a portal directly to the surface, as the pressure suddenly changes and the three of them have to hang on for dear life as they are sucked towards the shaft. Arnie slowly pulls himself up a rope against the vacuum effect, reaching the point where Cohaagen is clinging on by the activation console. So the old man, who’s been shot several times, is able to hold on in this extreme vacuum? Sure, I’ll buy that.

Milobar: Arnold rips Cohaagen away from his hold, sending him into the tube that ejects into the middle of nowhere on the surface of Mars.

Donkey: Once he lands, Cohaagen begins the stretching muppet transformation that is becoming the signature of being exposed to Mars’ atmosphere. Meanwhile, Arnie finally makes his way to the console and activates the alien machine by placing his hand on it. Arbitrary success! And as the machine begins to fire up, he and Milena lose their grip and end up following Cohaagen out the tube,  landing hard on the surface.

Blombo: So they made that shit in the shape of their handprint, and yet any hand will do?

Donkey: Yep, which just reinforces the fact that they really, really should have had more security around that thing. The next ten minutes of the movie consists of Arnie and Milena trashing around on the red soil of Mars as their faces starting going involuntarily hilarious, while the alien machine slowly goes about the process of melting the ice and creating an atmosphere. Keep in mind that these two assholes get sucked out before the first shreds of ice even begin melting, and yet the entire global process happens in time to save them.

Milobar: And once the process has reached a certain point, they stop asphyxiating and start returning to normal at a rate easily five times faster than they got fucked up in the first place.

Blombo: Their eyes were bugging out of their heads and yet everything goes back to normal as soon as there’s air. I’m sorry, you’re not recovering from that. You’re going to be pretty deformed and fucked up.

Milobar: That’s office hot right there.

Just be sure to tell 'em Large Marge sent you...

Donkey: Once the atmosphere is completely established a mere two minutes later, Arnie and Milena stand and look out at the impossibly pleasant environment before them. Boy that red seemed to go away pretty fast. Finally the two not-quite-lovers embrace and Arnold wonders if this really is a dream. They kiss in a way that makes snaking a toilet seem sexy by comparison, and the movie ends. Was it all a dream? Does anyone care?

Milobar: You know it’s funny because that whole scene of them suffocating is how I feel about watching this movie.

Blombo: This movie makes me feel like Kuato, but with a dude coming out my ass.

Donkey: You’ve got a man in your ass again? Is it Wednesday already?

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie is an odd combination that makes it hard to classify. On the one hand, it has elements of a truly shitty movie that make it a landmark achievement in the field. It features a line that would make into any Top Ten Shittiest Things to Say After Killing Someone list, acting that could only be matched by a series of marionettes controlled by a puppeteer with Parkinson’s disease, and idiotic moments that cater to the kind of crowd that would find a demolition derby too intellectual. But at the same time, if the movie really is just a fantasy which Arnie paid to have (which it CLEARLY is), then the stupid elements all have an excuse for their existence. And say what we will, the movie is actually a pretty fun and entertainingly mindless action movie. So on the one hand, it has everything we’re looking for, but on the other, misses the mark by actually being somewhat good. Since this is tearing me in more directions than a group of fat men who have been convinced that I’m stuffed with various candies and prizes, I guess I’ll give it three sweater cows out of five shamefully immature wet dreams.

What We Learned:

Donkey: And if you threw a party…invited everyone you knew….you would see the biggest gift would be from me and the card attached would say…see you at the party, Richter!

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Street racing gets the true representation that it deserves when we look at The Asylum’s…STREET RACER.

Back To The Main Page.

They're colliding? Is God drunk at the wheel? And does that mean that the Almighty is just another shirtless dude you'd find on COPS?

