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.

Someone should either be charged with fraud or given a Congressional Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Mindfucking because the actual movie isn’t half as interesting as this cover art.

Donkey: Since the three of us began this epic journey into the Land of Dreams, Magic, and Flying Splits Kicks lo those years ago now, we’ve frequently been asked what kind of effect it’s had on our outlook on movies in general. As you can imagine, the influence of this ordeal has been rather profound, but not quite in the way that most people seem to think. Rather than growing to hate the seamy underbelly of the cinematic experience, more than ever we have come to love the rampant hilarity of a truly shitty movie. That goes without saying; otherwise this exercise would have resulted in a glorious suicide pact involving dynamite, cyanide capsules, or possibly John Tesh albums long ago. But after all we’ve seen and heard there is one kind of movie that drives us into a bloodthirsty rage: the unrelentingly mediocre. You see, a truly great movie, or even a pretty good movie, can pull you in and deliver a spectacular experience for the senses, while the wholesale failure of an epically shitty movie can deliver laughs like no other. But it’s that middle ground, where a movie is neither good enough to be remarkable nor bad enough to be funny that simply manages to suck a couple of hours out of your life without a single reward other than unbridled rage upon realizing what happened. It’s kind of like being tricked into watching someone do a series of unimpressive and uninteresting card tricks for a couple of hours, just to turn around and realize that it was just one big distraction while someone has raped your cat.

As is usually the case, we had to learn the hard way. Much like TMNT III: Turtles In Time gave us an early lesson in how certain categories of movies simply don’t belong in our rotation, seeing as pointing out that the story in a kids’ movie is stupid is about as obvious and therefore relevant as finding that same fault in a porno, Alien Apocalypse taught of that unabashed monotony can destroy an evening faster than a cold sore at a swingers convention. And while this is a trap that we would inevitably fall into again and again since monotony can be hard to spot – I’m looking at you, Hellboy II – this was the movie that truly defined our hatred.

The Plot:

Donkey: Do you remember the movie Planet Of The Apes? And I’m not talking about the Tim Burton remake starring Marky “Pumping cinder blocks and looking perpetually constipated might cover for my lack of discernable talent” Mark, which was a blight on humanity so severe that I’m surprised it didn’t damn near wipe out the Irish. No, I’m referring to the original Charleton Heston feature, one of the most parodied, sub-referenced, and clever films in the history of science fiction. If you take that movie, with its suspense that led to one of the most memorable endings of all time, and replace those elements with Bruce Campbell and bad CG, you’re left with almost the exact plot of Alien Apocalypse and a vacuum which will suck in both your will to live and your faith in humankind.

Bruce Campbell plays Dr. Ivan Hood, the medical officer of a small band of astronauts whom, after Van Winkling their way through a pleasant 50 year cryo-nap in space, return to Earth to find the world has been enslaved by wood-seeking aliens so poorly crafted that it’s hard to believe that they could take over the fry station of a fucking Burger King, let alone an entire planet. It seems that all hope for both humanity and the slightest shred of plausibility is lost. But when fate makes a collect call, Bruce accepts the charges, leading a rebellion against the extraterrestrial overlords that will send them back to the 8-bit plane of existence from whence they came.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: The best part of this DVD by far is that it plays the trailers for Evil Dead and Evil Dead II before getting to the title menu, and quite lengthy trailers at that. It’s almost as if the movie itself was trying to give you one last warning that you could be watching something much more entertaining than what’s about to come. Trust me…it’s a warning you should heed. Other than that, there is quite literally nothing in this film that’s noteworthy, so much so that each time it clearly faded in and out for what would have been a commercial break I was hoping that it just wouldn’t bother coming back. So as there are specific points to discuss, I thought it might be more insightful to detail the actual experience of watching it so that you know what you’d be in for should you fall into the same trap. Behold how the horror unfolded:

8:37 PM: Arrive at Blombo’s house. Spirits are high as drinks and snacks are dispersed. Gastro-intestinal stability intact.

8:44 PM: Blombo finishes details of latest conquest. Highly suspect that sharing a couch with him is giving me gonorrhea. Mental note to pick up penicillin tomorrow as we begin evening’s film.

8:47 PM: Bruce Campbell makes triumphant entrance in opening scene, promising clever dialogue and razor sharp delivery. Time to sit back and wait for the hilarity to punch our brains right in the penis.

9:05 PM: Still waiting.

9:10 PM: Mind begins to drift. Check companions to see if they’re actually enjoying this so far. Milobar looks like he’s about to shit out a 4 slice toaster. Blombo looking like he’s not sure where he is. Looks about right. Enjoy a long swig of my delicious Dr. Pepper and remember where I am: Flavor Country.

9:12 PM: Something smells like soup.

Whatever.

9:16 PM: Really try concentrating on the movie. Aliens too badly created to be taken seriously, but not sock puppet level of poor animation that we’ve come to expect. Boredom becoming too intense. Vice-like grip of oblivion slowly wringing will to live out of body. Briefly consider smashing Blombo’s wall in hopes of finding health restoring pot roast inside.

9:20 PM: Bruce talking about something so uninteresting that he might as well be reading phone book. Look down at my tasty Dr. Pepper. Wonder if it’s as tasty as could be. The guy at the 7-11 who sold it to me looked like he was laughing to himself. Coincidence?

9:24 PM: Goddamn there are a lot of dead animals in this room. And who the fuck kills a mountain goat and puts its head on a wall, anyways? Blombo’s dad bragging that he actually thought to eat this thing, or paying homage to his sporting victory in a life or death struggle against an opponent nearly as vicious as a goddamn pony?

9:30 PM: Blombo proclaims that this movie sucks. Milobar assures him, “your mom sucks.” A vote is held. By a margin of 14-1, it’s agreed that Blombo’s mom does in fact suck. Blombo demands a recount, but I assure him that both Milobar and I officially represent 7 people. The motion passes and it enters into official record that Blombo’s mom does in fact suck.

9:37 PM: Something about the President still being alive or some shit like that. Apathy prevents me from retaining sounds and images long enough for my brain to process them. Looking for something, anything to laugh at. Milobar sneezes. I giggle hysterically. Both look at me like I’m insane. Motherfuckers. Don’t they know I’m the Rat King of Extroverted Corduroy? Feeling lightheaded. Steady, champ. Steady. Concentrate.

9:40 PM: Stomach starting to roll. Possible deficit of deliciousness in my Dr. Pepper wreaking havoc on my insides. That dude at the 7-11 has something to do with this, I’m sure. He could see I was in need of genuine refreshment. Saw to it otherwise. That son of a bitch.

If gay was contagious, this actually would induce a fever.

9:43 PM: Spirits continue to sink, nearing rock bottom. I haven’t wanted to cry this badly since Schindler’s List or possibly seeing the cover of that Travolta album.

9:49 PM: Blombo comments on how bored he is. Promptly begins cursing at me for buying this DVD. Milobar assures him that, “your mom’s a DVD.”

9:52 PM: The black pit of nothingness continues to envelope all. Dr. Pepper is almost finished. Putrid bile at this point. That fucking 7-11 guy has prevented both my thirst and my desire for unadulterated deliciousness from being quenched. I’ll burn down that fucking store, dance on his grave.

9:59 PM: Nothing. I feel nothing now. Time has stopped. One moderately clever line is uttered by Bruce when he kills someone, despite their protests of him being a doctor and therefore obligated to care for them, saying, “Your stupidity was terminal. I just cured you.” Too numb to even smile.

10:03 PM: Final battle as epic as two preteens slap fighting over the next turn on Dance Dance Revolution. Pray to Craig T. Nelson that nuclear device destroys entire planet. Stomach churning. Advanced calculus equations tell me that I should probably run to washroom lest a five alarm chili explosion stain Blombo’s couch before the movie finishes. Too lethargic to stand. Can’t seem to bring myself to care.

10:08 PM: Movie finishes. No one speaks. Light slowly seems to filter back into consciousness. What just happened? Did someone slip me a roofie? Check front of pants. All closures seem untouched. No matter. Something deep inside mind has been touched inappropriately, scarring me for life.

The Verdict:

Donkey: Fuck. I’m at a loss for words with this one. Trying to find something in this movie to laugh about couldn’t be much harder if you swapped it for real-time footage of a kidney transplant. It’s so clearly a TV movie in every possible facet of its production values that you might as well be watching three straight episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, and so boring that it would be a three episode mini-series of Xena tending to a garden to keep her mind off the pending results of an AIDS test. What a waste of Bruce Campbell’s considerable talents. If you want to bathe in the glory of what may be the greatest B-movie actor of all time, I’d recommend watching his brilliant Old Spice commercial on YouTube instead of this garbage. That is unless you always wanted to know what a persistive vegetative state was like, in which case feel free to pop this shit in, hook up a feeding tube, and prepare to shake hands with the Sultan of Dreamland. I give it zero moments of comedy out of five yawning chasms of aggressively overpowering tedium. Sorry Bruce, not even you could save this one. And thanks for reading the site, by the way. That’s mighty swell of you.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Pet Cemetery wasn’t fucking around. Sometimes dead is beddah.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: A former football player battles a former android for the title of Most Ridiculous Character Ever Conceived in…STONE COLD.

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.

Exhibit B: Future Technology – Increasing Your Prison Break Efficiency By 75 Percent

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!

Exhibit C: Come On Down…You’re The Next Contestant In My Nightmare

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.”

Arnie: “Fuck you.”

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

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

Arnie: “Don’t forget to send me a copy.”

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.

Arnie: “Killian…I’ll be back.”

Killian: “Only in a rerun.”

Exhibit D: Mini-Boss 1 – Stick Handling Of Death

Please observe my giant codpiece of doom! Ha ha!

Arnie: “Hey, Killian. Here is Sub-Zero. Now, plain zero.”

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

Arnie: “Yeah, he was a pain in the neck.”

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.

Buzzsaw: “I love this saw. This saw is part of me. And I’m gonna make it a part of you!”

Arnie: “That’s alright. Keep it.”

Quick, hit him with a red shell!

Amber: “What happened to Buzzsaw?”

Arnie: “He had to split.”

Exhibit F: Mini-boss 3 – More Flaming Than A Rip Taylor Showtunes Party

Flame on, bitches.

Arnie: “How about a light?”

Arnie: “What a hothead.”

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!

Arnie: “Well that hit the spot.”

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.

I'm here to make sure all your clocks are synchronized.

Donkey: If there’s one premise that will almost assuredly mean that a movie that you’re about to watch is about to be complete bullshit, it’s the subject of time travel. The method, governing rules, and possible results of time travel vary greatly from movie to movie, and no franchise handles it with less care than the Star Trek series. One moment they treat it like it’s a monumental task that can only be achieved by slingshotting yourself around the sun with a couple of whales, and then in the next moment treat it it’s a goddamn footnote to preventing the Borg from invading the Earth, less remarkable than Data getting a robo-boner. But they are far from alone, as this has been a popular subject amongst science fiction movies for as long as they have existed. The problem is that most of them assume that your knowledge of physics and the theory of time travel is strong enough only to realize that if you stuff Cheetos in your face, they will eventually make their triumphant return in your toilet a few hours later. So if I’m going to be patronized, I want to be patronized by a man doing the splits.

The Plot:

Donkey: Despite what the title would lead you to believe, Timecop is actually the story of Van Damme as he struggles to run a small haberdashery in the heart of eighteenth century London. With the pressure of rising textile costs and the overwhelming expectations of an overbearing father, Van Damme silently struggles through his inner turmoil while trying to gain the favor of his landlord’s comely daughter.

Seriously, wouldn’t it be awesome if that were the case?

Actually, Timecop is exactly what you’d expect it to be. In the far distant future, all the way in the year 1994, time travel has been perfected, provided that you consider throwing yourself at a wall and hoping that you don’t die perfection. As a result, the US government creates a secret organization dedicated to patrolling time and making sure that no one attempts to alter it for their own gain. But when JCVD, their star agent, discovers that the politician responsible for overseeing the department has been corrupted, he must find a way to stop the Senator’s exceptionally modestly evil ambitions.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Part I: Gentlemen, Find Me The Greatest Ballerina In All The Land

I've come back to ask y'all for your gold and your flossing techniques.

Donkey: Our feature starts as all tales worth telling happen to, in Gainesville, Georgia circa 1863. A small band of Confederate troops wanders down a lonely road in the pouring rain, having taken some time away from subjugating black people and planning weddings between cousins to transport a cache of the much famed Confederate gold. But their journey comes to an end moments later when they approach a lone figure standing in the middle of the road, blocking their path. Since we never learn his name, we’ll simply call him the Gummy Avenger. As they politely ask him to move, the Gummy Avenger counters their offer by suggesting that they hand over all their gold to him, all the while grinning like he just ripped a Taco Grande fart. That grin is especially noteworthy and his name becomes immediately appropriate when you realize that this man ironically has fewer teeth than the Confederate soldiers that he’s robbing. Having our pal Gummy quite outnumbered, the soldiers naturally laugh at his request, chuckling all the way to the grave as GA pulls out two fully automatic weapons and shoots them dead, a feat of marksmanship that is quite impressive when all their horses trot away quite alive without their mounts moments later, even though he was spraying bullets with less accuracy than a John Holmes money shot.

Now what do I have to do to put you folks in this Sunfire today?

With the threat of toothless men traveling back in time to steal a form of currency that’s all but theoretically useless to most of the world’s populace from other men whom are miraculously free of dental diseases having been established, the question now turns to whether or not the rest of the world will ever be able to sleep another night without falling into the depths of an oral hygienic nightmare. If you’re anything like me, then pondering this inevitably brings you to the answer, “shit no”. And as luck would have it, we’re not the only ones. We shift forward in time to the modern day, presuming that the modern day is somewhere in 1994, to see the repercussions of this interference with the space time continuum. A meeting of the Senate Oversight Committee for Covert Operations is called, where a group of politicians are presented with the news that time travel has been perfected. After an exceptionally elementary speech on how changing events in the past can cause ripples that will make drastic changes to the future, perhaps even going so far as to destroy mankind, the bureaucrats argue that it must be protected. To hammer home their point, they use the example of our friend, the toothless gold miner, to warn that they have already encounters dangers, having stopped an arms deal in Germany involving Middle Eastern terrorists that was being financed using the stolen confederate gold. The Senators listening to this pitch seem convinced, and the agency known as the Time Enforcement Commission is born. Ron Silver, playing Senator McComb, volunteers to chair the committee while looking on with the kind of moderately evil expression that could either mean that he will go on to be the film’s main antagonist or that he’s about to try to sell us a used Pontiac.

The face of disappointment.

And now that we’ve established the institution of the Timecops, it’s time to introduce the man who will lead them to glory. The movie cuts to a mall where Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend, Mia Sara, is approached from behind by a strange man with a thick Belgian accent. Hoping to turn around and discover a vision of rugged masculinity who will teach her the sensual French arts that unlock the doors to Flavor Country, she instead finds JCVD. Damn. I was kind of hoping it was going to be Cameron Fry. Once they’re finished playing the classic ‘let’s try to revitalize our failing sex life by pretending you’re a whore’ game, Van Damme explains that he has just come from a meeting with Matuzak, the head of the TEC. But before he can share the outcome of that meeting, danger rears its ugly and horribly stereotypical head. A dude on rollerblades, whom should be put to death for rollerblading through a fucking mall in the first place, snatches the purse of an elderly woman and tries to make a break for it. Unfortunately for him, the world’s deadliest ballerina is on the case! As he tries to make his obnoxious getaway, he comes face to face with the surprisingly small boot of justice. But rather than making the punk swallow his own teeth, Van Damme instead simply kicks his foot up to the punk’s face level and intimidates him into submission by asking him to read the logo on the sole of his boot. Rather than just turning and going to other goddamn way, this actually scares the failed thief into surrendering the bag back to the old lady and sulking away in shame.

Hey buddy, can you check to see if I stepped in dog shit?

There is no time in the history of man that this hair style wasn't considered retarded.

As he admires his own handiwork, JCVD looks up to a railing above him to see two random dudes with bad hair staring at him. With coifs like that, you know that they must mean business. Clown business, but business nonetheless. But being a man who laughs in the face of danger as readily as he will in the face of quality scripts, Van Damme looks back a second later only to discover that they’re gone. But rather than wonder who the fuck gets a haircut like that on purpose, he instead goes back home with his wife to make with the sexy time. If there’s a better way to end a scene than showing me Jean Claude’s ass, I don’t know what it is.

As they lay around at the end of what was likely a four hour tour of sexual delights that no mere mortal man could possibly Shirpa a woman through, JCVD gets a call from work asking him to come in immediately. Mia begs him not to answer it, but his sense of duty provides a convenient excuse to get the hell out of the non-splits involving cuddling that was sure to soon follow. As he leaves through the front door of a house big enough that no fucking cop could possibly afford it, he’s attacked by the two dudes with the Flowbee haircuts that he saw earlier at the mall, while others drag his wife upstairs and try to finish the job that Van Damme couldn’t. Once they slap him around to their satisfaction, the cyberpunks finally shoot Van Damme twice in the chest at point blank range and walk away. Naturally JCVD reveals that he was wearing a bulletproof vest a moment later, as he gets up to see his wife screaming in their bedroom window. But just as he tries to rush back into the house, the entire house explodes in a way that could only actually happen if the entire goddamn foundation that it was built on happened to consist of dynamite. We’re not really sure why, but I suspect that after having experienced dozens of orgasms at the hands of Van Damme, his wife had been brought to the very precipice of pleasures that no one was meant to achieve, and when someone tried to touch her again, her vagina simply exploded. But hey, it’s just a theory.

I wonder if I left the stove on...YAARRRGGGHHHH!!!

Part II: Dr Splitslove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying About My Dead Wife And Love My Mullet

I can't wait for the future when we replace our iPods with...what the fuck is that?

With that random act of unmotivated violence complete, it’s time once again travel into the past. In this case find ourselves arriving on the magical day of October 30th, 1929. A man named Lyle Atwood walks into an office on Wall Street, pulls out a newspaper from the distant year of 2004, and proves it to be entirely useless by laying out his plan to invest solely in oil companies. Did you really have to bring stock quotes back from the future with you if you were going to only pick one product? Couldn’t you just write a note on your hand that says, “Remember: invest in oil, pick up cat food”? To really get himself in the mood to do some evil investing, he pulls out what appears to be some kind of Future Walkman that plays an audio format that I’ve never fucking seen before to listen to some future music. I know how he feels. Not even planning my future wealth can suppress my need to RAWK! But just as he gets comfy, Van Damme steps through a time portal in the middle of the room. But this isn’t the cock-eyed young dancer Van Damme that we’ve seen up to this point. This is a grizzled, battle-hardened, mini-mullet sporting Timecop of the future. They greet each other knowingly and establish that they are ex-partners at the TEC. Van Damme starts to calmly gather up all the future stuff sitting around in the room while Lyle tries to justify his actions, saying that he won’t change anything but his own bank account. And as he talks, Lyle hits an alarm under his desk that summons two hilariously unoriginal 1920′s strong men who apparently skipped out of their fighting classes to concentrate on mustache waxing techniques. Van Damme naturally destroys them both, knocking the first one out rather easily before taking on the second one using a deadly combination of wall-running and completely unnecessary splits. Still not willing to give up, Lyle pulls out a Future Gun and proceeds to shoot the whole fucking office up, sending his coworkers away screaming. You know, for a guy trying to stop Lyle from changing the past, Van Damme’s doing a shitty job of it. Once he runs out of ammo and resigns himself to the fact that there is no man alive who can stop the Muscles from Brussels, Lyle reveals that he was sent back by Senator McComb who’s gathering money to fund his campaign for President. Van Damme doesn’t believe him at first, because apparently a crooked US Senator is a totally unbelievably premise, and tells him that Lyle that he has no choice. After saying that he doesn’t either, Lyle takes off and jumps out of a window. Still not willing to give up even in the face of the formidable duo of opponents that are gravity and really fucking hard pavement, Van Damme doesn’t hesitate to follow him out the window. As the two of them hurdle towards the ground together, JCVD grabs Lyle and hits a button on his belt that conveniently opens up a time portal right in front of them, taking them back to the future. The day has been saved! Hurray! Oh, except if you consider the crowd of people who watched you open a goddamn time portal, which should definitely change something about the future that they’re returning to. In that case you might want to wait before putting that trophy on your mantle.

Van Damme faces his most terrifying opponent yet: my elementary school vice principal.

Oh yeah, there's nothing weird about looking up and seeing that.

The movie returns to the future again, all the way to the inconceivably distant year of 2004, showing Van Damme and his captured prey in the TEC offices where Van Damme tells Lyle to testify and he’ll do what he can for him. Justice is apparently a speedy process in the future, as the two of them stand before a judge moments later, whom Lyle refuses to speak to, despite Van Damme’s pleading. Since he offers no defense of any kind, Lyle is sentenced to death, which is carried out immediately by putting him back in the exact same position in the past that he was saved from: falling to his doom.

With that business at an end, our focus turns to a Timecop staff meeting that Van Damme interrupts in an attempt to share his revelations about Senator McComb with his boss, Matuzak, only moments before a small group of politicians and bureaucrats, including Senator McComb himself, barges into the office for a tour. As McComb and JCVD dance with very little subtlety around the fact that they both know that he’s crooked, a couple of key plot points are established. First the group makes fun of McComb for having sold off his stake in the company that manufactures the chip that enables time travel, a move that cost him billions of dollars. Then Matuzak drops an obvious bomb of foreshadowing, explaining that one of the dangers of time travel is that if someone goes back and runs into themselves, the results can be catastrophic as the same matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

As he leaves the brief meeting with his soft-shoed rival, McComb jumps in the most fucking awesome future limo I’ve ever seen, where he gets an update on the latest poll results in his presidential bid. His assistant declares that while he’s making inroads, McComb’s numbers aren’t high enough and that he’s going to run out of money before all is said and done. And while part of me is desperately hoping this news will convince McComb to give up this idiotic path and turn to something truly evil, like traveling back in time to arbitrarily rape Tony Danza while yelling, “now who’s the boss?”, he dismisses his assistant’s advice by smashing his face into the side of the car. McComb declares that elections are won with television and money, and that all he needs is fifty million to buy the network time that he needs. Wow, Senator, that’s…really underwhelming. So the movie’s evil mastermind is stealing money to buy network air time? If he commits the heinous crime of misappropriation of funds on top of this, McComb might just become the next Hitler.

So if I'm to believe this movie, the primary complaint among car consumers in the future is the hassle of actually being able to see out of them?

Back in the TEC offices, Van Damme finally reveals the news of Lyle Atwood naming McComb to Matuzak before going home alone in another fucking awesome future car, which in his case drives itself. Apparently not very well, though, as it screeches its way around a corner when it pulls up to his place. Van Damme enters his dark future apartment and immediately turns on an old home video of him and Mia Sara trying to build a birdhouse before they give up and have a poorly motivated horizontal mambo session in the park. He recites his parts along with the tape while drinking, which one can only presume is mere moments before he begins a tear-filled jerk off marathon. Ah…that takes me back to Friday nights with season one of The Golden Girls on DVD. Who hasn’t been there?