Donkey: Everyone loves a surprise. Whether it’s winning a stack of Jacksons on Papa’s Mustache in the third race down at the track, or having all your friends pop out of the darkness and yell, “Surprise!” just as you, your dog, and a bottle of peanut butter are about to celebrate your birthday by entering a land of erotica shunned by the rest of the world, it’s the thrill of the unknown that makes life worth living. Of course, sometimes a surprise can be more like a kick in the head with cement galoshes. We thought we knew what we were getting into when it came to Asylum films. After all, we had already seen so much. Transmorphers had trilled us with with robots that transmorphed into unremarkable buildings and/or loose debris. Snakes On A Train had dazzled us with Mexican wizardry and breasts bared in palpable shame. Alien Vs Hunter had stunned us with a man in an old scuba suit running around the same tunnels for hours on end. Universal Soldiers had enchanted us with throats that never seemed to go hoarse, no matter that every word left their mouths in a blistering scream. We thought we knew it all, so we were eager to find anything Asylum related that we could get our hands on. And so we came to The Apocalypse. Little did we know that someone was about to turn on the lights and catch us with Skippy on our balls.

The Plot:

Donkey: We have seen movies with plots so simple that it would be reasonable to assume that they had stolen their scripts directly from the daydreams of houseplants, but nothing compares to The Apocalypse. Like many other movies that have come before it, The Apocalypse dares to ask what you would do with your time if you knew that an asteroid was about to end human existence. But rather than ask this question while Steven Tyler yowls like a cat in heat in the background, this movie adds a different caveat. What would you do if the world was going to end and you had to pander to all those people out there with a frighteningly obsessive relationship with Jesus?

You see, The Apocalypse is the first movie that was produced by The Asylum’s subcompany, Faith Films. And while it’s a given that Christianity is going to do to cinema what it has done to rock music – fuck it up so badly that even baby Jesus would cry – it becomes even more of a dark horse when The Asylum enters the picture. Can they really manage to make it that much worse? Hell yes. If you are still a Christian and happen to be looking for the inspiration to abandon your faith faster than an overflowing outhouse, look no further.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Exhibit A: Welcome To Our Nightmare. Our Hilarious Nightmare.

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. Already percolating in anticipation of the hot wool-on-balls action that is to come, the roadie gets up and goes to take a piss. As he’s standing in the trees with his junk in his hand, he looks up to see something in the sky, descending at an alarming rate. Suddenly, our roadie friend is smoked in the chest by a goddamn meteor.

God, please help me clear out this chest infection...Say, what's that?

Back at the campfire, which one has to imagine is no more than twenty feet away at most, one of the women asks, “Did you guys hear that?” But rather than giving her a good shake for asking something so obvious and retarded that it’s akin to asking someone engulfed in flames, “Hey, does that hurt?”, her boyfriend simply says, “I didn’t hear anything.” Really, champ? Because that, of course, is quite insane. Forget hearing; if a meteor hit the Earth twenty feet away from you, you’d feel it. One couple gets up to investigate, gives up after seven seconds, and turns back to the others just in time to see that same boyfriend gets smoked in the head by another goddamn meteor.

I'm just saying that According To Jim is the greatest show ever. If I'm wrong, may my head be pulverized by some type of ballistic rock from the heavens.

Almost immediately his girlfriend is knocked to the ground where she stares up and screams what we can assume is her meteor-flavored imminent demise, which is implied as we don’t actually see her die. But as sweet as that is, we all know that real disasters come in threes and they certainly saved the best for last. As the last couple flees for their lives, the remaining boyfriend suddenly screams like a little girl and jumps off frame. It then cuts to a shot showing him diving into a random puddle of molten lava like he’s in an Olympic diving competition, where he is of course immediately disintegrated.

Oh yeah! Belly flop!

He didn’t fall or stumble in. He fucking DOVE in. So either this asshole thought he had come face to face with the entrance to Candy Mountain, or he just wanted to be out of this Asylum film as quickly and hilariously as possible. Regardless, the remaining woman continues to run as the scene comes to a close. Our laughter, however, wouldn’t stop for at least ten more minutes.

So how much do you think a contractor charges to fix horribly created CG damage?

With that unparalleled example of arbitrary lunacy out of the way, the movie’s main and significantly less comedic story arch now begins. A scene opens to a cabin elsewhere in a Californian forest as a park ranger named Jason gets a call telling him that he has to come down to the station. He arrives there a few minutes later to discover that half of the station has been destroyed by a meteor. And of course, as this is an Asylum film, ‘destroyed’ in this case actually means ‘digitally altered using horrific CG images of rubble and fire to make it appear destroyed’. As Jason and his colleague, Don, stand staring in the understandable confusion that all of us would go through when faced with terrible, terrible special effects, they wonder if they should blame the destruction on an earthquake, a lightning strike, or Mexicans. But their mental crippling is interrupted as another meteor tears across the sky and smashes into the nearby city of Monteray, causing a nuclear-sized explosion. Jason and Don stand there relatively unimpressed, not some much as flinching, like they somehow didn’t notice the goddamn nuclear blast that just took place a short distance away. They remain completely unconcerned until they drive a short ways and see that Monteray is completely destroyed. Oh, THAT’S what that was…

Ewwwww...don't give me cooties!

The movie then introduces us to the next players in this tableau of shame, as we turn to Hollywood and meet Jason’s daughter Lindsay, played by the blonde military chick from Universal Soldiers. She’s in bed with her boyfriend, Andrew, where they’re engaged in a duo of mortal sins in tickling and cuddling. As they explore the unbridled lust of seven-year-olds, one of Lindsay’s roommates bursts into the room, telling them to come watch the news and see the destruction caused by the meteor in Monteray. As she watches the story on a TV in their living room, Lindsay begins freaking out about her mom, who is apparently near the blast zone. Just then she gets a call from her mother and begins a conversation that is in no way completely fucking insane. The fourth sentence of the conversation is, “I know, it’s His plan….no, I’m not afraid.” Her mother tells her to stay there, that she’s on her way. With that bit of reassurance Lindsay, Andrew, and her roommates are free to just sit around and have an exceptionally shallow and pointless conversation about death and, in turn, how all those people are better off because they’re with God in a better place. All the forced religious dialogue is shoehorned into the scene so pathetically that it honestly wouldn’t have been any more stupid for them to have engaged in a conversation about how extreme and in your face Mountain Dew is.

The movie turns back to Jason’s cabin where he and Don are joined by Jason’s ex-wife, Ashley, who gives them horrible news. Another meteor coming, and while the first one was only the size of a small home, this other meteor’s roughly the size of Texas. It should arrive within four days to cause what is widely acknowledged to be complete human extinction. So the question has now become, “if you knew the we all had only four days to live, what would you do?” Not wanting to admit to the massive four day orgy that just sprung to mind, Don instead says that he has to go see his brother before all is said and done and bolts out the front door to go find his Astroglide and assless chaps. Jason tries to cockblock, insisting that Don should come with them instead as he chases Don outside, only to discover that he has vanished. Jason and Ashley look around the front of the cabin to see where he could have possibly gone, and we are once again treated to the sensory delights of the Asylum’s production values. As the two speak to one another, their voices are drowned out completely by the wind. Not a strong, gale-force wind, mind you. Just a regular breeze. I’m not sure what either of them says, so instead I’ll just guess that the scene ends with, “I sure hope Don doesn’t strangle too many hookers on the way to that clusterfuck and steal all my fun.”

With our main character introduced, the movie breaks off and follows two separate paths at this point, both of which are equally uninteresting and poorly regaled. Rather than switch back and forth between the two plot lines like the movie does in a transparent attempt to make each of them appear to have more depth than they actually do, we’ll sift through these turd piles one at a time to show how little substance is actually in them.

Exhibit B: Self-Righteous Irrelevance Takes A Road Trip.