The scene fades to the next morning, where a news story playing on the TV in the background declares that McComb’s campaign is out of money as JCVD lays asleep on his couch. While he dreams of tight pants and deli sandwiches, a laser sight makes its way onto his forehead. But just as the mysterious attacker pulls the trigger, Van Damme wakes up and somehow manages to get out of the way just as the Taser strikes. After taking the assailant, whom we’ll refer to as Dynamo, out with a simple throw, Van Damme turns to face an Asian opponent whom is naturally in the movie only to provide some kind of plausible opponent that is as well versed as him in martial arts. To show off how badass they are, Van Damme and the Karate Kid engage in what has to be one of the fucking dumbest conceptual fights ever scene in films, the knife fight. Apparently we’re not supposed to realize how goddamn impossible it would be for anyone to parry an attack using a three inch blade. Well, I guess it would be far more implausible in this particular case if Van Damme actually moved his hand. But instead he just holds his knife up in front of his face and the Karate Kid just continuously slashes at it, rather than just sticking him in the kidneys. The fight ends in his kitchen, with Van Damme lying face down on the floor while a water jug spills out all around him and Dynamo takes aim at him again with his Taser. But being fully trained in the art of awesome, Van Damme avoids the attack by jumping up and doing the splits on his counters to stay safely out of range, while the Taser hits the floor and causes Dynamo to be electrocuted by the water he’s standing in. Just as Jean Claude smashes Dynamo through the front door of his apartment, an Internal Affairs agent named Fielding shows up with beat cops right behind her to clean up the mess.

Thank God he's in his underwear. I was worried for a second that I wouldn't be forced to see his balls in this movie.

As that mild dose of action draws to a close and I gradually stop karate chopping the couch while reciting quotes from Sixteen Candles, the movie returns to TEC Headquarters where JCVD bursts into Matuzak’s office to declare that McComb tried to have him killed and to demand to know why he’s being followed by Internal Affairs. Matuzak explains that it’s because his partner went crooked, so AI isn’t sure if he can be trusted, so Fielding will be following him on his next mission. He gives the typical buddy cop action movie speech about not working with partners, which is so old by now that I’m pretty sure it could write a firsthand account of the Lincoln presidency, just before an emergency situations is declared. The three of them run to the control room where they find Ricky The Tech digitally fucking a woman using the shitty future equivalent of a Virtual Boy. This adds absolutely nothing to the film besides an excuse to show another naked woman and to tee up Van Damme for the awesome line, “Looks like safe sex to me.” Sweet.

Part III: Apparently The Corrupt Are Pretty Good At Corrupting Other People…Who Knew?

Once the details of the time emergency are laid out, Van Damme suits up to take care of the breach. As he and Fielding march into the launch area, we finally see the movie’s actual method of time traveling for the first time. It consists of a rocket sled on a stretch of track that speeds towards a giant arch. As long as the sled gets up to the right speed, it passes through a time portal just before the arch and goes back through time and space. But the single greatest part of this process is that on the other side of the arch there is a fucking brick wall. This means that if something goes wrong and the pod doesn’t successfully travel back through time, it smashes into the goddamn wall at an incredibly high speed. Van Damme illustrates this by pointing out the two massive blotches of red on the wall that apparently used to be a pair of twins that failed to launch correctly. The movie rolls right past these details rather quickly, but these are plot points that stand out amongst all shitty movies as so fundamentally retarded that we really need to stop and think about this. If your method of time travel involves a rocket sled getting up to what Doc Brown has scientifically proven to be the required 88 miles per hour, why the fuck would you build a goddamn brick wall three feet past the point that the sled is supposed to disappear, other than creating an arbitrary element of lethal danger? Couldn’t you just have another fifty feet of track after that, so the goddamn sled could come to a gradual stop if something went wrong and you could, I don’t know, maybe try again? What goddamn Marketing major designed this fucking thing? And if two people had died smashing into that wall, why the fuck are their blood stains still on that goddamn wall? Is the wall itself not a terrifying enough threat to deter failure?

Theoretical danger isn't enough. Let's add a physical threat for no reason at all. Oh, and never clean the thing. Perfect.

Once the launch is completed successfully, which is denoted by Van Damme and Fielding’s faces being warped before the sled disappears into a time portal, the two of them drop into a lake in the middle of Washington DC. Again, this isn’t mentioned, but it completes a trifecta of stupidity when it comes to the time travel process in this movie. The two of them disappeared in the time portal with the rocket sled, but arrived in the past without it. So where did the goddamn sled go? Why exactly would it not travel back with them? Did anyone actually write this script, or did the Awesome-O 5000 spit it out for a boardroom full of Hollywood executives? Regardless, having arrived in the past, our two heroes walk towards their destination while making idle chit chat about their jobs and philosophical views on life, managing to make the subjects as remarkably boring as you would think. When they finally arrive at the Parker McComb Datalink industrial warehouse which we must presume is their destination, they split up to sneak in.

Ice to see you!

Inside the building we see a younger Senator McComb, or Past McComb, about to sell his part of the company, the move which was mentioned previously in the future as one that cost him billions of dollars. Just as his partner, Parker, hands McComb a cheque and says that he’s out of the company, Future McComb arrives through a time portal with a group of thugs and stops the transaction. Naturally JCVD steps in, as he and Fields quickly subdue the group. But just as JCVD goes to collect McComb’s Track & Return module and face McComb for a moment of gloating glory before returning him to future to face charges, Fields turns her gun on him. With the tables turned, McComb shoots Parker dead. But just before Van Damme shares a similar fate, he of course manages to create a distraction that allows him to escape. At that point the movie gives us a painfully stereotypical sneak and fight scene, where Van Damme takes out all of McComb’s men one at a time. After knocking the last thug into liquid nitrogen and shattering his arm with a kick, Van Damme finally faces off with McComb and Fielding. McComb watches to two of them grapple for a moment before getting bored, shooting Fielding, and going back into the future. As he hears sirens gradually arriving on the scene, Van Damme checks on Fielding before fleeing back to the future himself.

Van Damme arrives back in TEC Headquarters in 2004, coming to a smooth stop in the time pod before getting out, which represents the final slice of bread in this time traveling shit sandwich. To review: they leave in a pod, arrive in the past without it, but return to the future back in it somehow? This whole movie is taking a piss in my mouth right about now. As he walks back into the office, he learns that McComb is in the process of tearing down the whole department. Now that he has changed the future so that he didn’t lose out on those billions, McComb’s way out in front of the polls and has money to burn. Not giving up that easily, Van Damme tries to look up Fielding in the computer to prove his allegations that McComb has been tampering with the past. Unable to find any record of her, he realizes that the only way to prove his case is to go back, find Fielding, and convince her to testify. And why not? One random person’s testimony should be enough to drag down a prominent politician who’s on the verge of becoming the next president. It’s not like you could just manufacture that testimony by hiring a coked-up prostitute off the street. He, Matuzak, and Ricky The Tech prove that McComb had his own time machine by looking at electricity spikes before Matuzak finally agrees to send him back for shits and giggles. He and Van Damme go and fire up the equipment, as apparently the complicated process can be handled quite easily by two people, even when one of them is just sitting in the pod. But before Jean Claude can get away safely, two soldiers burst in to stop them. Undeterred, Matuzak tries to finish the process, only to be shot. But as he falls dead, he hits the last button which not only starts the pod but also delivers his revenge, as the pod belches out a massive flame that engulfs the two soldiers who shot him. Apparently military training doesn’t include the common sense required to not stand directly behind a rocket.

Sarge, permission to deploy marshmellows, sarge!

I made it! Thank God I'm now safe from all but the most arbitrary of dangers!

Seeing as his latest jaunt into the near distant past has the potential to exonerate him, save Fielding from rotting in a foreign reality, and bring McComb to the white-collar, prison resort justice that is sorely deserved, it’s a given that the entire operation is an utter failure. JCVD arrives on a highway, appearing in front of a rig only seconds before it creates a new recipe for ballerina goulash. He has only enough time to sense the impending danger and kiss the pavement, allowing it to run harmlessly over top of him. With yet another arbitrary danger overcome, Van Damme finds a phone booth where he dictates to his Magic Future Palm Pilot, which manages to locate Fielding in a hospital from a data source powered by rainbows and maintained by unicorns. He manages to reach her and convince her to testify without incident. But while he goes to retrieve a blood sample that the hospital took from Fielding, to serve as proof that she was actually there should she not make it back, he finds a blood sample belonging to his wife’s right next to it. For some reason the vial of blood has a piece of paper attached to it, revealing that the sample was taken for a pregnancy test, which came back positive. I didn’t think they strapped a patient’s entire fucking history chart to a vial of blood in a lab, but whatever. And it’s a good thing that he went and got that sample, as when he returns to her room to collect Fields, he finds that she’s been killed. As the homicide is discovered by a nurse and hospital security is called with the impression that Van Damme did it, we see the two Wonder Hair Twins from the beginning of the movie strolling away from the crime.

Look past the tragic hair, baby! It's me!

With his mission’s lack of success taking a back seat to the news that a woman can successfully mate with a cocked trigger of badassery, Van Damme decides to make a change in his plans and head for the mall where we were first introduced to him. After all, the only thing that makes a movie better than Van Damme is having TWO Van Dammes! He rushes to meet up with his wife in that same spot before Past Van Damme has the chance to. But even in the face of impending doom, his own fate is still assigned second priority to stopping petty theft, as he takes a moment to stop the same rollerblading fruitcake from committing the preordained mugging, slapping him down and explaining that’s for what he was going to do. With justice once again done, he grabs his wife and tells her that she must come with him. They run into the service area of the mall, ducking into a storage room to avoid the Vidal Sassoon Duo who are in hot pursuit. Once they’re inside, he explains to her that he’s from the future and convinces her that he needs her help. Once she agrees, he takes her back to find Past Van Damme, telling her not to tell him anything about what she’s learned. With the wheels of fate now set in motion, taking us past the highly improbable to lead us into the land of the utterly ridiculous.

Part IV: The Cure Might Just Be Worse Than The Disease

As our journey through time, space, and bowel irritation comes to a close, the film takes us back to Van Damme’s house on that same dark and stormy night that had sealed his wife’s fate. As the Past JCVD goes to answer that same phone call that to pulled him away before, Mia goes downstairs and finds Future JCVD hanging out in their pitch black living room. As he assures her that she must find a way to keep his past version from leaving the house, they notice the lights of the fated attackers coming towards the house. His wife goes back upstairs to keep Past JCVD occupied while Future Van Damme goes outside to kick some ass. And thus begins one of the strangest siege scenes I’ve ever seen.

While Future Van Damme takes on one member of the Mighty Hair Brigade in the yard, finally killing him with the help of a clothes line, others manage to make their way inside the house, where they end up battling Past Van Damme and Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend on the roof. And really, why not? If my wife were pregnant, I can’t think of a better place for her to be in the pouring rain that climbing around on the roof. Eventually the wife manages to make it back in the house safely while Past VD gets shot in the bulletproof vest again, falling unconscious to the ground below. Finally Future VD fights his way into the house, taking out more faceless henchmen until he finally finds Future McComb holding his wife hostage. As he gives Van Damme a very tired and predictable lecture, one of his lackeys sets a ridiculous looking C4 bomb. After another brief battle between the remaining Monument to Hair Style Perfection and the two Van Dammes, Future Van Damme returns to the bedroom to find McComb and his wife still waiting there. Future McComb begins to lecture again in a feeble excuse for the scene to have some kind of dialogue that isn’t a catch phrase, but is silenced moments later when Past McComb walks in. While the two McCombs share mutual confusion as to why the hell he’s there, Future Van Damme reveals that he left a message with his Past McComb’s office in the guise of Future McComb. As Future McComb starts to grasp that this means that Past McComb can’t be saved from the blast of the bomb, Van Damme motions to his wife, who in turn wrestles away from McComb while getting shot in the shoulder in the process. But to seal their fate and finally make use of the theory that they’ve spouted several times in this movie for no particular reason, Future Van Damme kicks Past McComb into Future McComb, who stands there for an awfully long goddamn time just waiting to make fatal contact with himself. The two of them finally collide and meld together into a CG blob of gore that eventually dissipates on the floor.

I hate to burst this movie's bubble, but technically two versions of one person touching isn't the same matter occupying the same space. They would have to find some way for one to reach into the other. Still, nice CG.

But the day is not saved quite yet. With a mere thirteen seconds left on the bomb’s timer, Van Damme runs over and grabs the body of his unconscious wife, manages to run downstairs and out of the house, making it walk way down the front lawn before the timer hits zero and the bomb goes off. They fall to the ground together in a dramatic yet disgustingly standard slow-motion-falling-away-from-an-explosion shot, before he leaves her lying with his past self out in the pouring rain for the police to find. And once again, why not? Your injured and pregnant wife catching pneumonia is a hardly worth even considering.

Why not just kick her in the stomach? It would be faster at least.

The scene fades back into the future, where Van Damme arrives back at TEC Headquarters from his fantastic journey into the past. He steps out of the time travel area to find Matuzak still alive and waiting for him. When Jean Claude asks what happened to Senator McComb, Matuzak looks at him like he’s a moron. He says that McComb walked out of his office ten years ago and was never seen again. Fair enough, but if McComb’s fate was that unremarkable in this future, why does Matuzak remember that ten years later? Not only does he remember who McComb is, but he also remembers that well enough to recite all the details the moments that Van Damme asks. Satisfied with that news, Van Damme starts to walk out of the building, passing by Fielding in the hallways. Yep, things are definitely looking different. He proceeds on to his home, where his ten year old son rushes out to meet him, followed by his wife. They share a tender moment before they all go inside and the movie ends.

Hey, it's...um...you!

Before you grab a tissue and applaud the closing of that exceptional film, I’d just like everyone to stop and think about that ending for a moment. Van Damme has returned to the future to find that he was successful in saving his wife. Great. The problem is, he now has a ten year old son that he’s technically never met, since he’s from an alternate reality where that kid never existed. Not only that, but he’s lost an entire decade with his wife. What kind of fucked up hell is that? He doesn’t even know the name of his goddamn son, let alone remember any event that has occurred in his life up to this point. And can you imagine going home to a spouse that you haven’t seen or spoken to in over ten years? Seriously, what kind of fucking ending was that? But then, considering how little to do with time travel made any sense in this movie, it’s just the cherry on top of the dickcheese sundae. Enjoy.

The Verdict:

Donkey: When it comes to hilariously tragic cinema, Van Damme stands alone as the king. Once again, he has delivered a movie that has every element of shitty perfection that you could possibly ask for. It takes a horribly implausible premise in time travel and preforms it in a way that’s laughably ludicrous, adds a perplexingly underwhelming villain that is stealing money to finance something as idiotic as a presidential campaign, and finishes it off with an ending that seems happy until you stop for one moment to consider what it’s true ramifications are. When you throw in the staples of unnecessary splits and multiple Van Dammes, this movie reaches a plateau of awesomeness that few can hope to achieve. I remember when this movie first came out on video, my older brother recommended that I buy it, as it was his favorite Van Damme movie. I might not have listened to him then, but years later, I followed that advice and reaped the hilarious results. I give this movie five Buellers out of five hair stylist’s nightmares.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Apparently running for public office requires a lot more time travel than I had orignally suspected. But then, that does explain George Bush.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Dolph Lundgren as he delivers a performance more plastic than the toy on which it was based in…MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE.

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 knw, 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.

Too wild? That sounds an awful lot like the tagline to a robo-porn. But then, that would explain the lack of a plot.

Donkey: If movies have taught us anything over time – and if you’ve read the rest of the entries on this site up to this point, you’ll agree that they haven’t – it’s that robots are the future. The painful and unavoidably horrific future. And if you’ve seen modern vibrator technology or wished there was a way to continuously vacuum random tracks into your floor while you weren’t home, you know that our predicted dependence on robots is already well on its way to becoming reality. But with so many movies having given us such drastically different visions of the robopacalypse that’s to come, it’s become hard to see where the actual future lies. Whether it’s a future of battling robots for our very survival in The Terminator or, um, battling robots for our very survival in The Matrix, our choices are endless.

But one movie dares to be different. One movie offers us a daring look into the world of tomorrow, where robots are used for the betterment of humankind. Provided that by ‘betterment’, you actually mean that they will be pointless and inefficient substitutes for diplomacy. Now that’s a future we can all get onboard with.

The Plot:

Donkey: Robot Jox is a tale of the near distant future, detailing the clash of two civilizations. But rather than being political, these clashes just happen to be quite literal and involve giant and excruciatingly slow moving robots, piloted by the heroes of the future, the Robot Jox.

In this movie we follow the path of Achilles, champion of the coalition that very obviously represents the US. After fighting Alexander, his deadly rival representing what is obviously Russia, to a rather unimpressive draw, Achilles decides to leave the sport and return to a life of common squalor. But when his replacement in the upcoming rematch is going to be one of those lesser people that happens to have a vagina, Achilles must decide whether to step in, save the woman he treats like a genetically engineered sperm receptacle, and complete his destiny, or stay home and continue to masturbate to the featured decorative plate collection offered this week on the Home Shopping Network. Either way, we’re all fucked.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Milobar: We have a special guest tonight: The man, the legend, the genital infection…Blombo. And he’s just in time for some Robot Jox.

Blombo: You know, I remember everyone seeing this movie when it first came out. I think it came straight to video, but sadly, everyone rented this damn movie and I don’t know why.

Donkey: Actually when I look the movie up in IMDB, I can see that it did actually go to theaters. And rightly so, because I’m not sure how it could possibly go straight to video when it has star power like Gary Graham and Paul Koslo. If those two people that I’ve never heard of can’t put more asses in the seats than expired egg nog, I don’t know who will.

The movie opens to a snow covered hellscape of robot debris as a narrator explaining that fifty years after the future nuclear holocaust, war is outlawed. Because it’s just that fucking easy. The UN couldn’t come to a consensus on whether Bud Lite tastes great or is less filling if the fate of the planet was counting on it, but this movie is suggesting that somehow they’ve managed to agree on and enforce a ban on war? They might as well say that melancholy is a thing of the past as well. But regardless, now that war has gone the way of the Garbage Pail Kids, international disagreements and territorial claims between the two great alliances are decided in arenas using giant machines that punch one another in the balls very softly.

Blombo: Why the hell would you want to win this area of land? It’s covered in dead robots.

Milobar: Apparently they don’t ever bother to clean up the old robots. They just leave them where they fall. You certainly wouldn’t want to recycle or reuse those.

Giant robot: menacing. Giant robot with spikey-ball-hand: indestructible.

Donkey: Hell no. This is the post apocalyptic future. We all know that in the wake of massive nuclear fallout catastrophic enough for war to be outlawed, resources will be plentiful. With that summation on the lack of thought that went into this movie completed, the action finally begins as an extremely slow movie robot steps into the scene looking about as menacing as a dew worm with an abscessed tooth, although to its credit it is trying to look tough with a ridiculous mace for one hand. The robot and its evil Russian pilot, Alexander, are standing in victory over their fallen American competitor, ignoring his pleas for mercy and the warnings of the referees who exclaim that the Russian must hold his position as the robot smashes a giant foot down, crushing the life from his opponent.

Blombo: The referee had declared that the fight was over. If the refs have no power anyways, then what the fuck is the point of even having referees?

Milobar: Wouldn’t you think that ignoring the ref would cause Alexander to lose the match, or be disqualified in some way?

Donkey: The referees in this bleak and poorly animated future must be run by the UN. They’re well intentioned, but no one listens to them. In the face of this devastating loss, the movie turns back to the American camp, where our team of heroes mourns the loss of their compacted fighter. The team consists of Achilles, the last great American hope who silently wishes it had been him crushed into the sweet embrace of oblivion, Tex Conway, the fat, loud, cowboy hat wearing archetype of the stereotypical Texan, and Dr. Matsumoto, otherwise known as ‘The dude that played the uncle and rival to Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid Part II.’

Blombo: Ah yes.

Milobar: His greatest role.

Donkey: I would agree, but I can’t discount the work he did as guest star on Hawaii Five-O, as it undoubtedly redefined the way that we view the term ‘average’. The group argues about its tactics or astounding lackthereof, as Tex McShithead laments that it should have been Achilles fighting in there today so that none of this would have happened, only to be reminded that Achilles is being saved for the next bout, which will determine who will lay claim to Alaska and all its resources. Tex scoffs at this, too busy thinking about the creamy fistfuls of mayonnaise that he’s running back to his apartment to engorge himself with to be listening to reason.

Blombo: It’s funny that the dude from Texas doesn’t quite understand how valuable Alaska is. Oil? That’s never made anybody rich!

Milobar: All it’s got up there is Eskimos!

Donkey: It’s a good thing that this asshole’s not in charge, or he’d have their robots laying claim to the nearest Burger King and the movie would be over pretty damn quick. With that meeting of the brain trust coming to a vacuous end, it’s time for Achilles to get back to preparing for the upcoming match. He stands fully padded in a gym, surrounded by androgynous clones that the movie calls “tubies”. Tubies in this case specifically means that the people were biogenetically engineered rather than born through the traditional process of drunken fumbling that inevitably leads to extreme vaginal tearing. These tubies are bred to be the greatest fighters on the face of the Earth, so naturally that entails…

It's raining men! Hallelujah, it's raining men!

Milobar: …horribly choreographed, shitty fighting with Achilles.

Blombo: You know what would make this movie great? If one of the Robot Jox did Gymkata.

Donkey: I agree. Even though we’ve only seen them onscreen for a moment, as soon as I saw those giant robots, I thought to myself, “Sure this is badass, but we need more unnecessary flips that accomplish nothing but to give cervical cancer to the audience”.

Milobar: This fighting demonstration is awesome. None of the kicks and/or punches that Achilles theoretically lands in this would have hurt anybody.

Blombo: If you were training as a Robot Jock, why would you even bother doing this? It’s not like a robot can do roundhouse kicks.

Donkey: Just wait until you get to the calligraphy and sewing classes. After an impressively useless demonstration of fighting skills that will never be put to use, Achilles and Tex run headlong into their second favorite past-time: blatant sexual harassment. They notice that one of the tubies is a woman, but the bitch has the never not to be completely swept off her feet by a fat man and an idiot heckling her by simply pointing out that she has a vagina.

Milobar: “I heard they had a woman”? This movie really wasn’t very forward thinking. This is supposed to be the future. They figured in the future that there would just be one woman in the entire group, and that she’d have no muscles whatsoever?

Donkey: Their irresistible charms are interrupted for a moment as they are introduced to the professor that developed the tubies, whom has comes in to gives Achilles and Tex little plastic cups for them to go jerk off into. For some reason, they actually want these two assholes to contribute to the gene pool. Can I place my vote for chemical castration? And barring that, maybe just go ahead and do it the old fashioned way, with a rusty soup can lid?