We’ll start our recounting with the parents and the tale of the their long trek to find Lindsay in LA. Their first obstacle, apart from lacking any interesting or redeemable qualities that would make the characters sympathetic or identifiable in the slightest, is unnecessary and poorly created tension in the form of a landslide that comes roaring down behind them as they drive away from Jason’s cabin. And once again, remember that this is an Asylum film, so in this case the landslide consists of absolutely nothing. Some street lights blink out to make it seem like they’ve been enveloped in the blackness of the slide, but since this scene takes place in the pitch black dead of night, that means that they’re adding blackness to blackness. This is shown pretty blatantly as they race away in their truck and Jason yells to Ashley, asking if she can see if it’s still behind them. She says yes as the camera cuts to a shot looking back behind the truck where we see NOTHING. But eventually, once they’re sick of playing their little pretend game, they somehow determine that they’re no longer being chased by invisible nothingness and slow down to a leisurely pace.

Ummmm....yep, I totally see a landslide behind us.

They’re still driving the next morning as Jason says something about hoping there’s some kind of contingency plan in place, to which Ashley replies that there’s always salvation. Yeah, I sure hope that if any looming natural disasters are facing us as a species, like a giant meteor, our world leaders don’t try to actually solve the problem by sending Bruce Willis and a team of crusty oil rig jockeys to pull an Armageddon or something even remotely useful, but instead just tell me to ante up and pay the cover charge with Mr. Jesus so that I can get past the velvet ropes in the sky. But rather than stopping with that stupidity, Ashley keeps talking and moves on to how Jason’s put it off long enough, but it’s time to face the death of their son and seek salvation. I’d love to say more about the minutes of dialogue that proceeds from that point, as they appear to be trying to make the scene appear quite dramatic, but you can’t hear a goddamn thing over the ambient noise of the background. Obviously whoever was doing the audio thought that the best place for the mic was in the truck’s goddamn muffler. Moments later they come to a van on the side of the road and a man who looks suspiciously like he’s using that van to lure children into a very sore world of rectal pain using delicious candy as bait. They stop and discover that it’s another Asylum film regular, the dude who played the doctor in Transmorphers. He’s frantically searching for his nephew who literally disappeared out of the back of the van while he was driving. A single middle-aged dude frantically looking for a child with whom he is loosely affiliated at best who managed to escape from the back of his van? Oh yeah, that sounds totally legit. Sign me up. But before Jason and Ashley can put the pieces together, the doctor suddenly disappears himself. What could this mean? Could it be an alien abduction? Divine intervention? Or simply that the dude stepped off camera during a cut?

Goddamn it! Do you know how many packs of Skittles it took me to get that kid in here?

The parents continue driving, passing a bunch of cars that have been abandoned in the middle of the road. As the truck weaves between them, the act of turning makes is sound like the truck’s front axle is also acting as a goddamn rock tumbler. Figuring that’s quite enough of an attack on our intelligence, the scene ends there and the movie soon returns to the parents as the weather begins to change. It transitions from ash falling to the ground like snow, to rain, and then to hail. And of course, an Asylum movie is to the weather what it is to everything else, so creating the ‘hail’ in this scene consists of someone off camera throwing handfuls of pellets at the truck. During this intensely fake weather attack, Jason and Ashely once again continue to argue about something, but you can’t hear goddamn thing over the sound of the hail. At the end of what might as well have been a pantomimed discussion, Jason and Ashley look out of their windows and see that the weather continues to change in very poorly animated ways, as what is supposed to be a tornado begins forming off the coastline that the truck is now somehow magically overlooking. Showing a surprising amount of basic intelligence, they decide to take off rather than to wait around and see if the twister will deliver them to Captain Christ and his Infinite Shellfish Buffet.

As they continue their journey at the pace of a leisurely Sunday drive, Ashley decides to continue with her sermon, recounting a tale of how their son Robbie had a meningitis scare as an infant. She was so terrified at the time that Jason had to take her aside and tell her not to worry, that God had a plan. A painful, terrible plan. Jason steels his gaze at the story’s telling, declaring that he was wrong. Ashley says no, he was right. And that’s it. That’s the scene. Wow, what a great fucking story. That showed all the human emotion and religious insight of a half eaten stack of soggy flapjacks. We catch up with them again later as they realize that they’re lost. Or at least I think that’s what they’re saying, since I still can’t hear a fucking thing as they examine their map, other than the sound of what I’m starting to believe is my life being wasted away before my very eyes. And once again the scene closes on that. Fuck, another brilliant moment.

MMMFFFMMMFFGHTTTT!!!! I SAID MMMGGDDDDTTTT, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Our tale returns to the parents shortly, as they come across a dude laying the middle of the road. They stop and get out to investigate, only to find that it’s our favorite Asylum actor, playing a character we’ll call Bald Spice, or BS for short. As Jason approaches his prone body to see if he’s dead, BS sits up suddenly and pulls a gun. He says he’s not a bad man, but he needs their truck to get out of here. I think he’s saying something about needing to see his wife again, but all dialogue in this scene is once again relegated to a lower audio priority than nearby crickets and the sound of air. Eventually Jason says what I believe is something along the lines of not being willing to give up his truck, but that he’s willing take BS with them. More inaudible dialogue is thrown out with dramatic emphasis, in which BS says something about liars. I think he’s talking about the ‘no late fees’ policy at Blockbuster Video, because at this point I’d rather make up my own story than bother to follow theirs. Apparently he’s not a fan of riding in the back seat, though, as suddenly BS yells, “Why has God forsaken me?”, stumbles into nearby trees, and shoots himself in the head. Or at least we presume that he did, since we didn’t actually see him do it. For all we know, he could have shot up into the sky at his trecherous god and then started silently dancing the Boot Scoot Boogie. But while Jason and Ashley cope with the loss of the potential Chinese-finger-trap-style threesome that they were hoping to talk their way into, a sudden earthquake hits, causing the road to split and their truck to fall into a resulting crevasse.

Shut up. It's totally a lake of boiling blood. Seriously.

The parents continue their journey on foot, arguing about their dead son Robbie. Once again Ashley continues to exclaim that  he needs to find God. As her very tiresome self-righteous speech momentarily ends, they come to a lake which gives them pause, as I believe it’s supposed to have had its water replaced with blood and have dead fish floating in it. But of course, the Asylum created this effect by simply filming a lake that looks like it has garbage floating in it. Close enough, right? The movie cuts away and then returns to the parents in another scene where Ashley demands that Jason pray with her. The water is blood, the sky is burning; it’s clear that The Almighty is having his period. But regardless, she says that her faith needs to be stronger and so does his, so that they can all be together in the afterlife. And then that scene ends. FUCK. Is this even a movie? Because at this point it just seems like a test to see how much ridiculous shit Christians will put up with so long as they are treated to an unmotivated reference to Jesus every five minutes.

As their journey continues, along with our pain in witnessing it, the parents arrive at random airplane hangar where they find a woman with a rifle and her young daughter. After a few moments which are supposed to be tense, but instead act as just another verse in the lullaby that is this movie as it sings you into a coma, the woman and daughter agree to allow Jason and Ashley to stay without first testing the velocity of buckshot with their faces. As the four of them sit around and listen to a radio, the daughter reveals that they still have wireless Internet. And apparently someone out there is still blogging, because moments later when Jason and the little girl are on the computer, they find news about the asteroid that’s coming to kill them all. And while Jason and the girl hack the Gibson, the woman tells Ashley that they’re alone because her boyfriend suddenly disappeared. Ashley asks if he was a man of God. And wouldn’t you know it, he was. The woman explains that she wanted more people of high moral stature around her daughter, so she she got online and found this dude in a Christian chat room. Are you fucking kidding me? You wanted to avoid freaks, so you went online? But Ashley assures the woman that her boyfriend is with God now, because it’s the End of Days. While all this is going on, the young girl decides to give Jason the keys to a plane, which he and Ashley hop into moments later, leaving the mother and daughter behind to face their fate alone. Because that’s the Christian thing to do, folks.