Here's to good friends, good health, and torquing your crank.

Blombo: Why the hell do they want sperm from the coach?

Milobar: Because he used to be the number one Robot Jock fighter, as Achilles is now.

Donkey: The movie then turns to the day of the big fight, as Tex is passing on his infinite depths of non-existent knowledge to the tubies as they stand in the control room, waiting for Achilles to get into his giant robot.

Milobar: You know what, I think Doctor Matsumoto needs a few more things to do. He’s wondering why his fighters keep losing…maybe it’s because you’re just sitting into the control room making Origami birds while everyone else is preparing for the fight.

Donkey: After explaining how the team coordinates a battle, the female tubie, Athena, inquires with Tex about the last fight of his career, where he managed to overtake an opponent that had him all but defeated with a single shot to the only weak spot in its armor. Tex dismisses it as luck, clearly uncomfortable with the spotlight shining on his uselessness, foreshadowing what is to come.

Blombo: He probably shot the guy in the dick.

Donkey: I know that’s where I’d concentrate all my firepower, were I battling a giant robot. Tex takes them over to one of the old, shitty televisions that serves as a monitor and we see Achilles getting suited up, ready for battle.

Milobar: Yeah, he seems like a really great athlete. He can barely stand on one foot.

Donkey: It’s a good thing that shit out though, because he doesn’t want to get out there in his giant robot that barely moves and pull a hammy.

Blombo: This still doesn’t make any damn sense. I mean, who would make a better Robot Jock; a martial artist or a guy that just has really good hand-eye coordination? You could put the fattest kid in there that had awesome hand-eye coordination and he’d probably be the best fighter that ever lived.

Donkey: Keep reaching for those dreams, sedentary youth of tomorrow. Does anyone remember why they have to pilot the giant robots in suits this goddamn big?

Blombo: They might just go into space.

Milobar: Ah yes. And also because they can’t take bathroom breaks.

Donkey: So it’s just an elaborate diaper?

Blombo: It’s also their air conditioning.

Milobar: It’s a combination, really. It pulls the shit and piss away from his lower body and circulates it through his chest area, which cools him.

Donkey: Now that he’s dressed and has crapped himself once already, Achilles takes an elevator up to the top of his robot, which looks in no way like a shitty model couldn’t even make its way into Power Rangers. As he’s about to set off for battle, he and his crew exchange their phrase of good luck, “crash and burn”. Crash and burn? Are you fucking kidding me? Why not, “I hope you die slowly and with a large amount of rectal pain”?

Blombo: That’s way better than, “break a leg”.

This is like a step class for the criminally idiotic.

Milobar: And finally he straps himself into the controls of the robot, as grabs two hand controls and steps onto a Dance Dance Revolution pad.

Blombo: Look at his damn gloves. There are RCA adapters in his gloves. As Achilles’ robot is being raised up to the battlefield from its underground hangar on a platform, there’s this shot of two technicians just watching him as he comes up that goes on for way, way too long. This is completely unnecessary.

Donkey: I think that’s just supposed to be an intermission where you can get a snack, use the washroom, or reconsider why the hell you’re watching this movie in the first place and look around for something else to do. But now we finally get our first look at the battlefield set out before Achilles. Besides everything else that makes this movie a hot gush of penile discharge into the eye, you have to love the fact that these giant robots are about to clash in an outdoor arena that actually has stands for spectators.

Milobar: And look at how small the space is between the bleachers. These two robots, that are both around a hundred feet tall, are about to fight in a space that is maybe a hundred yards across.

Donkey: Why the fuck would you want to be there in person to see that?

Blombo: Especially since they’re using rockets and other live ammo. Hey, let’s get as close to that as we possibly can.

Donkey: And as Achilles strides out into the field, we can see just how fucking stupid the way that he controls this mech is. He lifts one foot off the pressure pad and then brings it down again, which translates into walking forward. I can understand that it would register the impact of him bringing his foot down, but how the hell can a goddamn plate tell what he’s doing with his leg when it’s raised?

Milobar: The stop-motion animation of the robots in action looks just as ridiculous as the walking motion he’s making.

Donkey: And this simple act of walking forward really hammers home how goddamn unnecessary their entire training regiment is, because not only can you not do anything elaborate in these robots, but you can’t even do the simplest of things quickly.

Blombo: Those roundhouse kicks sure will come in handy now.

If only I'd spent more time working on my aim and less time on my jazz dance.

Donkey: Now that the trundling tribute to failure has finally entered the combat zone, the match between these two amazing champions begins, and in classic fashion. The two giant robots stand about five hundred yards apart from each other and just shoot rockets and shit back and forth at each other.

Milobar: They continue to slowly walk towards one another…

Blombo: …all the while they just keep trading shot for shot, not making even the simplest attempt to dodge the incoming fire.

Why exactly with a helmet that big, is his head bleeding?

Donkey: This is just fucking stupid. And once they get close enough to one another, a referee craft flies in and tells them that their long range weapons have been disabled. It’s now time for short range attacks. What? Why would you bother? But with this and so many other questions falling only bloody and deafened ears, the grappling of the robots begins. With one simple and extremely slow moving kick and punch, Alexander knocks Achilles’ giant robot over onto its back. The stunning display of ineptitude really defies description here. This is a supposed world class Robot Jock, and he just got smacked down onto his ass in two hits? But what makes it even better is that the Achilles’ team, still monitoring him from the control room, starts yelling about how he’s got a concussion. I’m sorry, if you get a goddamn concussion from your robot just falling over, then this whole thing is complete bullshit. He didn’t get slammed to the ground. He just fell over. And he’s wearing a fucking HELMET.

Blombo: Achilles comes to and finds himself staring up at the Russian looming over him. He starts up a torch on his robot’s arm, putting it to Alexander’s robo-leg, causing him to squeal and fall over backwards. How the hell did Alexander know he was doing that? It’s not like he can feel the robot’s pain.

Milobar: In an act of desperation as he’s lying on the ground, off comes the fist.

Donkey: That’s right, Alexander decides for no apparent reason to unleash his robot’s greatest weapon, a flying goddamn fist, which rather than posing even the slightest danger to Achilles, goes flying towards the bleachers. But Achilles, being more sentimental than intelligent, manages to get his robot up off the ground and jump into the path of the fist, blocking it before it can hit the stands. This just goes to show that while the physical fitness necessary to throw a roundhouse kick is a mandatory part of the Robot Jox training program, basic intelligence is not, as this of course causes Achilles and his robot to topple over…DIRECTLY ONTO THE STANDS.

A flying fist?! Quick, just duck and we'll be oka...AWWWW SHIT!!!

Thank you, Achilles! Instead having to dodge a fist that was flying at us, we’re now being crushed by a giant robot that’s laying on top of us. And if you look beyond the general idiocy of this scene and look at the specifics, how the fuck did Achilles get that mech off the ground in the first place, let alone that quickly? Achilles then cracks open his robot and peeks his head out at the carnage that he has caused. Women and children are screaming and dying all over the place.

Milobar: Everyone is looking up at him accusingly. You’re the morons that decided to watch two giant robots battle each other in person. Why not just watch it on TV at home like normal people you dumb fucks?

Blombo: And they probably paid good money for this, too.

Donkey: I can’t believe these people are surprised. Something like this had to have happened before. Can you possibly suggest that two giant robots have been fighting in front of people in that small an area and there’s never been a single accident? Really?

Blombo: There had to have been a stray rocket or fist before now.

I hereby declare the fight a draw! And that vertical stripes do not hide a beer gut.

Milobar: So we move on to some sort of tribunal that’s going on to determine who should win the fight since both of these Douche Bag Jox are useless. After presenting an argument in regards to Alexander using a long range weapon during a phase of the fight where they illegal, and Achilles heroically putting himself in harms way to save the civilians, the judges declare that Achilles motivations are irrelevant. And what about the argument that Russia-boy used the fist after long range weapons had been disabled? Doesn’t that seem relevant, considering that’s what the American’s were attempting to get the Russian disqualified on? No? No mention of that whatsoever? I guess we’ll just have to call it a draw.

Blombo: They declare that another fight will take place in one week to determine the true victor. I can barely wait to see what’s in store for that one.

Donkey: But once the tribunal has finished ladling out steaming bowls of justice, Achilles adds to the declares that he’s not fighting. As far as he’s concerned, his contract was for ten fights and he has now completed ten fights. Of course, upon hearing the news that the world’s greatest not-quite-a-warrior is hanging up his Robot Jockeys, the entire world erupts in controversy. Alexander calls bullshit, screaming that Achilles is scared of his impressive mane of pubic hair. The media yells a frenzy of questions at once, just so that the movie can continue its longstanding trend of not answering any. It even cuts to shots of Tex and Dr. Matsumoto, who shit their pants in surprise and mild dysentery. Finally we see the tubies all gethered in there training room, where Athena tries to justify to the others why Achilles has made a justified decision.

Milobar: Whatever you say, Athena. We’re all wearing white spandex outfits and you can see all our packages and mine is quite clearly extremely small.

Donkey: Moments later we see Achilles arguing with the commissioner of the US team, who is trying to tell him that he is under contract to complete ten fights, and that since he did not officially finish that last fight, he is obligated to fight again.

Blombo: Achilles calls bullshit, saying that he might not be able to read the contract, but that he’s no fool. What? Achilles can’t read?

Donkey: Nope, not at all. Apparently this is supposed to be an inspirational tale for fat kids AND the illiterate. And now that’s he’s officially told the entire world to suck the balls of toilet paper from his asscrack, it’s time for Achilles to hit a future bar!

Milobar: Future bar! I love future bar! Look at that future hair!

Blombo: Apparently in the future, white people still can’t dance.

Milobar: They really, really can’t. That’s just a combination of ducking and waving hello.

Donkey: At least the dancing matches the shittastic music that’s playing. It sounds like someone was trying to play an 1988 Casio keyboard with their armpits while having a stroke.

Milobar: Why is it that in every goddamn 80′s movie, the future looks so goddamn stupid?

Donkey: Eventually we pan past the convulsing collective of white shame and reach Achilles as he sits alone at the bar, having a drink for every letter in the alphabet. That’s the most creative attempt at alcohol poisoning I’ve ever seen. But before he can complete the task and slip into hot, buttery oblivion, Athena and a dude from the tubie class find Achilles there and start demanding to know why he did what he did. Those spectators signed a release to be there, so why didn’t he just let them die? In response to this question, Achilles asks, with with intense scorn in his eyes, if they both would have really let those people die. Hey Achilles, here’s the thing about that…you’re little stunt cost more people’s lives than if you had done nothing like they would have. So maybe you shouldn’t be trying to take the high ground here.

Milobar: Fuck, I would have let them die. Those people brought their goddamn kids to that fight. Fuck them. If there’s one thing me and imaginary future me have in common it’s that we can’t stand imaginary future idiots.

Blombo: Athena also asks him why he gave up his advantage. When the hell in that fight did Achilles have the advantage?

Milobar: I guess it would have to have been when he was down on the ground.

Blombo: And Alexander was rubbing his robo-balls in his face? So getting tea bagged is an advantage?

Donkey: Speak of the devil and he will appear, strolling into the bar with a badly performed Russian accent and all.

Milobar: What the fuck is Alexander doing here?

So comrade...do you come to this filthy capitalist pig establishment often?

Donkey: That’s a good fucking question. Why would these people congregate in the same bars? In his drunken stupor, Achilles demands that Alexander fight him then and there. Alexander, of course, refuses, saying that it will be settled in giant, awkwardly moving robots. So instead of fists, he hits Achilles with faux-philisophical questions to kick his brain square in the ballsack. “What do you fight for, Achilles?” What does Achilles fight for? He fights for burritos and discount tube socks.

Milobar: He fights for a cure for the herpes.

Blombo: And that scene ends on that great note. Next we see…what? Is Achilles having a bad dream?

Donkey: Yep. And Achilles’ bad dream consists of the same shots of the bleacher crushing incident shown earlier, just with a negative filter on. Outstanding.

Blombo: That might be the worst nightmare scene ever.

Donkey: Achilles opens his eyes to find himself naked and staring up at Athena in his glorious future apartment.

Oh sweet Jesus, did we just have dirty, drunken...hey, pretty colors!

Milobar: What the fuck is that thing rotating around in the background?

Donkey: Future art! None of that stupid 2-D bullshit for these people. In the future, it’s all about holograms of random shapes floating inside a sphere. As Achilles comes to realize what’s going on, Anthena tries to comfort him by reassuring that he didn’t have the chance to come up as short in the arena of love as he did in the arena of robots.

Milobar: I studied your body and I’ve got to tell you, that mole you’ve got on your taint…you might want to get that checked out.

Blombo: It tastes funny too.

Donkey: Do you have a lot of pork in your diet, by chance?

Blombo: It tasted like Reese Peanut Butter Cups and nickel.

Can I interest you in a white can of paste? No? How about a white can of paste?

Milobar: Future rooms are awesome. As he stumbles into his kitchen with her following, I love how we see everything in his future fridge is just a can with a blank label on it, like it’s all just protein paste.

Donkey: Which I believe is horse semen.

Milobar: I don’t believe. I know.

Donkey: Athena explains that she wanted to see what was different about him, what gave him the drive to be a champion. But she was unsuccessful, of course, as there is absolutely nothing remarkable about Achilles. Well my dear, let me tell you. It’s the willingness to continue to try to suck my own cock, even though I know I’ll never get there. That’s what being a champion is all about. Achilles stumbles back to his bedroom with Athena in tow and decides it’s time to hide his shame in a jumpsuit once again.

Even they seem pissed off about having to see his merkin in this scene.

Milobar: I can’t believe he’s actually naked for this scene. We don’t see his junk but we do get to see some ball-fro. You know, he could have just turned his back to the camera and we would have just seen his ass, which would have been much less horrific.

Donkey: And as they’re setting up this unwarranted cock shot, they continue with this philosophical conversation on what makes a champion and the art of war, and the whole thing is pointless, ridiculous, and completely elementary.

Milobar: Much like this entire movie. But as it transitions to the next scene where Achilles is watching the tubies train again, that’s a goddamn awesome sweater and jacket that Achilles has on.

Donkey: Achilles begins his new life by apparently coming to watch the tubies do stretches in their ludicrously tight suits. I guess you’ve got to get your ball-gazing in now while the getting’s good. And the while, Tex is leaning in awkwardly.

Pssstttt...that's not a pack of Rolaids pushing into your hip...

Milobar: It’s like being the manager of a boy band. You don’t get there without touching a few dicks.

Donkey: Half the fun is getting your fist wet. Achilles mentions something about Athena being the next in line to be a Robot Jock, to which Tex scoffs and says that while that might be true, she’ll never make it. She’s just a woman, after all. I love well-honed, arbitrary sexism.

Blombo: Good lord.

Milobar: Now that practice is over, it’s time to hit the showers together. Everybody get naked!

Donkey: Before he makes his exit, Achilles leaves Athena his lucky snot rag, telling her that it’s good luck and it managed to get him through ten fights. She accepts it, but reiterates her belief that there is no such thing as luck. Really? She doesn’t believe in luck? How can you not believe in luck? What the fuck would you call it when something coincidentally happens in your favor?

Milobar: I don’t believe in luck. I believe that everything is God’s will.

Donkey: That’s pretty much the only other explanation. The sweet baby Jesus flied down on a chariot made of marshmallows and exerts his will.

Blombo: Now it’s time for Achilles to saunter back to the projects. But he’s got to do that in style. Future car! Look at that thing. And it’s a hover car too.

Milobar: Of course they don’t show the whole car on camera at once.

Donkey: Of course not. It’s lowered very slowly, randomly bobbing on all sides to very clearly indicate that it’s on a big cables.

Still not as stupid as the El Camino.

Milobar: As he gets out, Achilles shuts the car down with a remote control thing. Now that is awesome.

Donkey: It conveniently fits in your pocket, provided that your entire jacket is one big pocket. Leaving his sweet ride to be vandalized by cyber-punks, Achilles enters the slums.

Blombo: Why is he here? Wouldn’t he be rich from being a champion?

Milobar: Since he can’t read, you never know how much he was being paid. As Achilles walks down a hallway, he stops to look at a poster of himself that’s been vandalized, with coward spelled on it very poorly.

Donkey: That’s an incredibly stinging blow, except for the fact that again, he can’t fucking read. For all he knows, that says, “fuck this guy’s awesome.”

Milobar: “I think this guy would look much better with a mustache, like this”.

Donkey: “This man is one mustache away from perfection”. Finally Achilles makes it to his brother’s apartment, where he has come to take refuge with his family. And in this tedious scene we see another little thing that speaks volumes about the role of women in the future. Achilles walks into his brother’s apartment, hands his sister-in-law his coat without her asking him if she can take it, and just walks away.

Milobar: Which is even more awesome since she’s pregnant.

Blombo: While Achilles is talking to his brother, his brother makes the comment, “We thought you won that last one”. Again, when did it look like he was winning?

Donkey: As the scene closes with whole family settling down for dinner, the movie makes a commentary about the shortage of meat in the future. The pregnant sister-in-law announces that they’re going to have meat tonight quite excitedly, like it’s a rare event. She opens a pot and we see that there’s a stew inside with a single hot dog floating in it. A hot dog? Even in the goddamn future, that can’t possibly be called real meat. No one, no matter how far in the future you go, will consider rat anus and human foot stuffed in a synthetic tube ‘real meat’.

Milobar: Realistically it’s just the losers of this next competition ground up, as we now see a training simulation where the Tubies have to climb this insane jungle gym that shakes, with bars that get red hot, and lasers and shit. How much time and money have you already invested in these dudes, just to have them get killed by this thing?

If this is your criteria for final selection, why not just use monkeys for Robot Jox?

Blombo: Again, how does any of this prove who the better fighter is? Or improve your skills in any way? Climbing is the most essential part of being a Robot Jock, I guess.

Milobar: Shouldn’t they all just compete to see how fast they can push buttons on an Xbox controller?

Blombo: That’s what I would think. Play some Halo.

Donkey: Nah, this is just out of the 80’s and yet this movie still seems like it’s ten years behind that. They’d be playing Missile Command.

Milobar: So Athena and another guy make it to the end, just to have a pole fall out from under the guy so that he falls to the ground. This whole exercise just seems like such a waste of money, time, and effort.

Donkey: You might as well train them, invest money in all of them, and then finish the training with a good old game of Russian Roulette.

Milobar: Just shoot them all in the chest and whoever survives is the winner.

Donkey: Watching the TV at his brother’s house, Achilles sees that Athena is the one who has won the right to fight the Russian in the rematch. Apparently that whole jungle gym shit was going to determine who got to fight, which makes it even more retarded. Seeing that Athena will be put in harm’s way, Achilles rushes back to the commissioner and declares that he will take part in the fight after all. He refuses to say that it’s for her sake, however, and instead just demands that there be no spectators. The commissioner agrees to that, saying that they had already thought about taking the spectators out. Apparently they realized that it makes no sense in any logical way, shape, or form to have spectators in the first place. Good for them.

Blombo: Especially since an accident like that should have happened hundreds of time before. But they probably get spectators who, like Achilles, can’t read and think that they’ve bought KISS tickets.

Milobar: As Achilles walks in to join his team in the hangar, he looks over a chart and asks Dr. Matsumoto about the lack of new weapons for the coming fight. What? He can’t read! Why the fuck is Achilles looking at a chart of technical specifications?! The doctor comments that there is a new super weapon, but no one knows the exact nature of it and it’s going to stay that way until the time of the fight, since they’re secrets keep getting leaked by a spy. Well, I’m going to ruin this for everyone because I’m an asshole: It’s a goddamn flashlight. That’s it. It blinds your opponent for roughly three seconds. What an awesome secret weapon!

Donkey: Dr. Matsumoto comments that even the people who installed it don’t know the nature of the weapon. Really? You think it’s that hard to figure out? Hey Bill, what is this giant flash bulb that we’re installing? What could it possibly be for? But the doctor declares that there will be no leaks this time. I think he’s actually talking about Achilles’ diarrhea problem.

Blombo: I guess the suits work then.

Donkey: As Achilles and Tex are walking away, Tex declares that he doesn’t trust that “Jap”, that he might be the spy. Wow. Sure, might as well add a little racism to the pile of sexism we already have in this movie. And what goddamn sense does that make anyways? Why would the guy designing your weapons give them away?

Milobar: Especially when he’s the guy insisting that nobody watch the briefing on the secret weapon until the fight starts.

Donkey: If he was the spy, wouldn’t he just develop weapons that don’t work, or are really shitty?

Blombo: Like a flashlight?

Donkey: Yeah, like a…hey, wait a minute…

Blombo: Next we see Achilles back at the bar, but this time he just wants a beer, because he’s in training.

Donkey: What a true athlete. He must be on the middle-aged redneck training regiment. Can anyone think of a science fiction movie that doesn’t have a fucking space cantina in it? Of course, Achilles isn’t there for thirty seconds before the drama begins. First Athena demands to know why he came back and took away her chance to fight. Then Alexander appears, welcoming Achilles back and taunting him with poorly written dialogue. “You make my drink taste like blood”? Are you serious? What the fuck is that? Are you a communist or a goth kid that just lost his puppy? And this guy’s fake Russian accent is just getting tiring at this point.

Two Douches and Mixing Board: the album drops next week, yo.

As our main players continue to verbally molest one another over Appletinis, the movie shows Tex “I’ve never met a burger that I wouldn’t rub on my nipples” Conway paying Dr. Matsumoto a visit in his personal lab. As Tex asks the doctor why he wasn’t included in the new weapon debriefing, the doctor asks Tex to watch a monitor as he pulls up the details of Tex’s final match as a Robot Jock. He points out that Tex managed to perfectly hit a tiny spot on the front of the enemy mech that was the only weakness in the armor, even though that weakness was not noted in the information that they had before the fight.

Blombo: Why would the only weak spot be on the front?

Donkey: Because that’s quality engineering. The one weak spot on the armor is on the front, just off center of the middle of the torso. At that point, considering how many Gatling guns and other shit like that could be used by the giant robots, I would submit that it’s quite likely that the weak spot would be hit eventually.

Milobar: And apparently nobody looked at those tapes before Captain Japan decided to do some research. Really? Not one person analyzed these tapes before?

Donkey: Since he’s corned, it’s time for Tex ‘Bacon grease for breakfast’ Conway to confess and pistol whip the doctor.

Blombo: He got a bruise from that hit really fast. Of course, Tex then shoots the doctor, but not before the doctor turns on a camera that films the murder and a convenient confession that is blurted out. And to finish it off right, when the doctor gets shot, you can see the paintball capsule fly off camera.

Donkey: Hey, at least they paid for blanks. He didn’t just hold up the gun and scream, “POW!”

Milobar: Or hold his gun off screen and just shake his arm. Wow, in this next scene, as Athena arrives at Achilles’ apartment, you can really tell how much taller she is than Achilles. How emasculating.

Donkey: And now we’ve come to one of the greatest moments in Shitty Movie Night history.

Blombo: The first time we watched this, I almost pissed my pants laughing.

Milobar: Watching the first part of this movie is totally worth it just to see this one moment.

Donkey: So Athena comes to his apartment and shoots Achilles up with a sedative while he’s not looking so that he’ll pass out and not be able to make it to the match. But before Achilles goes down for nap time, it’s time to fight. They wrestle around pointlessly for a while, and then in one glorious shot from the gods where Athena goes to throw Achilles onto the bed, she’s replaced by a stunt double WHO IS VERY CLEARLY A DUDE.

You're seeing this right. A black woman has been replaced by a white man. It could only be better if he had a full beard.

Milobar: I remember the first time we saw this, I had to replay this scene just so that we could be sure of what we just saw.

Donkey: No matter how many times you see it, nothing can prepare you for this insanity. Why the fuck did they not use a female stunt double? You couldn’t find ONE? But once Achilles has finally passed out, Athena has the option of pulling the old switcheroo and take his place in the fight, or just spending a lovely afternoon raping him with a rusty pipe wrench. I was hoping for the latter, but she chooses the former. Moments later we see her show up and execute her perfect plan: she shows up disguised as Achilles by wearing a tinted visor on her Robot Jock helmet and not saying a thing. And no one finds that odd.

Milobar: You can tell it’s a goddamn woman in that suit.

Donkey: Once the team of technicians that’s strapping Athena into the robot notices that she’s not Achilles, she flips the first dude that approaches her, which apparently knocks him out. The remaining five guys then run to the aid of the first dude, rather than continuing to try to stop her.

Milobar: Back at his apartment, Achilles wakes up to find himself locked in his own apartment. Apparently in the future, if you smash a door’s control panel, the door just stays closed. That’s a pretty basic design flaw and a massive fire hazard. Shouldn’t the default option in that case be that it stays open? Or at the very least, have a manual lever that can be used from the inside?

Donkey: All seems lost, but suddenly Achilles has a very, very bad idea. He grabs the controller for his car and fires it up.

Milobar: Better extend that antenna.

So the circle indicates that the car is pointed in what direction exactly?

Donkey: He then uses the extremely basic graphical display and the controller to drives the car towards his apartment.

Blombo: You know, there could be people in that things path and he couldn’t tell. And the display has his car represented by a dot. A single dot. How the hell would that help you drive? And if your car is that advanced, wouldn’t it have a safety device on it, so that you couldn’t crash it into shit?

Donkey: That would seem likely since his display starts flashing red to tell him that the car is about to crash through his wall. But still, it doesn’t stop this madness and moments later the car comes crashing through his wall. Of course, smashing a car, hood-first, into a goddamn building would likely destroy most cars. But I’m still picturing that dude who was supposed to be a girl and nothing else seems to matter.

Blombo: The movie goes back to Athena as she takes control of the giant robot that she’s strapped into while the rest of the team tries to stop her remotely. Did I see that right? Did the manual override that she just hit consist of a big red button?

Milobar: It certainly did. And the team is still scrambling to try to find a way to stop her. As Athena starts to raise the platform out of the underground hangar, Tex brings it to a stop, saying, “At least we can keep her inside”. The commissioner then gets on the phone with his security troupe, saying, “Don’t endanger your men, shoot to kill”. What? She has no weapons.

Blombo: She does have a special power where she becomes a man when she fights, though.

Milobar: You’d think just running out there to shoot at her would put the men in danger then.

Donkey: Undaunted by the team’s efforts, Athena uses the robot to climb up to the playing field. How the hell did she manage to make the robot have the dexterity required for climbing is something you’d best not ask yourself if you don’t want your brain to jump out of your skull in protest.

Milobar: Achilles then comes running into the control room in his pajamas.

Donkey: The vast majority of people in this movie spend the whole time wearing clothes that are way too tight. I guess everyone in the future has no shame when it comes to showing off the creases in their balls. Meanwhile, as Athena takes to the battlefield, Dr. Matsumoto’s video debriefing begins, explaining the new weapon that has been developed for this match.

Milobar: You’ve got a new weapon. It’s a goddamn flash light with the power of a million exploding suns.

Donkey: The doctor explains that the weapon is controlled by the sun image, which is a giant, ridiculous button. Fuck, did they plan for a five year old to be piloting this thing?

Blombo: At the end of the briefing, which is being played simultaneously in the giant robot for Athena and in back in the control room for the rest of the team, the video cuts to the recorded confession and murder of Dr. Matusmoto. Cornered once again, Tex bolts out of the room. He’s obese. How far can he run?

Donkey: It turns out he doesn’t have to run very far, as moments later Tex “Someone get me a gravy milkshake” Conway jumps to his death. That’s the first smart thing that I’ve seen someone do in this damn film.

Milobar: Geronimo!

Blombo: Who yells Geronimo when they’re committing suicide?

Milobar: As he enters the arena to face off against Athena, it’s clear that Alexander’s robot has been upgraded for this fight: it now has four legs. What’s the purpose of having four goddamn legs?

Donkey: Considering how badly Achilles was fucked up by getting gently knocked over before, I’d say the extra stability could be quite useful. But then that begs the question, why don’t all of them have four legs? Or a goddamn tank base with treads instead of legs?

Milobar: That was the old version that apparently wasn’t as good.

Donkey: Faced with her opponent, Athena elects to use the secret weapon right away.

Blombo: Of course.

Oh my God! That's totally the most ultimate weapon ever!

Milobar: As predicted, Alexander can’t see for a couple of seconds, so he just blindly charges and tackles her.

Blombo: Why they fuck did she use it? She didn’t even shoot at him after that. She just blinds him and stands there like an idiot.

Donkey: Not only does she not bother to attack, but she doesn’t even try to move as Alexander comes charging at her. So seconds later, his robot is on top of hers, hitting her robot as she’s screeching like she’s in physical pain. After arduous minutes of anticlimactic fighting, Athena manages to use an idiot’s version of a child’s idea of a chainsaw to cut one of the fists off of Alexander’s robot. Without hesitation, the Russian continues his attack.

Milobar: And here comes the dildo.

No! Stop! I just ate! I'm gonna puke!

Donkey: His remaining fist is on hydraulics, very slowly bumping into her, and she’s flailing around inside her mech like she’s getting hit in the head with a goddamn baseball bat. Back at HQ, the rest of the team is yelling about how he’s killing her. Killing her? HOW? That’s not even a slight irritation, let alone an actual attack.

Blombo: He’s shaking her softly to this song.

Donkey: Unable to stand by and let the fight come to its natural conclusion, Achilles suddenly rolls up in a car just as Alexander realizes that his opponent was Athena up to this point. Any moderate amount of brain activity would lead one to conclude that this should have the Americans disqualified immediately. But of course, rather than being happy with his victory, Alexander is outraged by the ruse that cheated him out of using his unremarkable skills to jostle Achilles around.

Blombo: Glorious.

Donkey: So to recap, we’ve seen two robot matches in this movie. The first one consisted of shooting at each other from a distance, one kick, one punch, and Achilles going down faster than a coked out hooker. This fight consists of a flare, him charging her, and then trying to rape her very gently with a fist. These are true champions of combat. I can totally understand why this is the preferred method of settling international disputes.

Milobar: They really are exciting fights. I can’t wait for the future at this point.

Blombo: Let’s not overlook the fact that the music is terrible as well.

Donkey: The referees declare Alexander the winner, but that demand that he must leave the field now or be held in contempt of process. Wait, that’s exactly what happened in the fight at the beginning of the movie, when he ignored the ref and crushed his opponent anyway. Why wasn’t he disqualified then? But while the movie bathes in its own inconsistency and the refs continue to warn Alexander to back off, Achilles climbs into his downed robot and begins pulling Athena out of the battle suit.

Blombo: Why are you undressing me?

Milobar: Stop taking my clothes off.

Donkey: They didn’t have a second one of these things that he could have just come straight out in, saving everyone the trouble? And of course as Athena returns to consciousness, these two end up making out. Yeah, there was no sexual tension between these two at all up to this point, so why not.

Milobar: Alexander’s boss is yelling at him on the monitor, warning him to walk away while they’ve still officially won Alaska, but instead of just turning off the screen, Alexander rips out the electrical lines. Then Alexander focuses his wrath on the judges. But instead of moving their hovercraft, the judges jump off of it just before he steps down on it. You flew in, for god’s sake. Just fly away. Does no one in this movie have any goddamn common sense?

Blombo: It looks better to jump off and then wait twenty minutes while the thing gets crushed.

Milobar: The commissioner of the US team appeals to Achilles in the same way, telling him that the Russians have now officially lost if he just pulls back. And while Achilles refuses, he also manages to turn the monitor off instead of destroying it. Wait, in the first fight, the refs disabled the long range weapons. So if they have remote access to disable systems on the robots, why wouldn’t you just shut them down completely?

Donkey: Now that the rivals have both thrown out all the rules just for a chance to destroy one another, that naturally means that it’s time to…fly out into space? What the fuck?!

Milobar: After they both lift off, the two robots are flying around in space. Achilles gets shot down by Alexander and then crashes down into the exact same spot they were fighting in before. Did anyone think about how long it would take to get into space, or how much rocket fuel would be required to lift something of that size into orbit? Or how unlikely it would be to crash land exactly where you took off from?

Donkey: That scene was as short as it was pointless. They flew up to space, Achilles got hit once, and then come crashing back to land. Goddamn it. This fucking movie seems like it was written using MadLibs.

Milobar: Achilles comes crashing down and the robot lands on its chest. You designed these things to take off into space, but didn’t give them any way to land?

Blombo: On your face technically counts as a way to land.

Milobar: That was pretty retarded, I don’t mind telling you.

I think I had a No-Name immitation Transformer that looked exactly like this.

Donkey: We’re still not anywhere near finished with the madness, though. Achilles breaks out another weapon of lunacy, pushing a button which transforms his robot into a tank. Wait, isn’t that a bigger deal than a goddamn flare? Wait, maybe not. And of course, since this effect is done as well as every other effect in the movie, the robot’s tank mode consists of it sitting on its ass, grabbing its feet, and rolling along.

Milobar: And now suddenly, as Achilles drives towards him, Alexander can’t hit the thing to save his life, even though his opponent is only thirty feet away.

Donkey: Keep in mind this is the first time he’s shooting at a moving target. Every other time up to this point, Achilles has just stood still, begging to be hit square on the chin. And that just goes to show how high the caliber of all the training that the Robot Jox go through, as he’s completely fucked the moment his target moves.

Milobar: Alexander shoots his own robot right in the knee, which appears to be oddly be painful for him, but then he just reaches down and flips the Achilles’ robot over. Well that was ridiculously fucking easy.

Donkey: And now that Alexander has Achilles beneath him and at his mercy, it’s time for him to produce his own weapon of madness: a chainsaw penis.

Blombo: That saw dick is awesome.

Donkey: Alexander starts screaming, telling Achilles that he has lost. No shit Achilles lost. He lost the match twenty minutes ago, asshole. But just before he takes the cock of death that square on the chin, Achilles dives out of his robot and starts running around on foot.

Milobar: He’s running in zigzag patterns, so of course Alexander can’t get a target lock on him.

Blombo: He’s using mini-guns, for god’s sake. How the fuck do you miss?

Milobar: As the bullet fire comes dangerously close to him, Achilles desperately to get away. But all he does is dive to the ground, out in the open. If you just keep shooting, you’ll hit him. But now that Alexander has inexplicably halted his attack, Achilles runs over and takes cover behind the hand that was cut off of Alexander’s robot earlier. As he ducks behind it, he magically somehow knows how to hotwire it. Where’s the power source for this thing?

Donkey: Finally Achilles manages to get the fist to shoot, and it rockets off like it did at the bleachers in their first fight. Only this time it flies up and hits Alexander’s mech in the chest. Only for some reason, even though it only knocked Achilles over when it happened the first time, this causes Alexander’s entire robot to fucking EXPLODE. Even if you discount what happened in the first fight, you’re telling me that every other weapon barely did a thing, but a blunt object causes the whole thing to explode?

Right at this moment, the designer who decided to spend their entire defensive shielding budget on rocket-fists realizes that he's about to be fired.

Milobar: As Achilles is celebrating, Alexander runs up behind him and attacks.

Donkey: Achilles says to him, “it’s over.” It was over half an hour ago, asshole. Why would he stop now? And Alexander agrees, as they continue to fight with discarded robot parts that are scattered on the ground. This might be one of the worst fight scenes ever. It’s just two middle-aged men throwing themselves around with metal poles.

Blombo: This is awful.

Donkey: As the fight comes to an end, Achilles pulls out yet another ultimate weapon: a double-fisted punch in the ass!

Blombo: That’s unstoppable.

Donkey: Achilles continues to plead with Alexander, but he won’t relent. “We’re dead…we’re Robot Jox.” No, you’re just dead on the inside.

Milobar: I’d be dead on the outside if I appeared in this damn movie.

Donkey: So after all this, Achilles tries to promote peace with the compelling argument, “we can live”. Then he just stands there, with his defenses dropped, waiting for Alexander to make the final move.

Milobar: Alexander drops the rock he was ready to smash Achilles with and…

Donkey:…THUMBS UP!

Milobar: And they follow that up with the greatest move ever, the fist bump. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this was the movie that started that entire trend.

If this is the price of world peace, I'm burning my cheque book.

Donkey: And that’s it. That’s the end of the movie. It goes right to the credits. Fuck this movie.

Milobar: That movie was so ridiculous.

Donkey: And with a running time of eighty one minutes, this falls once again into the classic Shitty Movie Night timeline.

Milobar: It should have been straight to video, right into the bargain bin at Wal-mart.

Donkey: Fuck that. It should have gone straight to the landfill.

Blombo: Right next to ET for the Atari 2600.

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie quite literally accomplishes nothing. Achilles and Alexander begin the movie in a fight for the territory of Alaska which is declared a draw, and end the movie by disqualifying themselves from the rematch, thus making the entire thing a complete waste of time. But when you look at it more closely, you see that Robot Jox boils down to three moments of absolutely glorious and unbridled insanity, surrounded by about forty minutes of lazily crafted, boring bullshit. The actual battles involving the robots at the beginning and end of the movie are filled with non-stop hilarity, whether it’s the weapons that were clearly developed as a love letter to psychosis, or the decision to save a handful of people by crushing them and countless more. And these are topped only by a quick moment of completely unmotivated gender bending. But does that make it worth it? Fuck yeah. Strap in. I give this movie 4 chainsaw dongs out of 5 exploding suns.

What We Learned:

Donkey: It’s a man’s world, ladies. If you want to play with the big boys, you better find a way to quite literally become a man for split seconds during key moments. Either that or avoid the kind of people who would make a movie like Robot Jox.

Don’t forget to check back every Thursday for a new, fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Three men walk down a beach, leaving behind only one set of footprints. Is it Jesus? Nay, as he’s too busy crying over the Asylum’s Christian atrocity…THE APOCALYPSE.

Back To The Main Page.

You have to be there to see it? What? Was something equally intelligent like, "It's a movie!" already taken?

Donkey: When I think back to my childhood, there are certain memories that I know will always belong to me alone, locked away in this brain for as long as it continues to function at the most basic level. Granted, that could all change someday, should I happen to be rendered a mental houseplant with a cranial capacity that forces me to trade away reason, memories, and the capacity for rational thought in favor of drooling, staring vacantly, or actually enjoying a Brad Paisley album. But in the meantime, I will treasure those memories as my own. Whether it’s the time I found a ripped up Playboy magazine in an empty field on the way home from grade school and saw a naked woman for the first time, or the first time I took my parents’ car out on my own after getting my driver’s license, and subsequently ran over a small clan of gypsies only to spend the remainder of that evening burying them in that same field. Ah, the circle of life. And until recently, I counted The Ice Pirates as one of those very private memories. My family had rented it a couple of times when it first came out on VHS, but not a single one of them ever remembered what it was about, or ever having watched it. I myself couldn’t remember much about it, apart from knowing for certain that it did, in fact, exist. But that was more than I could say for Blombo or Milobar, as the looks I got when I recommended it for Shitty Movie Night contained a level of vacancy and confusion so deep that I immediately recommended that they audition for a part on The Hills. But rather than keep this gem in the cloudy haze of my early childhood, we decided it was time that we search it out and share in the majesty that was Robert Urich. Goddamn, what a mistake that was.

The Plot:

Donkey: Trying to describe the plot of The Ice Pirates is so stupid that even the movie itself doesn’t bother. Instead, the plot’s description on the back of the DVD cover is riddled with ridiculous puns, hoping that you won’t notice that it only serves to take up space without actually accomplishing anything. It’s no wonder that no one has ever seen this goddamn movie. “Have an ice day”? “The manic, concluding…battle is just the ice-ing on the intergalactic cake”? That’s preposterous and remarkably unclever. “This movie isn’t even worth PIRATING a copy”. See what I just did there? Not so goddamn hard, was it? Game, set, and match, The Ice Pirates DVD.

But despite the fact that the film’s distributor didn’t see fit to do it, I’ll use three sentences to summarize the catastrophe that you’re about to witness through our eyes. In the depths of space, there exists a galaxy that has lost all of it’s water, save one single planet. With the entire galaxy’s water supply under the tight control of evil Templars, one small band of pirates dares to defy the odds and the very laws of physics. Led by one of the true titans of obscurity, Robert Urich, this band of misfits and the Princess that Robert is desperately trying to show his penis to, seek out a lost king and the mythical water planet that he was searching for.

Oh, and there’s herpes. Lots of herpes. Enjoy.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Milobar: Sweet, sweet Ice Pirates.

Donkey: Of all the Hollywood movies that we’ve watched for Shitty Movie Night, this one is probably the most obscure.

Milobar: It’s definitely one of the most ridiculous.

Donkey: We kick things off with an introductory paragraph being displayed on the screen that’s also being read by a narrator. I never really understood it when a movie handles their introduction this way. If you want to put some text up on the screen to open your movie, fine. If you want to have a narrator give an opening monologue, cool. But why do both? Why would I read through your paragraph if someone is quite literally reading it for me? And on the other hand, if I’m trying to read through this tripe, it’s very distracting to be forced to hear some asshole slur out the words over top of the ones that are already going through my head.

Milobar: The narrator explains that after the Planetary Wars, the galaxy has gone dry and the Templars have absolute control over the remaining water supply.

Donkey: Really? The entire galaxy? That’s pretty remarkable.

Milobar: The only thing left of value is water because somehow it’s all gone missing. Look, I don’t think you assholes quite understand how these things work. It had to go somewhere.

Donkey: You have to love how this movie offers absolutely no explanation as to how this happened. Just accept it. Now here’s a cookie. Go outside and play. As as small side note, if nothing else, I love this movie just so that when I say, “Robert Urich,” and people say, “Who are you babbling about now?” I can reply, “watch The Ice Pirates and learn, motherfuckers”.

Milobar: This was made during that time in the early 80′s, just after Star Wars, where Sci-Fi movies were all the rage. So of course you’ve gotta have that rogue Han Solo lead character, some robot sidekicks, an intergalactic princess…

Donkey: And abject racism.

This movie is probably their equivalent of looking back at an old high school year book.

Milobar: Definitely racism. And Ron Perlman. I forgot Ron Perlman was in this.

Donkey: Not to mention Anjelica Huston. What the fuck was she doing?

Milobar: The movie starts as the pirates are preparing to attack a water freighter on the edge of a convoy. Of course, as the pirate ship flies onto the screen, there is triumphant music playing. Hurray for our heroes! About to steal water from it’s proper owners!

Donkey: That water was headed to the orphanage on Beta-7. Thanks, pirates! Our heroes land their ship on top of the freighter and prepare for their stealth boarding procedure, which consists of taking a laser cannon and punching a hole into the side of the enemy vessel. I imagine that it probably came down to a coin toss between using that or a giant battering ram.

Milobar: You know these special effects are better than anything I’ve ever seen in any Asylum film, and The Asylum didn’t start making movies until years after this had already faded in to oblivion. After getting his crew of glorified space monkeys to shoot a hole through the hull of the water ship, Robert Urich peeks through. With a visible range of about 2 degrees he comes to the conclusion that no one is around and declares that they’re good. How do you know that you didn’t trigger an alarm? Or there aren’t guards on their way? Or that there just wasn’t anybody walking by at that moment? Fuck it, who cares? Commence using the laser to cut a door sized hole in the side of the ship!

Donkey: It’s the Metal Gear Solid philosophy of espionage rearing it’s ugly head once again: as long as something doesn’t happen within a four foot cone of vision directly in front of any patrolling guards, it must go unnoticed. Hell, it practically never happened.

Milobar: It’s hard to argue with that logic as we experience the movie’s first attempt at comedy, and they make an explosive entrance into what turns out to be the shitter. And of course there’s an alien present shitting exactly the same way a human does.

Donkey: Why the fuck did that thing just sit there this whole time?

Hey, how about a courtesy flush?

Milobar: Someone just spent five minutes cutting a huge fucking door in the wall next to you! I guess it must just be regular scheduled maintenance.

Donkey: In shock at the sudden invasion of its privacy, the alien makes about fourteen consecutive fart sounds. I suppose the movie is trying to suggest that the pirates have literally scared the shit out of this thing. We’re dealing with high-brow comedy here, folks.

Milobar: While doing their best to sneak through the ship’s hallways, the robots that the pirates have brought with them decide to fuck up everyone’s day and start fighting amongst themselves.

Donkey: Naturally. If you’re going to build yourself a small troupe of fighting robots, it’s just a matter of common sense to model them after The Three Stooges. They’ll get shit done and be delightful while doing it. Sure, their antics might be exceptionally annoying and have an extremely high probability of getting you killed, but it will end up being quite heart-warming if you manage to survive long enough. And isn’t that what’s important? After evading the robotic sentry that their squabbling metal fighters had attracted the attention of, a door opens right next to the pirates and they are immediately discovered by an old woman.

Milobar: What? A maid? Why would people in the future wear maid outfits?

Donkey: Looking at this, I would guess strictly for the sake of sexual role play. Grandma here looks like she’s about three washing machine spin cycles away from begging for it. She takes one look at Roscoe, Robert Urich’s black first mate, and starts calling for guards. The gang pushes their way into her room, closes the door behind them, and muzzles her as guards gather on the other side of the door.

Milobar: Fuck, why would these guards use swords? And wear chainmail?

Donkey: I think they’re taking this whole ‘pirate’ theme a little too literally. Just because these guys are committing the act of piracy, that doesn’t mean that everyone in this movie should look like they’re from the eighteenth century. As Roscoe is pretending to be the old white woman and calling off the guards, Jason (played by the sweet Robert Urich) walks into another room and discovers Princess Karina lying in a hyperbaric chamber seemingly filled with dry ice.

Milobar: No, I’m pretty sure that’s just fart gas. She’s been in there a while.