As their journey takes to the skies, the parents look down to see a tsunami hitting the west coast. It should go without saying at this point that this latest disaster, like all others before it, looks like complete ass. The movie cuts away and eventually returns to them, where this time the dialogue loses audio priority to the musical score, which makes sense. I guess hearing the third chair obo player for the Sacramento Carpet Layer and Food Buggerer’s Orchestra is more important than anything else. If you strain hard enough, you’ll be able to make out Ashley saying that she’s only worried that Lindsay won’t ask for God’s forgiveness in time. But as long as she does, everything else will work itself out. Apparently even the magic man in the sky found this idea to be as incomprehensibly and offensively idiotic as I did, as suddenly a bunch of meteors begin to rain down around the plane. Jason uses his finely tuned piloting skills to do absolutely nothing, as the scene ends with a flaming ball of poetic justice smashing through a wing and the plane beginning to descend back to the Earth.

Damn, I think that crash gave me a hangnail.

The next time we see the parents, they are inexplicably walking away from the horrible burning wreckage that their plane now consists of without so much as a scratch. To add insult to a blatant kick in the balls, Ashley decides it’s time to treat us all to another story. This time it’s about how the priest at Robbie’s funeral gave her shit for not doing enough to save him, as Robbie was never baptized. As a result of his cruelty, she hasn’t been back to church in years. To really add the exclamation point on how much of a fucking idiot she is, Ashley says that she doesn’t forgive the priest, but she understands him, as he was just trying to save souls and that’s what she’s trying to do now. She surmises that because of what she describes as her casual approach to religion, as apparently this woman rates any view that’s not so fundamentalist that it involves strapping yourself to a metric ton of dynamite and running at an abortion clinic as “casual”, she’s not being raptured away like everyone else around them is. And once again, the Flying Spaghetti Monster must agree with my exasperation at this display, as moments later lightning strikes twice within five feet of the couple as they flee from the well deserved smiting. But finally their journey comes to an end as they approach LA.

Exhibit C: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Lindsay. Oh, And My Secular Pussy Of A Boyfriend.

While those events were playing out for her parents, Lindsay ventures through a even simpler and far more pointless odyssey. We first catch up with her as she and Andrew show up at the church that she frequents. The couple sit in a pew and Lindsay reassures him that she’s not trying to convert him, but that she thought coming here to chill would be relaxing, or at least it would be for her. Wow, now that’s considerate. Andrew makes an offhanded quip about how, “this is a little strange, especially after…last night.” That’s right kids, he’s talking about the dirty, dirty sex. You see, you can’t be a decent religious person if you have premarital sex, even if you are of legal consenting age and in a loving, committed relationship. And apparently piercings and tattoos don’t cut it either, as Andrew points those out as well all to make the case that Lindsay’s a terrible person. Then somehow the conversation ends up turning around, with him arguing that she obviously believes in God while she plays it cool, like she just comes to the church for free pizza and geriatric bingo. That’s the end of that scene, and I’m sure glad that I watched it, because I learned absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact, I’ve completely forgotten where I live.

You so owe me and hanjob for this.

We return to see the young couple the next morning, back at Lindsay’s house where she sits up in bed after another night of dirty anal sex with Andrew. She hears a noise and Andrew tells her that everything will be alright. And once again we fade to black with the end of another scene. WHAT?! That’s a scene? How was that even in the goddamn script? What was the point of that?

Next we see Lindsay later on that day, pleading to go out while Andrew puts his foot down and says they’re not going anywhere. As this argument, which seems like it has been time warped in from 1954, continues, the phone rings. Lindsay answers it, only to realize that it’s a call from…no one. DRAMATIC! And that’s it. Time to end another scene. Again, what a poignant look into the human condition. I’ve seen shampoo commercials deeper than this fucking movie. As the movie returns to Lindsay later, she is still hanging out in her living room, watching the news with one of her roommates. The camera tightens its shot on Lindsay for no apparent reason, then pans back out to show the roommate has suddenly either disappeared or just wandered off camera to grab an RC Cola. Lindsay steps out her front door, just to confirm that her roommate did not, in fact, find some miraculous way to defy physics and dive out of the house without her noticing. And that’s it. End of scene. FUCK. This is really testing my goddamn patience. And let me remind you all, I’m no goddamn rookie when it comes to ‘Asylum-boring’.