Damn. Somebody already gave this chick a 'baked potato'.

Donkey: What the hell? Were you eating beef burritos, lady? Jason takes the surprisingly bold initiative of opening the stankchamber, risking the chance that he might wake this woman who is clearly sleeping off an asparagus and chili eating contest, then holds two fingers in front of her face. Hey lady, smell my fingers. Does this smell normal to you? Then, thinking no one’s looking, he reaches for the top of her dress…

Milobar: Robert Urich, trying to maintain his title of Greasiest Motherfucker Ever, attempts to sneak a peek at the titties. Seriously, what was the point of that?

Donkey: As they’re about to leave Princess Karina’s quarters and continue with the heist, Roscoe walks up behind one of his own robots that is standing at attention and cuts a wire in the back of its neck. The robot then walks off with a limp. What the hell was the point of that? Did he just really not like that robot?

Milobar: He’s probably just mad that his dad got laid off at the hydrochloric acid processing plant and was replaced by a robot. Fuck, even though this is supposedly a freighter full of ice, the only place this band of morons was able to locate any was in the goddamn engine room. Why would ice be stored in, arguably, the hottest room in the ship?

Donkey: As Jason and his band finally make their way there, it’s not even cold enough that you can see their breath. So it doesn’t appear that they’re even bothering to try to cool this room in any way.

Milobar: Arrggg!! My hand!

Donkey: As he’s pointing Jason in the direction of the sought after ice, Ron Perlman has his hand cut off by an attacking robot. No worries, though. He retrieves it off the ground a moment later, calm as a Hindu cow.

Milobar: Why is there no blood coming out of Ron Perlman’s stump?

Donkey: Apparently the wound was immediately cauterized shut by the inner fires of his white-hot embarrassment. As Jason and his crew are attacked by hostile robots, they send their robots in to fight for them. And of course, even though they seem to spend enough time practicing on each other, their robots fight very badly. This is just so wacky and lovable.

Milobar: But their little midget robot manages to fight back with some barely adequate martial arts skills that mostly involve kicking the other robots in the nads?

Donkey: Repeatedly. Because if you want a robot to feel that kick, you’ve got to really pound on those balls. Sure, I’ll build a robot that has balls, and sure, I’ll make sure those balls are his weak spot. But I’m not going to make those balls hyper-sensitive! I’m not a goddamn moron!

Milobar: Once the fight is over, Jason coaxes one of the robots over to the railing, and then pushes it off. Because hey, fuck robots.

Donkey: Their two remaining robots who witnessed this suddenly snap to attention and march away in an exaggerated orderly fashion, as if frightened by these developments. It’s nice to see that they programmed these robots to somehow feel fear, as well as have an over-developed sense of comedic timing.

Milobar: As the scene switches to the control room, there are gay dudes watching Roller Derby. So in the future they have pirates, chain mail, Roller Derby, and control rooms full of gay dudes. This is what you get America! A future dominated by Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.

Donkey: As the commanding officer and his crew sit around watching the finest entertainment that the late 70′s has to offer, Jason and a few of his pirates sneak in and hold them at gunpoint. Once they’re satisfied that they’ve secured the control room, Jason radios back to the rest of his crew, telling them that they can commence with loading the ice onto their ship.

Milobar: You know, there’s a significant difference in scale between the freighter and the pirates’ ship. The freighter is about a thousand times larger than the pirates’ ship. So they could only get away with about a half of a half of a half of a percent of that cargo at best. It would barely even be noticeable, let alone profitable. You’d lose more to melting and evaporation in that goddamn engine room alone.

Donkey: After a few minutes of awkward chit chat about the princess and a bizarre moment where one of the pirate robots appears to be masturbating next to a captive woman’s face, one of the flight crew gets up the courage to dive for the control panel and hit the emergency alarm button before Jason has a chance to laser up his ass real nice like. And once that happens, all hell breaks loose.

Milobar: Holy shit. Did Robert Urich just deflect a laser with his wristband?

Donkey: He certainly did, as a person tried to shoot him from about three feet away.

Milobar: How fast and accurate do you have to be to deflect a laser with anything, let alone a wristband?

Donkey: You’ve gotta be Robert Urich-fast, baby!

Milobar: Watching them all running back to the ship, something very important just occurred to me: You would have to think that if water is the most valuable resource in the entire galaxy, then these people haven’t showered in a long time.

Donkey: That’s quite astute, and I’m willing to bet that you’re right. Everyone in this movie probably smells like a dead yak’s crotch. As they flee to safety, Jason elects to spilt from the group and meet them back at the ship. You know a man like this can’t pass up the opportunity for some free date rape, especially when it saves him the cost of a roofie. He runs back and grabs the still unconscious princess to take as a trophy.

Milobar: As they escape back through the shitter, they pass the pooping alien again, who is still examining the bump on its head from their last encounter.

Donkey: Why the fuck is that thing still in the shitter? Whether you can remember how you got there in the first place or not, if you wake up in a shitter with your pants down, there is only one universal rule to follow: RUN.

Milobar: Why was that alien even on the ship? Everyone else was either a human or a robot.

Donkey: As the pirates prepare to make their daring escape, the movie cuts to a battleship, closing in on the freighter to investigate the emergency alarms that were set off. Immediately they suspect that they’re dealing with pirates and do the only rational thing possible.

Milobar: Prepare to fire! Now cut to an external shot where they do nothing for thirty seconds.

Donkey: Um, alright. Apparently preparing to fire is about a ten minute process. The pirates blast off and attempt to make the ultimate getaway by playing a game of ‘space chicken’ with the battleship. As the two ships fly at one another, one of the soldiers on the battleship is counting down the seconds remaining until impact, and finally the commander orders that they take evasive action at the two second mark. Of course, some of the most astute viewers of this film probably noticed this for themselves, but IT TAKES MORE THAN TWO SECONDS JUST TO SAY THAT ORDER OUT LOUD, LET ALONE EXECUTE IT. But regardless, they somehow manage to get out of the way in time. Everything seems to be clear sailing from that point, so Jason calmly orders Anjelica Huston to initiate evasive tactics and seems to be visualizing the extremely satisfying shit he’s about to take. BUT WAIT!

Yep, I definitely think they might have found us.

Milobar: “I think they found us!” Really? No shit, you just flew past them! THEY’RE RIGHT FUCKING BEHIND YOU! And as a last ditch effort to get away, the ship breaks into three parts.

Donkey: That was done quite nonchalantly. Say, what do you say we ditch two thirds of the fucking ship? Boy, by any measure of reason, that should have drastic consequences and not be done without careful consideration. But I’m feeling pretty gregarious, so sure, why not? And of course, it works perfectly and they get away! YAY! Tuna salad sandwiches for all! No, not really. It doesn’t work at all. The battleship is unwavering as it follows, attempting to sodomize the pirates’ craft with laser fire. Realizing that their gambit was about as successful as this movie was at the box office, Jason and Roscoe dash for a control panel and start applying countermeasures to hold off the battleship’s incessant attack. What do their countermeasures consist of, you ask? Well since you’re so goddamn nosy, I’ll tell you. Roscoe sits at a control panel and plays what is basically a bastardized version of Space Invaders, where instead of hordes of aliens, he’s trying to shoot the laser fire as it comes streaming down at the ship. All the while, Jason is standing over his shoulder behaving like your mother did when she tried to take some interest in the videogames that you played when you were a kid, pointing and yelling at him to SHOOT THAT ONE! NO, THAT ONE! And as is always the case when you have a nagging, judgemental distraction hovering over your shoulder, Roscoe ends up failing miserably. The moment that this videogame declares “contest over”, a hole is blasted into the side of the pirates’ ship and soldiers begin swarming in.

You don't even want to know what has to happen for them to end up playing Centipede.

Milobar: They rescue the princess and arrest everyone on the ship. Before being taken away, this dude declares that killing Jason and Roscoe’s gang would be too easy. He has something better in mind for them. Who the fuck is this guy?

Donkey: He’s a dude named Zorn, but I prefer to call him by his pet name, the High Chancellor of Balls in Your Mouth. Moments later we see Jason and Roscoe in the holding cells of some kind of prisoner transport, cramped in with a bunch of other greasy thugs, including this bearded chap named Killjoy that explains to them that they have all been sentenced to castration. It makes for great dinner conversation while they all enjoy the meal that has been lazily distributed to them.

Milobar: The thing is, a eunuch was walking around, pouring soup haphazardly into the bowls being held in the outstretched hands of the inmates as he passed. But soup is made primarily out of WATER. That seems like a terribly expensive thing to be feeding prisoners.

Donkey: Yeah, that seems like it would be a delicacy. If anything, I would have thought that they would have been passing out stale bread or some shit. But then, that goes back to how poorly planned this movie’s entire story is. If you have no water, you can’t grow any food. So there shouldn’t be anything to eat at all.

Milobar: Suddenly the prisoners all gather in awe as they approach Mithra, the water planet!

Donkey: Water planet? So this planet, where the Templars come from, is the only source of water in the galaxy. See, that’s fucking insane. If this entire galaxy was without water, and there was one single planet that they used as the source of all their water, that fucking planet would not have water for very long. No fucking water source is infinite, so this is basic supply and demand. A single planet, or even a solar system is one thing, but if an entire galaxy needs water, they’re going to suck that one fucking planet dry real fucking fast.

As their holding cages are unloaded from the ship and carried across a hangar, our heroes catch sight of the princess and her maid walking with Zorn as they pass by. Just then some random fucking dude explains that she’s the daughter of a king/famous explorer who has been missing for three months, after setting out in search of the famed ‘Seventh World’. But little does the princess know, her father was actually killed by the Templars.

Milobar: Thank you, white Candyman. Thank you for explaining everything about the plot of this movie in the span of one minute and thirty seconds. They’re unloaded in what looks like a Crayon producing factory, but is supposed to be the neutering facility, and strapped to a conveyor belt that is slowly taking them to their doom. But first they pass by a couple of dudes using hedge trimmers to make it appear like they’re cutting off everyone’s clothes.

Donkey: There’s absolutely no way that anyone could be good enough with one of those fucking hedge trimmers to cut through their clothes and only their clothes as they pass by on a goddamn conveyor belt. They’re not wearing fucking used tires. The next group of people they pass by lather them up so they can apparently be shaved. What? Why the fuck would you bother shaving them, especially at this point? Can’t that wait until later?

Milobar: There’s nothing quite like a sweet, industrial strength shave.

Donkey: They continue on to the next group, the actual shavers, consisting of an old dude that’s shaking so badly that it appears that he’s the poster child for Parkinson’s disease (which is exactly whom you want coming at you with a straight razor) and another man whom looks like an offensively stereotypical 80′s caricature of a gay man. How fucking random. Moments later, they reach the end of the line and come face to face with a ball-hungry chomping metal jaw. Wait…let’s look at that for a moment in summation. So this castration machine is a conveyor belt at the end of which there is a giant metal jaw that’s supposed to bite their balls off. That’s it? That’s the fucking DUMBEST WAY to carry out castrations that I could possibly think of.

Milobar: That’s a castration machine? I thought it was just supposed to be a metaphor for Robert Urich’s career.

This is the most efficient method of castration you can come up with? Why not just use peanut butter and hungry dogs?

Donkey: But just as the machine is about to feast on their nads, it pulls away and they find themselves still in possession of rather tiny balls. It turns out that the princess has made arrangements to save them. Why? I’m not really sure. She met them for all of seven seconds when they were trying to kidnap her. You wouldn’t think that would be long enough to make an impression, let alone a good one. Regardless, she’s arranged for them to be spared and taken into her employment, providing that they pretend that they’re eunuchs. Jason and Roscoe oblige by talking in really high voices. HILARIOUS!

Milobar: I don’t understand how castration is supposed to somehow make them obedient, robot-esque servants. Fuck, why would you even want a human servant that acts like a robot when you are surrounded by servants that actually are robots? Now that the maid has explained the situation to our boys, we move on to a party scene, featuring ‘future dancing’ and fashion that appears to be a combination of turbans and spandex leotards. ‘Future dancing’ sure is radical, it’s a combination of the dumbest shit you can imagine and apparently the Macarena.

May I have the next awkward set of movements that barely resembles dancing, my lady?

Donkey: But crazy, dysfunctional dancing and fashion that can only be described as a schizophrenic’s miscarriage aren’t the only highlights of this party. A group of people are putting stethoscopes connected to car batteries to their temples and running an electric current into their heads, which is apparently some kind of space drug. And I can surmise this from the fact that they’re quite literally getting high, floating up to the goddamn ceiling. That’s goddamn ridiculous.

No, seriously, what the fuck are YOU looking at?

Jason and Roscoe, fulfilling the obligations of slavery, work Princess Karina’s party as servers, and eventually discover that Killjoy, the same bearded dude from the holding cells on the transport, is hanging around in a suit of armor in a room with a group of robots.

Milobar: Why the fuck does this big dumb guy keep showing up?

Donkey: I have no fucking idea. And why the hell is he hiding here, of all places? But this is just the beginning of the things to come in the next couple of minutes that don’t make any goddamn sense. As soon as they discover Killjoy hanging out with the robots, they are immediately summoned back to the party to speak with Princess Karina. So once again we get a sweet shot of the Solid Bronze Dancers and their dry-heaving lambada.

Milobar: This dancing is just embarrassing. How do you convince people to do this?

Donkey: The Princess explains to her two pirate servants that they’ll be leaving immediately to journey to the Pirate Moon. And just then, Zorn, or the HCOBIYM, asks the Princess to join him for a brief conversation. She hesitates, so for some reason he calls for soldiers to arrest her and the two pirates. Why the fuck is he attempting to have her arrested? Other than perhaps for crimes against fashion, I can’t really think of any possible grounds. But since there are no answers forthcoming, we’ll just move on. Naturally, our heroes bolt out the doors, only to be once again joined by Killjoy. Fuck they just can’t shake this guy. To make a quick getaway, they jump onto a ‘future motorcycle’. As much as I love how much this goddamn motorcycle is just a regular one with shitty sheet metal welded onto it, I’m far more in love with the sound they make as they drive, having totally ripped off the sound effect used for the Lightcycles in Tron.

Milobar: Cue the Benny Hill sketch! Our retarded heroes race off on their space-cycle, dragging Killjoy in his suit of armor along behind them as they’re chased by a future cop car with spikes on the front of it.

Donkey: And of course, for this chase scene they’ve sped up the film speed so that it appears that they’re going really fast, even though they’re just drifting along at the same leisurely pace that a senior citizen’s cart would drift through a shopping mall. Speaking of which, they’re going through a what appears to be some kind of shopping area when suddenly the barrage of tedium gives way to the heartbreaking bizarre, as the pirates’ motorcycle and the cop car that’s following them smash into a family of three robots that are walking through the shopping facility, destroying two of them.

Milobar: Oh. My. God. The one robot left is screaming, “Mommy! Baby! Mommy! Baby!”

Donkey: Fuck that’s disturbing. Jason proves to pilot a motorcycle about as well as a spaceship, as he soon crashes through the front windows of a shop and sends them all sprawling. He and the Princess take off on the motorcycle again while Roscoe and Killjoy end up separated and on foot. As those two are left by the side of the road, wondering how the hell they’re going to get away now that Jason has taken off with the motorcycle, a random robot with a black face comes up and starts talking jive to them.

Milobar: Trying to sell them titties!

Donkey: Wow. The train of cultural sensitivity just keeps on rolling through this movie. That’s some fucking fantastic racism right there. As the movie turns back to Zorn and his soldiers, trying to interview people and figure out where their prey has escaped to, we see that robot still rolling around in the background, crying, “Mommy! Baby!”

Milobar: Just then they turn to see what I think is supposed to be a ship taking off. It turns out to be the Princess and the entire pirate gang making their escape. How did Roscoe and Killjoy meet back up with them on the ship? Ten seconds ago they were with the jive talking robot and now they’re on the ship with everyone else.

Donkey: Now that they’re once again sailing through the cosmos in freedom, Jason and Roscoe are obviously not too receptive to taking orders. But the Princess demands that they still take her to the Pirate Moon, explaining that she intends to use the water onboard to pay for the services of a man named Lanky once they get there. And to make sure that they cooperate, she’s rigged the ship so that if anyone tries to tamper with the water, the ship will self-destruct. How and when did she pull off this hack job? And why would you not just set it up so that it killed the person trying to do the tampering, rather than having the whole ship explode and kill you all?

Milobar: Back in Gaytown, Evil Bad Guy Numbnuts is going through a security checkpoint, where he clambers on to a ‘metal detector of tomorrow’ only to have it go off. He looks at the guard like he’s annoyed, takes out his money purse, and dumps out some coins. Are you fucking kidding me? His entire costume is made out of metal. His fucking change set this thing off? Fuck, a better question: why are they still using gold coins as currency in the future? This movie is so indiscriminately shitty I feel like I need to take a goddamn shower. Zorn then proceeds into an atrium where he finds the leader of the Templars or some shit like that. I don’t even care anymore, this movie makes me want to kill myself. He reports to this old dude that the Princess has escaped on the ship, and that everything is going according to plan. This old bastard that Zorn’s talking to is going to make me puke. Those are some fucked up arthritis hands.

Sir, I hate to say that I told you so, but remember that article I showed you about cracking your knuckles?

Donkey: Although now that we see him up close, we can see that Zorn is doing his best to keep up on the creepy scale with some fucking over-plucked eyebrows. But with that brief escapade into geriatric hell at an end, the movie turns back to our heroes on their ship. Jason is talking to some dude at the port that they’re heading to, when the camera slowly pans over to what looks like a baked potato on the floor that starts to leak out Vasoline. A few seconds later, a worm-like alien creature bursts out of it.

I think I'll be choosing mashed or fries for quite a while after this, thanks.

Milobar: Uh oh. Space herpes!

Donkey: The camera pans up and we see Roscoe is sleeping nearby with his shirt off…

Milobar: …in the ship’s fucking bridge…

Donkey: …with a coat over himself. As he undoubtedly dreams of something that will earn him a little more respect than being in this film, like kicking blind children down a flight of stairs or throwing puppies in front of speeding buses, we see the little alien crawling up on his shoulder. He awakens and reaches back to find the little worm thing, tossing it to the floor as he jumps to his feet in panic.

Milobar: Why is he still wearing that scarf?

Space-aged sleepwear at its gayest.

Donkey: That’s outstanding. He took his shirt off to get some sleep, but not his ascot? After he and Jason find the creature again only to have it escape, Roscoe mentions that he thinks that it came from this one particular cargo bin. After opening it, they check the manifest and see that it was for…space herpes.

Milobar: Okay, so why would that be on the manifest? Why was there a box containing space herpes in the cargo? Who ordered that? Where were they shipping it to?

Donkey: Someone was actually paying them to transport that?

Milobar: After that random sexually transmitted interlude they finally arrive at the Pirate Moon, which appears to be a shitty town where everyone beats the crap out of each other on a regular basis. As they travel along on one of those carts that they use to shuttle old people around airports, we get to see a variety of the local population including an overabundance of midgets. Fucking space midgets. They ruin everything.

Donkey: You can’t have a Sci-Fi without space midgets. And a fucking cantina, of course, as they soon arrive at a place called the Pirates’ Den where they meet up with Anjelica Huston and Ron Perlman. Wait, how did those two manage to either escape or be released when the pirates where arrested earlier in the film? Fuck, nevermind.

Milobar: I guess when the ship split in to three parts these two geniuses didn’t follow the impressive and proper escape plan alpha, otherwise known as: fly straight forward and hope they don’t catch us. Some black dude is sitting in the cantina with a parrot on his shoulder that has been plucked of all it’s feathers. As PETA’s arch nemesis is about to enjoy a meal of live mice, some other dude comes up and motions over towards our Wonder Group, saying, “It’s the cute one and the nigger”.

This makes me want to cry every time I look at it.

Donkey: Realizing that he’s talking TO a black guy at the time, this dude suddenly corrects himself and says, “Oh, I mean the black gentlemen”. Fuck, that’s so random that I’m absolutely stunned. Again with the racism. Sometimes you forget how far we’ve come in the western world until you’re reminded by shit like this. I can’t believe the ridiculous amount of mature content in this movie that otherwise seems like its intended for children.

Milobar: There’s so much shit in this movie that’s goofy, and then there’s some serious fucking shit that’s just completely offensive. It’s like they couldn’t make up their minds what kind of movie they actually wanted to make.

Donkey: Anjelica Huston and Ron Perlman fill Jason and Roscoe in on the current climate of the galaxy, explaining that a bounty has been put on their heads. But Han and Chewy…um, I mean Jason and Roscoe, don’t seem the slightest bit concerned. Anjelica then tells Jason and the Princess that Lanky is hiding out in a place called Sweet Water. When Princess Karina asks Jason where Sweet Water is, he explains that it’s about fifty miles out of town, so they’d need a land craft to get there. And he only knows one person who has one, as he motions over towards a fishman sitting off at another table. Jason goes on to explain this dude works for the city so he can’t be bribed with water, but maybe if the Princess was real nice to him, he’d do them a favor. I believe he’s suggesting that she go blow that fishman.

Milobar: What? Since he works for the city, he can’t be bribed with water? This is the goddamn Pirate Moon. They have a municipal government? That’s it, they’ve finally done it! This movie is so retarded it has officially made me forget how to do long division.

Donkey: Not only that, but a government that can’t be bribed. The fucking government of the Pirate Moon is apparently a beacon of ethics. She goes over to the fishman and it turns out the fishman is actually a fishwoman, who is now looking over to Jason with sexy bedroom fish eyes. Slowly it dawns on Jason that he’ll soon be going down on a carp. But before he does, the Princess finally reveals that the reason that they need to get to this Lanky character is because he apparently knows the whereabouts of her father.

Milobar: Fuck this whole scene. They’re sitting here at this bar, drinking. You know, to distill alcohol, I was under the assumption that you needed water. So if water is your source of income, how much water would you have to pay to get an alcoholic beverage?

Donkey: It’s not only water, but it’s water that’s been processed and turned into something, so you’ve got the extra investment of time and resources. That’s like taking thousand dollar bills and encrusting them with diamonds. That should be a fucking expensive drink. But before this clusterfuck comes to a close the random black guy and his racist companion that we saw taking careful note of this pirate gang earlier come over and ask the Princess if she’d like to dance. Since Jason is over sweet-talking the fishwoman, Anjelica Huston comes to the rescue and tells these chumps to beat it. But of course, random chumps in bars don’t exactly take rejection from any woman very well, so the black leader of the local chapter of the KISS fanclub stands back while his pal, Patty McRacistpants puts on a masterful display of might.

Milobar: Is he just attacking the table?

Donkey: Yep. He manages to cut the wooden table in half with his sword with a mere three swings. That’s sorta-kinda-not-even-close-to-impressive. After a brief and uninspired duel, Anjelica manages to takes this asshole’s head off, and then treats the black KISS fan to the humiliation of having to publicly apologize to the Princess as his featherless bird sinks into an even deeper pit of shame. Slowly the scene fades out and transitions to Jason and the Princess racing across a desert in the fishwoman’s transport.

Milobar: Fuck, now that’s an awesome ‘future car’. Hey, didn’t they say that it was only fifty miles out of town? Couldn’t they have just flown their ship there?

Still not as stupid as the AMC Gremlin.

Donkey: You would think. They’re coming up to Sweet Water, which is marked by a sign that says “Population: 1. Trespassers will be violated.” Not killed, or maimed, or even sent away with hurt feelings. Violated. It’s not often that you see people brave enough to come right out and threaten rape on public signs. Kudos.

Milobar: This Lanky guy is so hardcore. He lives in a series of tents that are ripped to shit. Fuck the elements, I sleep on the ground bitch!

This movie would honestly make more sense if THEY were the pirates.

Donkey: Yes, this Lanky fellow is living in what appears to be a series of progressively less ripped tents. Awesome. That’s going to provide just the cover you need from those pesky sandstorms. But on the plus side, he does have two baby donkeys (my favorite part of this movie, naturally). Finally they meet up with Lanky, who is shooting at gophers with a slingshot. Not a space-age, ‘future slingshot’. Just a regular old, over-the-counter slingshot that you’d get from Wal-Mart.

Milobar: That’s not just a little crazy.

Donkey: Nope, that’s pretty super fucking crazy. As they press Lanky on the location of the Princess Karina’s missing father, again the conversation goes back to the fabled Seventh World. Lanky explains to them that the last time he had seen her father, he was recounting the tale of how he had found it, only to be ambushed by Templars.

Milobar: So this Seventh World is a water planet. But as you mentioned already, if it’s only one planet with water on it, that water isn’t going to last very long if the whole galaxy needs it.

Donkey: Nope. They’ve just thrown that little detail out there without thinking of the consequences. If your entire galaxy is out of water, then the movie better involve your ass finding an entire galaxy of water, not just a planet. Regardless, as Lanky finishes his tale, he looks off into the distance where he sees a car of hoodlums fast approaching.

Milobar: I love this fucking pirate car. Gigantic ten foot wheels and a massive paper mache skull on the front.

We are SO metal!

Donkey: A fucking foam skull that is the most ridiculously cartoonish thing they could possibly add. Seriously, somebody thought to add that to their car with a straight face? Is this a goddamn Gwar video? That doesn’t make these assholes intimidating, it makes them a joke.

Milobar: I’m surprised that they don’t have a giant box on top that they kick over so a balloon can inflate into a giant hand that’s giving the devil horns.

Donkey: Correctly figuring that now would be a good time to get the hell out of Dodge, Jason and the Princess round up Lanky and make a run for the fishwoman’s car. But before they can reach it, these Asspirates of the Caribbean Sands fire their laser cannon and send the woman and her vehicle back up to that great fishmarket in the sky in a grand explosion. Goddamn, I just can’t take this seriously. This fucking vehicle is like a goddamn six year old’s idea of bad ass.

Milobar: If they just stopped the vehicle and the eighteen dudes riding on top of it got out, they could kill these three idiots in about fifteen seconds.

Donkey: The Thunderdome Rejects then fire on our three heroes as they run, searching for an alternate means of escape. And as laser blasts are raining in around them, all of Lankey’s tents are going up in massive explosions. Come on. Laser or not, in order for something to explode like that, you need some kind of goddamn flammable accelerant. So what the fuck does he have in those goddamn tents? Oily rags and kindling? Our three protagonists eventually loop back around and jump in a vehicle that I could swear is the fishlady’s.

Milobar: Wait, didn’t these bounty hunters just blow that thing up a minute ago?

Donkey: I could have swore that was the case myself, and I don’t know what other vehicle this could possibly be. I guess the fishwoman was highly flammable and her car was a fire retardant. They race away with their aggressors in steady pursuit. As the villains pull up close behind them, one of the bounty hunters jumps down onto the heroes’ craft. After grappling rather poorly for a few moments with this Mad Max motherfucker, he and Jason both tumble overboard. Naturally, Jason manages to grab some cable that is inexplicably hanging off the back of their vehicle. Goddamn it. Sand or not, do you know how badly his junk would be destroyed by being dragged behind a vehicle on his stomach?

Milobar: What junk?

Donkey: Jason lets go of the rope and as the bounty hunters’ Styrofoam-skulled monstrosity passes, he grabs part of its tire and does a ridiculous flip into the air. Most people would have their arms ripped squarely out of their sockets, but Frillypants McCracken here manages to somehow toss himself into the air and land squarely on top of the vehicle, where he immediately begins pushing off all the bounty hunters from behind. Once it is down to just him and the leader of this gang of chumguzzlers, Jason leaps off the vehicle to safety just before it runs into what I can only guess are oil drums and explodes. Of course, him leaping to safety from this speeding embarrassment without so much as a scratch just begs the question, why don’t all the others that he booted off the thing moments ago just gather themselves up, march over, and kill him? After all, he kicked the rest of them off as this thing was traveling at the exact same speed, so if he’s okay, shouldn’t they be as well?

Milobar: Jason returns to his two companions to find that Lanky is dying. Let’s get you out of here…HGGGGNNNNN!!! *poop*

Donkey: After Jason attempts to reef the mothefucker up off the ground, Princess Karina tells him that Lanky’s back is broken. Whoops. Thanks for making him a quadriplegic, asshole.

Milobar: Obviously concerned about this guy who might sorta, kinda, almost be his friend, Jason asks Lanky if there’s anything he can do for him. What can you do for me? Let me ask you son, have you ever heard of a ‘Rusty Trombone’ or a ‘Dutch Rudder’?

Donkey: So now that Lanky is dead, with two baby donkeys and pigs in tow, Jason and the Princess simply walk all the way back to their ship. And moments later we see them back onboard with the rest of the crew with nary even a parched throat.

Milobar: Why does Roscoe have an admiral’s jacket on? And why is that robot playing with his robopenis?

Donkey: Even better than his metalicock: the robot is playing with the one screw that apparently holds its entire body together, as once the robot unscrews it, it falls completely apart. Wow. I’m sure glad they included that scene.

Milobar: No! That’s a load bearing screw! For fucks sake, as they take off we see that they landed their goddamn space ship in the middle of the desert. Why didn’t they just fly there in the first place? Okay seriously now, why did they take the pigs and the donkey with them?

Donkey: Really, why not? They’re easily the most handsome characters in this goddamn movie. And now that they’re all safely onboard their ship and flying back through the depths of space, they gather to enjoy a grand feast, in celebration of a job not even close to done.

Milobar: There’s robotic hands hanging from the ceiling and sticking out of the walls, helping people lift and pour things. Fuck, the future is so retarded it almost makes me want to fall asleep watching Turtles in Time again.

Donkey: And as Ron Perlman goes to carve the turkey, out pops the space herpe, giving us the Clark W. Griswold moment of the film. Of course, everyone panics as the space herpe once again manages to get away without incident.

Milobar: Everyone is freaking out and screaming, while the donkeys are just stumbling around in the background, embarrassed to be in this scene.

Donkey: As Jason and Roscoe comically stumble their way through an explanation as to why they haven’t told the rest of the crew about their Cosmic STD, I can’t help but notice that Jason’s got his shirt tied up in the gayest way that I’ve seen outside of a pride parade. What is that?

Does this shirt make my dick look like it should be in your mouth? Probably, huh?

Milobar: He’s definitely a pirate! Now Jason, Roscoe, and the Princess are exploring the surface of some planet. I forget…why are they here?

Donkey: Fuck, I wasn’t listening. I think the Lanky told them that her father was being held here, but I really couldn’t care less. That’s the great thing about shitty movies. If you paid really, really close attention, you could probably figure everything out. Save for some Asylum movies, of course. But they’re just not worth that kind of effort. No matter how much you pan this river of obscurity in search of gold, all you’re ever going to find is nuggets of turd.

Hold still while I paint you onto the side of my van.

Milobar: It’s painful trying to pay attention to this shit. Like why are there Amazonian women riding around on unicorns on this fucking sulphur planet. This shit is insane.

Donkey: Just when I thought this movie couldn’t get any more ridiculous, they pull this rabbit out of their hat and slap me across the face with it. As these women materialize out of the fog, Jason, the Princess, and Roscoe attempt to defend themselves from their attack. But as one of the women rides by, she whips Jason around the throat and drags him behind her fucking unicorn as she races off.

Milobar: Another one of them does the same to the Princess.

Donkey: I don’t think these people quite understand how much it hurts to be whipped in the first place. I can’t be sure, but I would guess that it’s somewhere between taking a dodgeball to the groin and being burned at the stake, not on par with a light slap to the back of the head as the movie seems to be suggesting. But to then have a fucking horse drag you by the throat after that? And they don’t have so much as a mark on their neck afterwards? I’m going to need a whole box of Kleenex to mop the explosion of awesomeness that just hit me in the face. And for some reason, the women see fit to leave Roscoe behind, unscathed. That seems like an odd choice.

Moments later, Jason and the Princess are brought before Bruce Vilanch, who’s playing the flamboyant overlord of these amazons. The Princess demands to see her father and Bruce responds with babbling nonsense before ordering one of his freaky, mannish women to kill Jason. But as she stops flexing long enough to move in to land the killing blow, Roscoe swings down on a rope and, like the proverbial black bowling ball smashing into a bunch of the white pins, knocks Bruce Vilanch and several women to the ground. A struggle quickly ensues, as three or four women instantly pounce on the three heroes. Oh, and Bruce Vilanch’s head falls off. Apparently he’s a robot or some shit. Who could have guessed? Ted McGinley, that’s who.

Milobar: This is the most awkward fight scene I’ve ever witnessed, with this guy rolling around on the floor.

Had this not worked, they would have moved on to their next most fiendish method of torture: gentle teasing.

Donkey: Princess Karina manages to wrestle her way free and put a gun to Bruce’s disembodied head, demanding that everyone stop their playtime antics this instant. Eventually Jason gets up in agreement. Alright girls, better back off. I’ve got space herpes. And now that they’ve got everyone safely subdued, our three heroes move to extract the information they want from Bruce Vilanch. As Roscoe holds the severed head, Bruce mocks them, demanding to know what they’re going to do. In response, Jason puts a feather under his nose, which somehow manages to make Bruce relinquish the location of Princess Karina’s father in exactly four seconds, after only a single sneeze. Isn’t this guy a robot? Would that not be why they’re able to hold his fucking head in their hands? Why the fuck would he be ticklish, let alone to such an extreme that he caves within seconds? Fuck you, Ice Pirates. Now that they’ve been pointed in the direction of the father of the Princess, they race off to discover him alone in a room, only to discover that they’ve come face to face with another robot.

Milobar: Not just any robot. An Omega Robot.

Donkey: Suddenly the movie cuts and they are once again back on their ship. The Princess is still pouting, moaning some shit about, “How could I have thought that thing was my father?” Well, it was a robot that looked exactly like your father. That’s kind of the point, don’t you think? You’re not very bright, are you? While she’s carrying on about this, Roscoe is examining the inside of some robot, looking for stored information. Is that the body of the robot that looked like her father? Or of Bruce Vilanch? We have no fucking idea, but a few seconds later Roscoe says that he found something about a ring, and Princess Karina demands that the disembodied head of Bruce Vilanch tells her where it is. Turns out, it’s in his head. Awesome.

Milobar: So he coughed up this ring that he was hiding in the back of his throat?

Donkey: Yep. And once Bruce spits up her father’s ring, Jason asks what else he’s got in there. Bruce Vilanch says, “Nothing. Care to make a deposit?” Ah, not very subtle gay innuendo. Enjoy, kids.

Milobar: She gets her father’s ring, combines it with her own, blows on it, it starts spinning and then somehow it produces this fucking recorded holographic message?

Donkey: That’s pretty fucking random. So when the dude who wrote this movie sat back and tried to come up with a way to rip off the message that Princess Leia’s left hidden inside a robot for Obi Wan Kenobi, the best he could come up with was a couple of fucking rings? That guy deserves a Lifetime Achievement award in the illustrious category of COMPLETE WASTE THEREOF. I’d love to know how fucking rings are supposed to encode a message, let alone play it back. But again, I just can’t bring myself to care. The recording of her father tells the Princess his coordinates on the Seventh Planet at the center of the galaxy, that she must come there, and that she can’t deviate from a specific path in the slightest or she’d be lost in time forever. How the fuck did he find this place then? If there was no trial and error allowed, how did he manage to be that precise? Fuck it. Set a course for the Seventh Planet!

After deciding to make the harrowing journey, the rest of the crew disbands, leaving Roscoe and Jason alone on the ship’s bridge. Roscoe takes the opportunity to show off his handiwork, having just rebuilt Beauford, the midget robot that has been the only competent one in the film so far. Roscoe explains that he has managed to make him .01 milliseconds faster than the finest Omega Robot ever built. What? Really? This guy is better than the galaxy’s finest engineers?

Milobar: And .01 milliseconds is such a minuscule timeframe that it’s basically not measurable. That’s not really enough of an advantage that it’s worth bragging about.

Donkey: Before leaving, Jason notices that Roscoe painted the robot black and asks why. Roscoe responds that he wanted to make him perfect. Why the fuck would you even notice the color of the robot?

Milobar: The movie cuts to a short time later and we see that once again Jason’s got his shirt tied up in the gayest possible way.

Donkey: Jason arrives at Princess Karina’s room looking sexy as hell, to discover that she has just finished getting a massage from her robot butler. She comments to Jason that she might have overworked the butler, to which Jason responds, “well, there’s a lot of body to rub.” Smooth, cowboy. Isn’t that basically calling her fat? You might want to think before you let garbage like that fly out of your mouth, or you’ll be looking forward to another night of crying and fucking your pillow while she’s wiping fishbones and used diapers off her face.

Milobar: This is another one of my favorite parts of the movie. After some pathetic flirting, it’s clear that Jason and the Princess are about to get it on, and of course there’s a giant TV screen next to her bed. So they put on a tape called Passionate Storm or some shit, which basically shows a massive rainstorm in the middle of the ocean on the giant screen right beside them. It’s supposed to be all sexy, so they start making out. But then something starts spraying them with water like they’re part of the video. Seriously, in a galaxy where water is the most valuable resource, who would waste it on something as extravagant as spraying it on you while you’re having sex?

It's a good thing Jason only lasts about 13 seconds, or this sex would cost a fortune.

Donkey: I would criticize, but I love to be sprayed in gold and diamonds, myself. The Princess, helping Jason disrobe, reaches down and says, “You feel so stiff…your belt, I mean.” What? Really? Ah, horribly transparent sexual suggestion. Enjoy, kids.

Milobar: Pour on the water!

Donkey: I think these two might have a watersports fetish. She says to him, “Shouldn’t you be at the controls?” To which he replies, “If you insist.” And then he appears to go down on her. Fuck, again, who the fuck is this movie targeted at? But once this opulent and far too lengthy scene of bumping handsomes is complete, our team suddenly notices that they’ve got a ship on their tail that’s moving five times faster than any ship they’ve ever seen. This is, of course, because they’re entering the Time Field.

Milobar: But if they’re speeding up, that means you’re speeding up too. So they shouldn’t be gaining on you. Alright THIS is my absolute favorite part of the movie: they’re entering the Time Field. That crazy Benny Hill sketch bullshit is about to start up again. The Templars’ battleship eventually catches up and boards the pirates’ ship. Jason’s crew starts running around and fighting robots and guys in chainmail, as they all get older at a ridiculous rate.

Donkey: At this point, they mention that they’re aging at a rate of a day per every half an hour, but that it’s getting exponentially worse. And to show that time is passing at an incredible rate, they keep speeding up the film randomly so that they appear to almost warp from one point to another.

Milobar: These stupid goddamn pirates keep stopping and having goddamn conversations in the middle of a goddamn attack. How are you doing? Not bad, how about you? Fuck, you’re fighting for your very lives!

Donkey: A life or death struggle is no reason to interrupt some good, civilized discourse. Rules of engagement must give way to the rules of etiquette. As time continues to pass at an exponential rate, our heroes start growing beards. Of course.

Milobar: And the Princess has to go to the washroom because she’s pregnant.

Donkey: As the pirates and their robots continue to fight the horde of Templar soldiers, one of their robots is too scared to go into battle. It’s a fucking robot. I know I’ve brought this up already, but fuck me, why would you program it to be afraid of anything? After much prompting, the robot expels a bunch of oil and random nuts and bolts, which is supposed to be it shitting itself, before it finally goes into the fight. Fuck, that’s just stupid.

After being notified moments later by Bruce Vilanch that he needs to go see the Princess, Jason wanders away from the ongoing battle and ends up taking an epic journey. First he ends up passing by the donkeys and pigs, which are now full grown. He then comes across Princess Karina’s robot butler, which has managed to capture and kill the space herpe. Okay, I guess that was important to see at this point, in case maybe one of the dozens of people who have seen this movie is actually concerned about continuity and tying up loose ends (although that’s presuming that trying to account for continuity in the plot up to this point hasn’t already driven that person thoroughly insane, of course). Finally, he makes it back to the Princess and discovers that she has just rocketed his screaming infant son out of her crotch. In all seriousness, this moment actually seems very true to real life to me. Upon seeing that they’ve had a child, it’s clear that he’s not very happy about it. She’s not very happy about it. Fuck, NOBODY is happy about it. And that, kids, is how most of you come into the world.

Milobar: And then he denies that it’s his and walks away while the Princess watches him leave with hatred filling her eyes.

Donkey: That was the most realistic thirty seconds of this entire film, or possibly any film I’ve ever seen for that matter. For God’s sake. A short time later, the movie returns to the princess and her hellspawn. The Princess tells her son, who is now old enough to be running around on his own, not to bother nanny. The camera then pans over and we see that nanny is a fucking decomposed skeleton sitting in a chair. Goddamn. I can’t handle this continual swing back and forth between the insultingly childish to the offensively mature. And as a brief aside, are you trying to tell me that the old woman who was acting as Princess Karina’s maid was actually named “Nanny”? Really?

I'd probably do the same thing if I were there to witness another Robert Urich entering the world.

Milobar: Now the movie turns back to the crew of pirates who are still fighting the Templar soldiers. Their hair is white, their beards are white. They’re crouching over like decrepit old men. And somehow they’re all overweight. How can they have gained weight when they haven’t eaten anything?

Donkey: And now it’s the beginning of the end. First Ron Perlman drops dead from a heart attack.

Milobar: This is so ridiculous.

Donkey: This is fucking idiotic. Next Killjoy gets stabbed in the back because he’s too old to react.

Milobar: More robots burst in through another wall and Zorn finally shows up, all old and decrepit too. And Roscoe’s got a ridiculously huge afro.

Scientific proof: watching this movie will take years off your life.

Donkey: Just as everything looks like it’s about to end in The Big Sleep for all of our beloved heroes, Jason’s son bursts onto the scene as a full grown man, looking EXACTLY like Jason. Robert Urich really stretched himself here, playing his own son.

Milobar: He looks so much like his dad that he even ties his shirt in the exact same gay manner. And then the scene starts flickering and they’re all on the bridge of the ship again.

Donkey: And just as we wonder where the fuck they’re possibly going with all this crazy bullshit, they travel back to the exact moment that they entered the Time Field. So everything is magically back to the way it was before. FUCK. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! They pulled a Mortal Kombat: Annihilation?

Milobar: They take a moment to explain that the other ship was one degree off the course when they entered the time field, so they’re lost in the time field forever. WE MADE IT! WE’VE REACHED THE SEVENTH PLANET!

Donkey: Which seems to look a lot like Earth. It would be awesome if this movie went on for another half hour or so and showed them landing on that planet in the year 1984.

Milobar: And freeze frame! End of movie!

Donkey: That’s fucking it?!

Milobar: So they made it to the planet and sure, they’ve got this wealth of water now, but look at how insanely hard it was to get there in the first place. How the fuck are they going to get back out and transport that water back and forth? As we know, if they’re off by so much as a degree, they’re lost forever.

Donkey: And as the credits roll, they show freeze frame shots of the movie, like a fucking TV show in the 70′s. I feel like I’m watching the end of CHiPs.

Milobar: Fuck, this is such an amazing movie. I can’t believe I don’t watch it every day.

Donkey: I think I’ll be sending it back into the recesses of my brain now, for the sake of my tender grasp on reality.

The Verdict:

Milobar: Much like a giant coiling steamer, this shit hurts so good. Robots, Spaceships, Pirates, Princesses, Eunuchs? Watching this movie was like peering inside the brain of a recording executive as he tries to imagine exactly how Bittorrent works. The overall premise of this movie makes sense in theory, after all lack of water is a major concern in the developing nations of Earth right now. Of course, their concerns have more to do with free access to CLEAN water, not a mysterious disappearance of every available source. The idea that a civilization in the future has developed laser based weapons, functioning battle robots, and interstellar space travel, but has yet to uncover the ability to purify waste water is ludicrous. We do that shit right now for fucks sake. Oh well, what can you really expect from a bunch of rubberheads running around in chainmail? As a sign that I am getting soft in my old age, and as a concession to everyone I’ve met in recent years who have actually seen this movie, I hereby give The Ice Pirates one Robert Urich out of one Ron Perlman. May they find happiness in each other’s arms.

Donkey: This movie locks you in its handsome, steeled gaze, hoping that you won’t look down and see its shirt tied up inappropriately or the festering rot that’s destroying its withered love pump. The ending of this movie alone could be studied and marveled at for years to come. They enter a Time Field that causes their bodies to age, but their perception of the time that passes isn’t altered (the exact opposite of the widely accepted belief that time is relative). They somehow manage to warp back to a moment in time, somehow reversing the aging that has taken place and even nullifying the fact that most of them had died. And the movie literally ends the moment that they even catch so much as their first glance at their destination. That’s fucking genius. And to top it off, this movie has donkeys. Do you have any idea how rare that is? I therefore give it five cosmic STDs out of five.

What We Learned:

Milobar: Just like the real Herpes, everyone freaks out and runs around screaming the first couple of times they see The Space Herpes, but after a while no one remembers or seems to care that it is running rampant in the bowels of your leaky vessel.

Donkey: Watching this movie again has reminded me that memories can be strange things, and dredging them up can be a lot like hoping to resurrect loved ones by burying them in a pet cemetery. So remembah, sometimes dead is beddah! Oh yeah, and even though time is relative, it still has a definite effect on the state of matter and the rate of its decay. So if ever you’re standing next to someone who wants to play a little prank and wind a clock ahead, punch that asshole square in the face before that little prank causes your body to rapidly age.

Don’t forget to check back every Tuesday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Humanity’s last great stand against the onslaught of engineered soldiers specializing in low production values in…UNIVERSAL SOLDIERS.

Back To The Main Page.

I'm willing to give them a mulligan on the 'Alien' on the left, as that's sort of the way it looks in the movie if you've been huffing glue, but that 'Hunter' on the right isn't even close.