Hey, you don't know who ate my leftover burrito, do you? Hello?

What? There's a what coming? I totally don't hear anything.

The movie picks up again as Lindsay is joined by Andrew in the front yard and they look up to see a twister coming towards them, tearing apart anything in its path. As the two of them flee back inside the house, they run into one of Lindsay’s other roommates who doesn’t believe them when they tell her of the impending danger. Apparently she’s been hanging out in a fucking sensory deprivation tank. She runs out front and sees for herself that yes, there is in fact a tornado about a hundred yards from their front door. What was the goddamn point of that? We’ve already seen the twister, so it’s not like the movie needed an idiot to give it an excuse to prove that it was there. So is the movie seriously trying to suggest that she couldn’t hear that? Regardless, they all run back inside a take cover. The roommate ends up hiding underneath their stairs while Lindsay and Andrew take cover in their tub. But it’s all for naught as everyone but Lindsay is sucked away to their doom as the tornado rips through the house. As that scene ends and a new one begins soon after, we see Lindsay stumbling around through wreckage that used to be her neighborhood. Eventually and rather conveniently, she finds Andrew nearby, trapped underneath shit. So not only did he not fly very far after being picked up by a goddamn tornado, but he seems to have landed in an assload of debris without receiving the mandatory complete internal organ makeover. AWESOME.

Sure this might be badly timed, but do you wanna hear my car alarm impression? EEEEEEEEE!!!!!

The next series of scenes in this harrowing, awful tale revolves around Lindsay trying to comfort Andrew as he succumbs to the mortal wound of a not very hurt leg and cries like a schoolgirl, ensuring that even if he were to miraculously survive what should not be fatal wounds, she wouldn’t possibly respect him enough to touch his little boy bits ever again.

Oh God. Look at all the blood that's not coming out of my flesh wound. I'm as good as dead.

Lindsay starts by bringing him a drink, as Andrew gulps at the empty can like a child actor auditioning for his first Kool Aid commercial. They talk about how no one is coming to help and Andrew begins mumbling something that we CAN’T FUCKING HEAR. This just never gets old. Once again dialogue loses out, this time to an unseen helicopter which Lindsay tries unsuccessfully to flag down for help moments later. Of course, an Asylum film doesn’t have the budget for a screenplay, let alone a helicopter so we don’t actually see one. But we still hear it, even as the first scene ends a new one begins, and it still sounds like it’s hovering about six feet above their heads. To fill the time before his life is finally extinguished by the minor scratches on his leg, Andrew continues to babble on, asking what happens if he dies without finding God, saying, “So this is it? I just die?”, and saying he’d believe if Lindsay would just say something. Lindsay asks if Andrew wants Jesus to do something fantastic like raise the dead, or turn water into wine, because He did that already and Andrew still doesn’t believe. Oh snap, son! That might just be the greatest theological argument slapped down since, “well what if you’re wrong?” Just then some Random Arab Dude, whom we’ll awesomely call RAD, wanders up, shaming Andrew into silence. RAD tells them that this kind of devastation is everywhere, but even worse than that is the quiet. It seems like everyone is disappearing. With his pride quickly going out the window, Andrew once again starts to cry like a newborn. Lindsay and RAD move all the way down to the bottom of Andrew’s legs and then start talking about Andrew’s chances of survival. Let’s say that once again just to be clear. They didn’t get up and walk a city block away. They’re literally at his feet, talking like he can’t hear them. And as they carry out this highly covert briefing, Andrew starts gasping for air, then suddenly he starts repeating, “I believe” over and over. Just then Lindsay and Captain RAD turn their heads slightly to discover that Andrew’s gone. Fuck, how did they not notice him disappear? They were crouching at his feet, for god’s sake.

Now that he can't hear us, did you want to get a drink after this fucker dies?

This is the greatest special effect I've ever seen made with MS Paint.