Donkey: Like many things in life, expectations can be a blessing or a curse. While providing a standard of quality that some aspire to achieve, they can also act as landmines, waiting to shred those who afford them too little respect into a bitter fondue of failure. After being made into a fairly successful comic book series years before its release, the first Alien Vs Predator movie was the object of a moderate amount of anticipation, and in turn, expectations. While it did quite well at the box office, and was even deemed successful enough to have warranted a sequel, it was heavily criticized and considered by some to be a disappointment. Enter the Asylum and their version, Alien Vs Hunter. This is where the movies that they produce thrive. They have no such constraints, no bars of quality to volley over, as the only people who would possibly be stupid enough to actually anticipate them are the three men involved with this website. And since they bask in this monumental lack of standards, anything short of quite literally lighting your film’s budget on fire and going home with no product to speak of can be considered a success. After witnessing Alien Vs Hunter, however, I honestly think they should have just piled up that cash and struck a match.

The Plot:

Donkey: Fuck me with a rusty tire iron if I know. Honestly, to say that this movie even has a plot is akin to saying that Intelligent Design is in any way, shape, or form actually associated with intelligence. The badly neglected story that this movie throws up onto the screen can only be described in an outline of its most basic terms, as deeper pondering will only result in a psychological form of ‘the bends’ called ‘AVHemorrhaging’, whose symptoms include comas, flash-undergarment-flooding, and permanent paralysis of the lower jaw. So I will attempt to spit this out as fast as possible before succumbing to these depths of despair and smashing my head into the keyboard in front of me:

One sunny morning, an alien arrives on Earth. From where did it come, why did it crash here, and how did it manage to reach US soil without a single government agency noticing? The movie doesn’t really give enough of a shit to tell us, so I suggest that you follow its lead and keep your mind focused on the task at hand. Its ship wipes out near a small town where it soon encounters the local human populace, or more specifically, a combination of their semi-literate journalists and semi-house-trained hillbillies. Immediately upon the alien’s discovery, a vicious cycle of despair begins: a human dies, so they all gather and try to figure out what to do. They explore the woods and someone else dies, so they immediately flee underground. Someone else dies, so they come back up to the woods. Someone else dies, so they go back underground, where someone else dies, so they come back up to the woods. Lather, rinse, repeat. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the humans discover that an intergalactic hunter has also come to the Earth in pursuit of the alien. However, it spends far more time trying to kill the humans than it does the alien, so the entire premise behind the Alien Vs Hunter title is pretty much traded away faster than a Rolex in the hands of a crack addict. Finally, one of the humans manages to overcome his incredible burden of extreme stupidity and kill the alien. Witnessing this, the hunter fucks off for no foreseeable reason and the town’s decimated population of three people rejoices. And that’s the end of the……..shit……..too late……..everything going dark……..tell your mom I love her…kjnkilasgtfubuosajsgipoooooooooooo…

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Milobar: Our third Asylum experience, Alien Vs Hunter.

Donkey: Featuring William Katt, the dude from The Greatest American Hero, playing Lee, the main character.

Milobar: I don’t even know who, or what, the fuck that is. Nor do I care.

Donkey: It was a show in the 80′s that I can’t actually remember a single thing about, save an unpleasantly tight red outfit. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a full episode. I just know it’s his claim to ‘fame’.

Milobar: I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this movie is his claim to ‘shame’. The movie begins with Lee running up a hill with his iPod on, so he of course doesn’t notice the fireball that goes shooting by behind him to crash nearby. A very poignant commentary on the iPod generation. Who knew an Asylum film could be so deep?

I am woman, hear me roar...

Donkey: I don’t care if that iPod is blasting Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills at its highest volume level, that’s the kind of shit that you’re going to have to notice. It would be one thing if that was sailing through the sky miles away, off in the distant horizon, but that flaming atrocity ends up crashing not too far away from him. I’m imagining the ground is going to shake a little bit.

Milobar: Fuck that, I’m pretty sure this dude makes a habit out of ignoring attention grabbing catastrophic events since he’s running up the middle of a highway. This motherfucker is so extreme he doesn’t even want to be able to hear the high speed traffic before it slams in to him.

Donkey: Especially since the first vehicle that enters the scene drives up behind him and the dumb ass doesn’t even notice. If that car had come speeding around the corner and didn’t see him there, this might have been a mercifully short film.

Milobar: Even though the vehicle doesn’t have any Police logos or Police lights on it, the guy driving has what could be loosely described as a Police uniform on, so I guess it’s supposed to be a Police cruiser.

Donkey: It’s just a dude in a costume that they obviously rented, riding in an SUV that they convinced someone to bring to the set. Actually, I’m willing to bet that’s how this guy got the part of Sheriff Armstrong. He had a car and he was willing to drive it around in a couple of scenes for free. We hear the sound of sirens as this vehicle approaches, and yet there are no sirens anywhere to be found on that vehicle. Once the sheriff gets his attention, he repeatedly asks Lee to join him, which seems kind of odd. It’s not often that you see cops begging reporters to accompany when they’re on their way to the scene of an incident.

Milobar: “Come on, reporter guy! Come with me and write this story and you’ll get the Pulitzer Prize for sure! I’m a small town sheriff, so you can trust that I’m sitting on the board that decides who to hand out the award to.” But in the end, it’s doughnuts that convince Lee to come along, and he makes an almost believable production of how DELICIOUS THESE DOUGHNUTS LOOK!

Donkey: After driving further up the hill, and I’m imagining avoiding uncomfortable silence by mutually recounting stories about picking up and exposing their penis to hitchhikers, they pull up next to an RV, which appears to be nothing more than an average sized motor-home. But this white trash estate hides a desperate secret.

Milobar: As Lee walks around behind the motor-home, he sees what the fireball was at the beginning of the movie; an alien spaceship that has crashed kind of behind the motor-home. So this average sized motor-home managed to hide this entire alien spaceship.

Look where? Flaming wreckage where? Directly ahead of me? Seriously?

Donkey: That’s pretty impressive when you account for the fact that the alien ship is smoking, with sparks shooting out, and there are exploding noises every few moments.

Milobar: How the hell do you not notice that thing? An alien emerges from the wreckage to attack the cop while Lee flees for his life. The Asylum won’t let you see what’s going on, of course, because they can’t afford any kind of special effects.

Donkey: This is the first time that we see the alien of the Alien Vs Hunter duo, and it looks absolutely glorious. We are treated to blurry, extreme close up shots of the sheriff as he quickly abandons the ‘shoot-this-fucker-in-the-face’ tactic in favor of the much more effective ‘cower-and-whimper’ technique, as he is either eaten or sexually molested by the alien. It’s kind of hard to tell which.

Milobar: While the sheriff is being molesteaten Lee is ducking down in the driver’s seat of the police car and screaming “ooooooooohhhhhhhh!”.

Donkey: I’m not exactly a method actor myself, but this looks more like he’s blowing a load into his pants than like he’s terrified of something.

Milobar: The alien, fearful that William Katt’s inability to act is contagious, quickly disappears.

Donkey: Apparently this alien is considerate enough to not kill reporters. Or he’s decided to discreetly watch one masturbate. Suddenly, Tammy, a random black chick, runs up and bangs on Lee’s window only a few seconds later. How the fuck she got right up to the window like that without seeing the sizable fucking alien that was chewing on the sheriff’s taint a few feet away just seconds ago is beyond logical description, so we just won’t think about that.

Milobar: That’s awesome. The audio in this scene is not dubbed correctly. Tammy’s freaking out at the window of the vehicle and Lee starts spouting off half formed sentences: “You scared me… I was just sitting in my car… ” What? No you weren’t. You were cowering from a goddamn alien that just eatfucked the town sheriff!

Donkey: And it’s not your car either, Greatest American Liar. It’s the cop’s. After a couple of minutes of spitting nonsense at each other, Lee and Tammy escape on foot and we see a severed hand on the hood of the car. I guess that’s supposed to be the sheriff’s hand. Either that or he had one of the most fucked up hood ornaments I’ve ever seen.

Milobar: That whole conversation between the two of them didn’t make any sense at all, much like our choice to watch this piece of shit. And suddenly they’re in a house, which I am going to assume belongs to Lee.

Donkey: So even though the alien was killing someone right in front of them only moments before they decided to go on a little sojourn back to town, they actually managed to somehow escape and make it all the way back here to Lee’s house unscathed? Did they find the lost city of Atlantis or perhaps the body of Jimmy Hoffa along the way? Because that’s just as fucking likely.

Milobar: In an attempt to handle this crisis, Lee starts assembling what appears to be the writing staff of this small town’s newspaper. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? What are they going to do? Throw the weekly jumble at it?

Donkey: While Lee is on the phone in the other room, summoning the Super Friends to their office, Tammy is busy cleaning herself up in the bathroom. She pulls a crumpled piece of paper out of the trash can, which is apparently a rejection letter from a publishing company in response to a pop-up book or some shit that Lee had sent in. Say what you will about character development, but that just doesn’t seem even remotely noteworthy or relevant at this point in time. I can’t see trying to pull myself together in a bathroom, thinking, “fuck…hold it together, Big Shooter…sure, you just witnessed an extra-terrestrial sexual assault, but you’re still cool…oh hey, what’s this random piece of paper in the garbage all about? An unrelated rejection form-letter? Now this is just what I need at this precise moment in time! SHAZAM!”

As the Greatest American Clump of DickTartar finishes his phone call, Tammy joins him and they enter into yet another incredibly baffling and unmotivated argument, where she even goes as far as to call him a miserable failure in life. This seems like it got unnecessarily harsh at an insanely fast rate.

Milobar: Tammy insists she is not going back outside, but when Lee decides to leave on his own, she frantically screams she won’t stay inside without him. What? Make up your goddamn mind.

Perhaps strapping your camera to a pony while walking him around wasn't such a good idea.

Donkey: As Lee and Tammy start the long trek into town to meet at the newspaper office, we’re given a visual feast. The framing in a bunch of these shots is outstanding. Everything above their eyebrows is cut off completely. Sometimes you can’t even see their eyes. You just see from their nose down to their junk. I know I speak for Blombo when I say invest in a tripod, people.

Milobar: In typical Asylum fashion, these characters go from screaming at one another incoherently and hating each other, to acting like best buddies who’ve known each other for years, in about twelve seconds.

Donkey: This is just continuing to solidify the only constant in this movie, as nothing in any of the conversations so far has made any sense. I have no idea what the fuck these people are talking about. Moments later they decide that the best thing to do with a killer alien running around on the loose is to sit down and have a random heart to heart.

Milobar: After sharing some heartfelt stories about their childhood Pog collections, they notice a truck that’s driving past. They excitedly try to get the attention of the driver when suddenly…OH NO! The alien comes out of nowhere and body checks the truck into the woods!

Hey buddy! Can you spare a dollar? I need to buy legs that actually touch the ground!

Donkey: There are so many great things about this scene. But the real beauty is in the way that they put this mess together, making a visual shit heap look even worse. There’s a shot of the back of Lee and Tammy’s heads as they are looking on, trying to flag down the truck. Then there’s a separate shot of the alien darting across the road and attacking the vehicle, and then it cuts to a shot of the Lee and Tammy reacting to what they’re seeing (without being able to see what they’re looking at). Separating out the only part with the special effect so that it’s entirely on its own does two things, neither of which are good. First, it seems very, very low rent not to have the characters in the same scene, clearly showing them and what’s going on at the same time, because at that point you could have inserted anything. You could have stuck in a clip of Chuck Norris combing his beard while simultaneously playing a stand-up bass and killing a terrorist with his feet. It really wouldn’t matter. And second, having the special effect separate like that only serves to highlight it and make you pay particular attention to what you’re seeing, which is not good if it looks like a hot pile of camel dicks.

Milobar: What the fuck? Did they just magically teleport themselves to the newspaper office?

Donkey: So that’s twice now where they’ve been standing out in the goddamn open when the alien has made an appearance and then walked away just fine. But now that all the Super Friends are gathered at the newspaper office, they begin to argue over the matter at hand.

Milobar: Everyone seems to want to go to Valentine’s to use the satellite radio.

Donkey: But they can’t go there because Valentine hates Lee. Who can blame him?

Milobar: The requisite stoner dude seems to be the only character in this movie that isn’t fucking insane, since he’s the only one suggesting that they just leave town. I’ll tell you that’s exactly what I would do. Fuck aliens. Fuck the newspaper office. Fuck this town of inbred yokels. I’m getting on a goddamn motorcycle and getting the hell out of here.

Donkey: They move on to discuss who has died and who might be dead. They keep throwing out a bunch of names like it should mean something, but we have no idea who they’re talking about. What the fuck is going on? And how do they know what’s happened to these people? So far there have only been two sightings of an alien, both made by Lee and Tammy. Yet they keep making it sound like there have been catastrophic events throughout the entire town that have killed most of them. What the fuck are they talking about?

Milobar: When this movie started I would estimate it was supposed to be about 8 am, now it’s maybe 2 pm, so it’s not like a lot of time has passed. What the hell happened in this town and when?

This guy is like the herpes. He'll never truly go away.

Donkey: After arguing in circles with no resolution, the group decides to go as a collective and check out what happened to some dude named Garrison, who’s played by our favorite Asylum actor. Apparently he was the one driving the SUV that was knocked off the road moments ago. It skips to them walking through the woods when they find him just laying on the ground. Fuck, hold on. He was in a goddamn vehicle that had been attacked, he ended up just lying out in the open, and he hasn’t been killed? WHY!? Does the alien just really fucking hate Ford trucks?

Milobar: How the hell did they even find him? Hey you, yeah YOU, the guy we just found passed out on the ground. Where’s Scott? Answer our questions or so help me I’ll beat you into unconsciousness. At this point, I honestly wonder if they had any dialogue in the script or if this is just all ad-libbed.

Donkey: One of the members of the group, a woman named Marcy, takes Lee aside and starts making a lot of ridiculous assumptions. Garrison is alive, therefore Scott must be alive, and Joel, and…WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Milobar: Yes, I’m fairly certain there is someone, somewhere named Joel who is alive. But, fortunately for people named Joel, there’s no Joel anywhere in this movie honey.

Donkey: She then starts insinuating that Lee is making this whole thing about an alien up, complaining that he was the one who called her and woke her up with this crazy story. Really? He woke you up in the middle of the afternoon? How long was this chick sleeping?

Milobar: Apparently she was sleeping off a hard night of booze and roofies.

But seriously, if there is an alien running around in these woods, then let me be yanked away from above and carried off to my death. See? No alien.

Donkey: The alien isn’t without a sense of irony, however, as this Marcy chick gets snatched up right as she’s finished her little speech accusing Lee of fabricating the entire story. She gets pulled into the air randomly, and even though we can’t see what the hell just pulled her up, there are alien sounds in the background so I guess that’s good enough.

Milobar: Everyone scatters in to the woods and they all end up just wandering around, looking up into the branches, waiting for death to descend from above.

Donkey: The movie then shows a shot of the alien, just hanging out behind a tree, waiting for a chance to sell these people some hemp necklaces and filthy ponchos.

Milobar: I don’t understand why this alien is ducking and weaving behind trees. It’s larger than all of these people put together. It could pounce and kill them all instantaneously. None of these people have any weapons and the only thing imposing about them in any way is their lack of acting talent.

Donkey: After wandering around for a few minutes and accomplishing nothing, the Super Friends randomly decide to regroup, combine their powers, and accomplish a whole lot more nothing. Suddenly they turn to discover the alien is exactly two feet behind them.

Milobar: It’s getting ready to rush them and th-I’MA CHARGIN MAH LAZAH!

Ahoy! I need five stout men to work the bellows.

Donkey: Where ever did that laser blast come from? Alas, it’s the first appearance of The hunter.

Milobar: That codpiece is serious business.

Donkey: This metallic humanoid shaped character with a giant mushroom hat is apparently the alien’s nemesis.

Milobar: Whose ‘hunter vision’ basically looks like playing a fucking Virtual Boy.

Donkey: It’s red, very narrow in scope, and very grainy. And now they’re back at the office. WHAT? HOW THE FUCK DID THEY GET BACK THERE AGAIN? Now Lee is having another heart to heart, this time with Hilary, whom we will later discover is his dysfunctional love interest, and again we have no fucking idea what they’re talking about.

Milobar: I have no idea who any of these people are, and, at this point, have no intention of finding out.

Donkey: Fuck no. The characters in this movie haven’t even properly introduced themselves, let alone all these other goddamn people that they keep talking about. As they’re all sitting around, Figgus the stoner pipes up and says that he has three ATVs at his house and that they should go and get them. Then another dude says, “I’ve got a Honda”.

Milobar: Okay. Thanks for adding that. A Honda what? Motor boat?

Donkey: It’s an ’89 Civic hatchback. It’ll haul ass through the woods like nothing else.

Milobar: Well I’ve got a Datsun. Great, if we could just convince the alien to get in and drive it somewhere, the problem will take care of itself when it randomly bursts into flames.

Donkey: As they once again begin arguing about what they should do, Garrison suggests that they “have to fortify the compound”. What fucking compound?!

Milobar: Does he mean the newspaper office?

Donkey: But despite all these perfectly reasoned diatribes, Lee is adamant that they have to go to Valentine’s. And we still have no fucking idea who this Valentine is.

Milobar: Garrison insists that they need to get to a working phone so he can call his wife, but refuses to go outside. I wish just one of these morons could make up their goddamn mind. Lee decides on a compromise and they set off for Valentine’s through… the catacombs? Dude, I think this movie just gave me an aneurysm.

AVH Drinking Game: count how many times they walk around the corner with that pipe running down it. You'll be hammered in ten minutes.

Donkey: Where the fuck are they now? In the ancient Egyptian burial chambers under the goddamn office? This is fucking ridiculous.

Milobar: I guess there’s some kind of caverns underneath the town that lead to the local lake. That makes perfect sense! Every town has those.

Donkey: This seems like a pretty fucking big thing to have in a small town. I can’t see any reason why they would have built this shit. And I love how Garrison keeps saying that he’s got to get to a phone to call his wife. Doesn’t that seem like a pretty big presumption, that she’s sitting by a working phone?

Milobar: I’ve got to call my wife to tell her that I forgot to set the TiVo to record Desperate Housewives. She’s gonna kill me!

Donkey: We’re forced to watch these assholes wander through tunnels for ten fucking minutes with nothing happening.

Milobar: Eventually one them notices that the alien is down in the tunnels with them. Maybe if they had taken ten seconds to think this plan through they would have realized being in an enclosed space would severely hamper their ability to avoid alien love.

Donkey: Javier, the proud owner of the Honda, is apparently cornered and killed by the alien a few moments later, while the rest of the characters simply move on without the slightest bit of remorse.

Milobar: But of course we don’t get to see the alien kill anybody. Just a shot of what is supposed to be him eating, or more likely humping, a corpse.

Donkey: This is the best part of this whole scene. We see an overhead shot as they appear to emerge from the underground tunnel system. But for the very next shot, the camera is facing them and you can see that they actually just walked out of a huge drainage culvert that is only about fifteen feet long, as you can clearly see the grass on the other side. So to simulate walking out of a tunnel system, they just walked through an underpass that goes under a goddamn road. THAT’S NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE.

The only way this could be better is if this shot was of them walking out of the front doors of a Safeway.

Milobar: All they had to do was hang a fucking black sheet at the other end of the culvert so that it would look like they came out of a tunnel. But instead we can see that they came from fucking nowhere. This is what makes a great shitty movie folks, they make no apologies for the lack of budget, acting ability, or direction.

Donkey: The movie transitions to show them arriving at Valentine’s house, which is apparently just a goddamn barn. Our group of heroes are about as excited as I would be to go anywhere near a place that looks like this incest factory, as they stand at quite a distance and yell for Valentine’s attention.

Milobar: Valentine appears on the roof and, in typical living in a barn asshat fashion, uses something to reflect sunlight into the eyes of the people standing on the ground for no reason.

Pictured above: a fine mustache using a hillbilly cell phone.

Donkey: As they plead their case for his assistance, Hilary starts listing off a bunch of people who are dead, and we still have no idea who she’s talking about. Valentine’s response? He raises a rifle and shoots in their general direction. Fuck, this guy is sweet. I love hillbillies. Almost as much as I love how he was blinding them not with a mirror, but just a metallic reflective surface. That’s not that goddamn bright.

Milobar: Oh, my eyes! Mild discomfort! This is worse than be eaten by the alien!

Donkey: Valentine eventually lets them in and asks what the issue is, as apparently he’s the only person in this town that doesn’t know that everyone else is dead. As Hilary begins recounting their tale, she says that there’s something out there. Some animal or something.

Milobar: Stoner dude emerges from his self induced haze to state: it’s an alien that crawls on the roof and looks like a spider on steroids.

Donkey: Thank you, Figgus. That’s only the second intelligent comment in the entire film.

Milobar: He’s the only person in this movie that has mentioned what’s going on at all. Everybody else is just running in circles and screaming at each other.

Donkey: They continue to describe the issue and again, they’re talking about people who we’ve never seen or heard from. Seriously, none of these conversations are making any goddamn sense. But just a moment later, the movie turns away from the Super Friends and we see the hunter, strolling around out in the woods.

Milobar: Grumbling to himself, “I know I left my keys around here somewhere…”

Donkey: Now that we get another good look at him, the hunter’s outfit looks like it consists of one of those old-timey diving apparatus and a goddamn mushroom helmet. He kneels down and I’m going to guess somehow manages to look through the ground to the catacombs below, and watches the alien who is still feeding on that dude.

Milobar: The alien sure is going to work on that dude’s crotch.

Is he eating that dude's penis? Or just trying to suck-start his heart through his scrotum?

Donkey: This alien loves the cock.

Milobar: Seriously? The hunter’s gun is basically just some PVC pipe and electrical tape. This movie so goddamn half-ass it’s ridiculous.

Donkey: As the our time with the hunter comes to an end, he looks off into the distance and then disappears. But Donkey, you ask yourself, how does he disappear? First, that’s a pretty odd question to ask yourself. I know that you’re reading this, but I’m not actually a voice in your head. If I was, rest assured that I would be pelting you with subliminal suggestions to go out and buy aviator sunglasses and entire cases of fat free cottage cheese. But to get back to the point, he disappears using the ancient art of basic film editing. One moment here’s there, then after a quick and obvious cut, he’s gone.

With that technical magic unleashed upon the world, the film then shows us that night is approaching with the very standard cinematic scene of the sun setting at an extremely fast rate. And yet it’s clear that it is definitely still daytime when they do all of the external shots that are to follow. They try to make it look like it is night by putting a really, really shitty filter over the camera lens. But there is clearly sunshine and shadows in all the shots.

Milobar: They’ve just washed out every color except blue, trying to make it look like night time.

Witness the dead of the night in an Asylum film, so deep and forboding that you can barely see your way back to the illuminated barn or the sunshine in front of your hands.