The movie eventually comes back to Lindsay again, as she and Professor RAD begin to argue about what to do next. They’re interrupted by a tremendous roar and we see a badly created CG tsunami wave washing over the Staples Center, followed by a shot of downtown LA completely submerged in water. As the movie turns back to Lindsay and First Mate RAD standing there, unaffected by the catastrophic events around them, they have a shallow conversation about their families before The Duke of RAD tells a crazy non-Christian religious story which has no discernible point. If nothing else, it’s terribly nice of this movie to at least highlight the fact that Christianity hasn’t captured the market on useless drivel. But once again the argument resumes, as the Lord of RAD insists once again that they should be heading to a shelter. But even as he prepares to leave, Lindsay declares that she can’t. She has to find Andrew and wait for her mom to arrive. Soon she finds herself standing alone in a pile of rubble, which is pretty much exactly like the experience of actually watching an Asylum film.

Exhibit D: A Pointless End To A Meaningless Journey…In TECHNICOLOR.

With all of our characters now in the city and their individual stories told, our stories once again converges. Still searching for Lindsay, the parents end up wandering into the church where Lindsay and Andrew had been earlier. They look around and discover that they’re daughter is obviously not there, but before they leave to resume their search, Ashley stops at the large crucifix hanging at the pulpit. And just to bookend the movie, a death as startlingly hilarious as those in the opening of the movie takes place. As they stand in prayer, lightning somehow manages to strike inside the building and hit the cross directly. But it gets even fucking crazier: the cross then explodes and a huge chunk hits Ashley, instantly crushing her. Jason kneels down to comfort her as she dies in one of the funniest  and most ironic ways ever seen on film. As she looks up at him, Jason’s bathed in light. Ashley tells him not to worry about her, to find their daughter and let her see his heart. They tearfully tell one another that they love each other before she finally disappears. That might have been touching if it weren’t one of the most goddamn ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.

How much does God have to hate you for you to be killed by a crucifix that's been struck by lightning INSIDE A FUCKING CHURCH?

Is it just me, or is he only five years older than his supposed "daughter"? Ten, tops.

With very little left to do, Jason walks outside into the rain. He strolls through three different shots, and even though it’s pouring rain in every one of them, he’s only slightly wet. After a few minutes, he finally finds Lindsay, and at that point he’s miraculously bone dry. They have a tearful reunion and a conversation that’s once again drowned out by the musical score. As they embrace one last time, they turn and see that the asteroid is about to strike. And at the point, the credits begin to roll and the movie ends. So just to be clear, these two weren’t save. I’m not sure what commentary that’s trying to make, but I’m pretty sure it’s one that would still be considered ridiculous if you muttered it out through a mouthful of crackers after getting kicked straight in the vagina.

The Verdict:

Donkey: While it could only be described as an insult to anything with a pulse, The Apocalypse does feature two of the greatest things ever to be witnessed in cinema. First, the opening scene is as without equal in hilarity as it is without reason for existing in the first place. It clearly doesn’t fit this movie in any way imaginable, but stands out as its greatest strength by far. Second, the audio quality of the film shines as one of the true crown jewels of The Asylum production company. While it is certainly a signature aspect of all of their early films, this is the one movie that features absolutely no action scenes, no explosions, no loud sound effects, or any other possible excuse that could be made for it’s blatant shittiness. It’s like they recorded this entire movie in a fucking wind tunnel and are making no apologies for it. However, those are the only two possible points of acclaim, as the rest of the movie is boring, self-righteous bullshit. Stil, that prologue is badass. I give his movie three meteor strikes to the face out of five sermons from a trashpile.

What We Learned:

Donkey: If there’s anyone that can make me believe in Christianity less than Jerry Fallwell, Pat Robertson, and Kirk Cameron all rolled into one ball of fucking crazy, it’s the Asylum. I should have never doubted them. My hat is off.

Don’t forget to check back every Thursday for a new, fresh review! Next week we will unfortunately be forced to take a break to regain our strength and intestinal fortitude, but check back later when a fully renewed shittymovienight.com presents: Possibly the greatest tragedy to ever hit the film and music industries simultaneously in the form of a dancing abyss of shame…COOL AS ICE.

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