Donkey: Fuck, you can see the sunshine in the background. This is clearly fucking daytime! It’s one thing to try a couple of little tricks to see what you can get away with, but this isn’t even close. The movie turns back to the Super Friends as they continue to try to formulate a plan.

Milobar: Valentine’s trying to contact the outside world using Morse code. But even Morse code needs to be transmitted over something. If you don’t have a radio, that signal isn’t going anywhere.

Donkey: As he taps away at his transmission to nowhere, they hear noises coming from outside. Deciding to investigate, Valentine tells his daughter to take over with the messaging, telling her to call TwoFingers and his gang, as they need reinforcements. Wow. A dude named TwoFingers? This just got even more hillbilly.

Milobar: Valentine insists everyone accompany him outside to fight the alien, but of course he’s the only one with a gun.

Donkey: I guess everyone else is just supposed to piss on it. As they come out of the house to investigate, we discover that the alien is near by, as it quickly cuts to ‘alien-vision-cam’. And once again when it switches to the alien perspective, the camera is about a foot in front of their faces, so either the alien is insanely close to them or this is just completely wrong. But the alien’s not the only one trying to peep into the windows to see if he can catch some sad titties.

Milobar: The hunter removes his cloaking field and we see he is hiding in the trees like a sexual predator. Now he’s very slowly raising his gun, pointing it at Valentine, and then out of nowhere the alien attacks the hunter! Who saw that coming?

Donkey: At this point we see that the hunter was only about five feet in front of Valentine at the time. So the movie is not only suggesting that it’s nighttime right now, even though it clearly isn’t, but that the darkness is so thick that these people can’t see more than six inches in front of them. Valentine begins yelling and motioning for everyone to go back into the house. Yeah, no shit.

Milobar: There was no reason for them to come outside in the first place you dumb ass.

Donkey: Valentine stands and just watches the extraterrestrial grappling match, where after struggling to retrieve his gun, the hunter begins shooting at the alien. It makes it look like the alien is scooting out of the way as the hunter fires, but they couldn’t be bothered to animate much movement for its legs, so it looks like it’s just sliding along the ground. Or like a completely fake and uselessly inanimate object that has no business in any film that wasn’t shot on a cell phone. Either way.

Stand still! If I just keep firing at random, logic dictates that I'll hit you eventually!

Milobar: Fuck, the hunter didn’t even aim at the alien. He just pointed his gun on an angle and started shooting repeatedly. After the alien legs it, the hunter and Valentine decide to do a little bit of the Truffle Shuffle. Somehow Valentine manages to get behind and club the hunter with the butt of his gun.

Donkey: And as is usually the case when someone tries to punch out another person who’s wearing full metal armor using anything less than a freight train, Valentine’s attack is shrugged off and he ends up getting bitch slapped. The movie takes a moment to cut away from this playground shin kicking to show us the rest of the Super Friends, as the Greatest American Zero leads them to some escape route in Valentine’s floor that I’m not sure how he’d know even existed. So once again they end up underground in some kind of fucking cave system. But now that this is established, the movie goes right back to the main event.

Milobar: Valentine, laying on the ground staring up at the barrel of the hunter’s gun appears to be doomed, until he does a roll move and comes up… swinging on a rope? Firing an assault rifle? In what goddamn dimension does that make ANY FUCKING SENSE? And then of course they show us the same three shooting/dodging/rolling scenes to stretch the ‘action’ sequence out a bit.

Donkey: This movie should win a fucking award for going green, with all the goddamn recycling that it’s doing. Valentine then rolls into a hole and covers himself up with a tarp. Damn, this guy’s got madd skillz. What a superior warrior the hunter is dealing with here.

Milobar: This movie makes me feel about as smart as someone who works at Arby’s. The hunter isn’t just a dumb animal. He watched Valentine roll into that hole in the ground and cover himself. He should know where the fuck he is!

Donkey: Now that this fight has come to a baffling conclusion, the movie once again turns to everyone else, as they’re still crawling through the same dirt caverns under Valentine’s house. And once again, this is completely uninteresting.

Milobar: Eventually they end up in the massive underground catacombs again.

Donkey: How the fuck did they end up here? And again it’s time to sit through more extended scenes of them trudging through tunnels, with nothing happening.

Milobar: Until! Excitement! Valentine reappears!

Donkey: Once Commander CousinRaper makes his triumphant return, fresh from being thoroughly over-matched in every way, our team stands dumbfounded, waiting for him to tell them what to do next. Valentine explains that there’s an aqueduct that takes them to the main line that in turn leads them right to the power station. Wait, why do they want to go there? What the fuck is happening? But I guess I’m the only one asking any questions, because our group simply falls into line and follows without hesitation. But as they try to make their way down the tunnels, they run into a problem.

Milobar: A ‘wall of dirt’ is supposedly blocking the tunnel.

Donkey: And now that we’ve come to another point in the movie that requires a special effect, let’s take a moment to guess how they manage to fuck this one up before I go ahead and tell you. Ask yourself this question: if your movie had no budget whatsoever and you were required to create a wall of dirt, what would you do? If you answered “just film a close up of the ground,” then congratulations, you need to put a gun in your mouth and get ready to kiss the puckered anus of oblivion, because you think the same way as the Asylum special effects team. Just in case you missed that, I’m going to repeat it one more time: THEY FILMED THE FUCKING GROUND.

Eat your heart out, Pink Floyd. Now this is THE WALL.

Milobar: Well, Lee reaches forward, but when they show the shot of him brushing away some of the dirt, it just kinda moves to the left a bit and stays there.

Donkey: This is supposed to be a wall. A VERTICAL wall. So if you brush away dirt, IT SHOULD FALL. It’s a little thing we call gravity.

Milobar: Apparently gravity wasn’t in the budget for this movie.

Donkey: Once Lee brushes away about a three inch area of dirt, or just enough of an area to not be able to see anything clearly, they somehow find Tammy’s mother in that wall, so she starts freaking out. Or at least I think that’s why she’s freaking out. Maybe she’s just having the natural physiological reaction that any human being would experience once they truly come to realize that they’re in an Asylum film.

Milobar: Who the fuck cares? It could be Amy, or Joel, or Jacob, or one of the other million people that they’ve mentioned in this movie without explaining who the fuck they are.

Donkey: It actually wouldn’t catch me off guard in the slightest at this point if they had brushed away the dirt and found Jim Belushi for no apparent reason.

Milobar: Meanwhile the hunter is just running around aimlessly in the woods. And once again we get to see people emerging from a goddamn drainage pipe.

Donkey: Fuck, having to witness this the first time was like getting beaten with a sledgehammer. Having to see it a second time is like getting that same beating twice, followed up by being forced to watch a King Of The Hill marathon. Lee and Hilary stop with Valentine, seeing him off as they prepare to go their separate ways.

Milobar: If anything should happen in this ten foot long section of culvert, here’s a gun.

Donkey: You know, I don’t want to tell the crazed militia-leading product of cousin-fucking here how to do his job, but it might have been useful to have given other people a gun before now. I’m not sure, but that might have helped.

Milobar: Valentine’s not coming back? From where? Where the fuck is he going? What the fuck is he talking about?

Donkey: Watching Valentine caress his rifle like a most tender lover, Lee decides he wants a piece of that action and declares that he’s going to accompany Valentine into battle. Or on the quest to find the closest IHOP, whichever it is that he’s about to do. With Valentine an uncomfortably close distance from the two of them, Hilary then engages Lee in yet another conversation that doesn’t make any goddamn sense. At first she’s telling him not to be stupid, that it’s not his fight. Then she seems to be struggling, trying to tell him that she loves him. Suddenly kisses him on the forehead, slaps him, calls him a pervert, and says, “don’t look at those.” WHAT?! What the fuck is going on?

Milobar: I think they just fed a piece of paper into a typewriter, mashed down on the keys with their feet, and whatever came out was their script.

Donkey: I’m actually coming to believe that they held a contest where they asked the general public to submit scripts, then took a single page from each one just so that they didn’t have to pay anybody, mashed them all together, and this is what they came up with. Anyways, with Hilary turning back to meet up with the rest of the Super Friends that they left wandering in the tunnels, the two men set forth to engage in what will undoubtedly be a one-sided slaughter. And as they walk out of that goddamn underpass, they emerge into the daylight. So the movie is therefore suggesting that THEY WERE IN THE TUNNELS ALL GODDAMN NIGHT?

Milobar: Just wandering around, looking for a good sushi joint.

Donkey: There is no way that they spent an entire fucking night in there. But speaking of pointless sauntering, the movie then turns back to the others, whom of course are still wandering through goddamn tunnels. There’s no point to this scene as nothing even remotely interesting happens, but the movie is kind enough to remind you in case you’d forgotten. With that out of the way, we turn back to Lee and Valentine as they make contact with the rogue hillbilly militia.

Milobar: TwoFingers and the Merry Cornholers.

Donkey: TwoFingers explains to Valentine whom they’ve managed to gather and where they’re positioned. Valentine notices that someone named Boo Boo is apparently absent. According to TwoFingers, that asshole couldn’t make it since he had to pick up his kids at school while his wife is visiting her sister. Valentine is disgusted at the news. What, a man having to actually do something for his kids?! That’s bullshit, right there.

Milobar: A man should have as much time as he wants to go out into the woods and shoot his gun at things.

Donkey: TwoFingers asks Valentine what they’re hunting today, and Valentine tells him aliens. TwoFingers scoffs and says that it’s people like Valentine who give militias a bad name. No asshole, it’s militias that give militias a bad name.

Milobar: Or it could be the gonorrhea.

Donkey: These guys are a perfect example of why militias are goddamn clownshoes. It’s a bunch of fifth grade drop outs wandering around with guns while chugging beer. With that introduction complete, it’s now time to make our mandatory return to the people who are still wandering through tunnels.

Milobar: Garrison is being stalked by the alien. Goddamn it, all they do to simulate the alien’s vision is film the person standing out in the open and then show the same person in the exact same shot, just with a shitty filter. They could have at least switched to a different camera.

Donkey: Yeah, one that isn’t six inches from the characters face.

Milobar: After becoming separated from the rest of the group Garrison decides the best course of action is yelling at the top of his lungs. Fuck! They’ve shown people step around this same corner at least eight times already.

Donkey: They’ve spent more than half of this goddamn movie in tunnels, showing the characters moving along one painfully drawn out step at a time. I know you want to pad your film so that it’s not thirty minutes long, but fuck, can’t we speed this up at all?

Milobar: Oh boy, here’s what I’ve been waiting to see: hot mamma taking her shirt off.

Donkey: As Hilary begins stripping down to deal with the heat, she pauses and asks the rest of the group, “Do you hear that?” Hear what?

Milobar: Honey, this is an Asylum movie. We can’t hear shit.

Donkey: We can barely hear you talking, for Christ’s sake. But now they show us another quick shot of the Hunter ducking down and looking through the ground to see the alien who is still chewing on the same dude’s crotch. Fuck, I think that’s the same shot we saw earlier of that too. Does that mean that the alien went all the way back to eating that same fucking body as it was before, and the hunter is now back over top of it again? But before we think about this too much and get stuck in some kind of fucked up wormhole time continuum, it cuts back to Valentine and his squad roaming the hillside.

Milobar: The movie has inexplicably come full circle, back to the cop car parked by the motor-home that’s blocking the alien spaceship from view.

Donkey: It’s nice to see the bloody hand is still on the hood of the cop car and not one imbecile in this militia takes notice or finds that the slightest bit bizarre. Instead they wander past and come to a random house.

Little known fact: the RV is nature's camouflage, capable of cloaking objects 20 times its size, and the shame of its owners.

Milobar: The house is up on a hill, where they look down and see the cop car, the motor-home, and the alien ship. They can now clearly see that the alien ship is enormously bigger than the motor-home. I once again ask how the fuck they didn’t see that at the beginning of the movie? As the militia monkeys continue on their journey our friends in the catacombs have suddenly realized that Garrison is missing.

Donkey: As the rest of them begin searching the immediate five feet around them, just in case he’s playing hide-and-go-fuck-yourself in one of their shadows, it cuts back to Garrison and shows him walking around that exact same corner again.

Milobar: I swear there are only three hallways that make up this entire set. They just keep shooting them from different angles.

Donkey: Three hallways and a goddamn culvert.

Milobar: That’s a sweet budget. That’s some serious bling bling!

Donkey: Garrison is wandering slowly with a flashlight. You know, that thing could have probably come in handy a long time ago. Like when they were outside trying to fight the alien in the fucking dark.

Milobar: Or in the blue filter, to be more exact. Hey, is that alien poop?

Donkey: I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to be. As he’s stumbling around like a confused senior citizen, Garrison drops his flashlight into a pool of light colored mud that I guess could be shit.

Milobar: Since Garrison is two hundred feet underground it’s the perfect time for his phone to ring. He answers it and tells his wife that he loves her, and not to leave the house. And then we can’t hear the rest because of the typical shitty sound quality.

Donkey: At the end of his mumbled conversation, Garrison screams at the top of his lungs into his phone, telling his wife that he loves her. Fuck, easy there, asshole. I’ve got the phone right by my ear here, and unlike your stupid ass, I’m not hanging around in a goddamn tunnel. No need to yell like that.

Milobar: Could this go on any longer? It’s worse than watching Lord Of The Rings. I feel like we’ve spent nine hours walking just to throw this asshole into a volcano.

Donkey: Finally, the alien gets around to attacking and Mr. Garrison is dead. We can only hope that Ms. Chokesondick will now step in as a substitute.

Milobar: Fuck, this movie is putting me to sleep.

Donkey: The movie goes back to the rest of the Super Friends in the tunnels, and we see them walking around the same fucking corner AGAIN.

Milobar: As they exit out of the tunnels, FINALLY, into a big room with steam everywhere, we are treated to one of the finest lines ever uttered on film:

Tammy: “Guys, we’re in their ship and that totally sucks.”

Donkey: What? Seriously? What an amazing coincidence. That’s exactly what I would say if I suspected I was on an alien craft. Providing that I had a full frontal lobotomy first, of course.

Milobar: My first comment would be, “I wonder where they keep all the freaky alien porn.”

Donkey: Our bellows of laughter soon fade back into gentle sobbing and the film returns to the drunken militia, wandering through the woods. I don’t know what they’re even trying to accomplish here.

Milobar: Are they even trying to accomplish anything?

Donkey: I think they’ve actually given up on whatever primary goal they had before and have gone back to searching for illegal Mexican immigrants. They wander up and find a severed hand holding a walkie talkie. Was that supposed to belong to a member of their group? If so, WHO?? But it doesn’t really matter as they look up into the trees and find the alien there, just chilling out.

Milobar: And now in another great Asylum tradition, they are shooting their guns, but with the barrels off screen so that they don’t have to actually simulate gunfire.

Donkey: This is fucking ridiculous.

Milobar: At least Transmorphers, while confusing the goddamn shit out of me, had scenes that moved on from one to the next.

Donkey: Yes, at least it moved on in a linear fashion so that you were left with the impression that while shitty, it was at least telling some kind of story.

Milobar: This is like they just rolled some fucking dice and, oh a six, let’s throw that scene in. Then, oh a three! It’s like the writers had a Yahtzee tournament one afternoon and the script was made! Fuck, and now this guy has a bazooka?

Donkey: One of the drunken militia dudes, apparently named Marty, gets shot by the hunter and his goddamn laser. So is the hunter hunting the alien, the hillbillies, or because of the shitty visor on his helmet is he just shooting at anything that moves?

Milobar: My vote is anything that moves. I’m surprised he’s not shooting at the wind.

Donkey: Fuck, and again we can’t hear the dialogue.

Milobar: Back to the people in the ship, and they find another one of the hunter’s guns. More PVC pipe and tape.

Donkey: As their search for the stash of alien dongs continues, they go into another room and apparently find the body of another alien lying on a slab. One of them asks if it’s dead. Do you really want to take that chance? I’ll tell you what, Baby Einstein, maybe you shouldn’t stick around to find out.

Milobar: Or perhaps you should unload a couple of rounds into it from that space rifle that you found to be sure.

Donkey: The group now concludes that the hunter is, in fact, a hunter who is here on safari, stalking these aliens. It’s just a game to him. What? How? How do they have anywhere near enough information to reach that conclusion?

Milobar: It’s time for us to argue now, because we’ve been wandering around doing nothing for too long. In celebration of our argument let’s try to rip the alien apart! What? Why?

Donkey: Again, none of the camera shots show what they’re doing. They’re straining to do something, but we don’t know what.

Milobar: I’m gonna go with alien rape.

Donkey: The movie turns back to the militia as they continue to try to take on the alien and/or hunter.

Milobar: One of the militia dudes supposedly gets lifted off his feet, but we can’t see by what since nothing actually is.

Donkey: They proceed to unload their guns into the hunter, which does nothing, and then try to beat this piss out of him themselves. Valentine throws a bear hug around the hunter from behind. What the fuck was that supposed to accomplish?

Milobar: What kind of a Benny Hill routine is this bullshit?

Donkey: TwoFingers, showing a remarkable ability to learn fucking nothing by ignoring what happened only moments ago to the people who tried to do the exact same thing, runs up and starts unloading his rifle into the hunter’s face. The hunter plays with something on his wrist and proceeds to become invisible. This time instead of editing him out, they make him “invisible” by showing a quick flash and then turning the camera suddenly so that the hunter is out of frame. Fuck me. Seriously? So did the hunter become invisible, or just have a remote control for the camera on his wrist? But just as the hunter decides to exit the scene, the alien swoops in to clean up, attacking the random militia guy that was pulled into the air and dropped a moment ago.

Milobar: Lee tries to come to the rescue as he runs up and fires his gun. But as he fires, the special effect of the muzzle flash unsurprisingly doesn’t match up with the recoil of his gun.

Donkey: Valentine then tries to take on the alien in hand-to-hand combat.

Milobar: And very poorly, because only moments later, he’s dead.

Donkey: For some reason the alien then bolts off like he’s late for a formal dinner with Pee Wee Herman, rather than sticking around to finish off the only two humans who are left alive: TwoFingers and Lee. Everyone else is dead, so why not finish the goddamn job? Not bothering to question their luck, TwoFingers calmly turns to the Greatest American Failure and says, “let’s go.” Where?

Milobar: We need to get to the arcade!

Donkey: We’ll play some Pit Fighter. I get to be Buzz.

Milobar: Or perhaps some Mortal Kombat 3.

Donkey: Fuck, if that’s the case then I want to play as the shitty mall cop.

Milobar: Everyone wants to play as the shitty mall cop.

Donkey: Now the movie turns back to the small band of idiots hiding on the hunter’s ship. As the hunter returns and boards his craft, all of them duck behind a small box that isn’t even big enough to hide one of them, let alone all of them. Whew. That was close. It’s a good thing he didn’t turn his head slightly. Now it goes back to Lee and TwoFingers and they’re arguing over what to do next. Lee is saying that they need to call the military, while TwoFingers is saying fuck that, we don’t need no military. Yeah, because you’re doing a bang up job on your own so far, asshole. And now they start talking about people again and I have no idea who they’re talking about. Lee is telling TwoFingers that he can’t just leave because of…Freckles?

Milobar: Who the fuck is Freckles?

Donkey: Fuck, every scene that focuses on someone talking makes NO SENSE. This fucking movie DARES YOU to try to keep up.

Milobar: You couldn’t make a movie that makes this little sense if you tried. This movie is like a slap in the dink from an eighty five year old Korean woman with a hand covered in acid, razor blades, and Nair hair remover.

Donkey: And now TwoFingers and the Greatest American CumDumpster run across the rest of the Super Friends in the woods, just randomly for no apparent reason.

Milobar: Oh, and to answer my own question, Freckles is apparently Valentine’s daughter, although I don’t remember ever having heard her name before.

Donkey: Now that everyone is back together, they’re all shattered to hear that Valentine is dead. I can see why. He was a pretty lovable guy.

Milobar: If these dumb motherfuckers had just listened to Figgus in the first place and left the city, they’d all be safe. This movie is like taking a goddamn Shakespearean play and feeding it into an online translator, translating it into Chinese, then from Chinese to Russian, from Russian to German, from German to Japanese, and then from Japanese back to English.

Donkey: And then having a three year old try to read that English back to you.

Milobar: There’s a few words in there, some of them form sequences that could almost be sentences, but as for what the fuck they’re actually talking about, you couldn’t possibly guess.

Wait. Are they discussing how they’re going to trap the alien in a quarry, or a big open field? How exactly do you trap something IN THE OPEN? Fuck, why not just tie him up with some magical green puke rope?

Donkey: I honestly have no idea what’s going on at this point.

Milobar: Fucking insanity. That’s what’s going on. Lee and Hilary are discussing the hunter’s gun and what it’s made out of. What the fuck? How would either of you know anything about guns from outer space and what they’re made out of?

Even worse than realizing that an alien is about to kill you is knowing that he'll be using those bungee cables to strap you to the roof of his ship later.

Donkey: Suddenly Figgus lets out a yelp as he’s dragged and then held tight against a tree by bungee cables. Just regular old bungee cables. Not fancy, space-aged alien straps. Just fucking Home Depot bungee cables. As he struggles with his bonds, he’s impaled in the chest by a stick. Not a spear. A stick.

Milobar: TwoFingers rushes in to be killed by the hunter, although all we see is a flash and him falling to the ground. So I guess the hunter shot him.

Donkey: And now the alien has arrived, so we’ve got everybody at this shitty party.

Milobar: And they just used the same shot of the alien moving through the trees that they’ve shown about a dozen times already.

Donkey: To save few members of the group left alive, the Greatest American MonkeyTesticle tries to lure the alien over to him. Once he gets its attention, he rolls underneath netting that was covering a hole and hides just out of reach of the alien’s strikes. Why the fuck is that hole and netting there? Who put it there? And how did he know about it? Wait, what the fuck is that?

Milobar: Freckles just got vaporized.

The hunter takes aim with his Virtual Boy vision and picks off the most scared/retardedly-grinning member of the group.

Donkey: She screams, you hear a shot, and then she literally just disappears. Not in an explosive manner or anything like that. She’s clearly just edited out. Fuck, that gets more and more awesome every time they do it.

Milobar: There’s just a quick flash and she’s not there anymore. Fuck, these people are so stupid they deserve to be eaten alive by a spider alien.

Donkey: After crawling back out of his hole in the ground, somehow Lee manages to get his hands on the Hunter’s gun. It looks like he might just…OH JESUS. Lee shoots the alien with the intergalactic gun and it fucking EXPLODES.

Milobar: He only hit the damn thing once!

Donkey: Not only that, but there were points earlier in the film where the hunter managed to shoot the alien himself, with little to no effect. So why did this one shot make the goddamn alien explode? They show that terrible explosion, cut away, and then cut back to show the same shot of the woods with no trace of the alien or any sign of an explosion. I guess just to show us for sure that he’s gone.

Holy shit! Now that's an explosion! Talk about scorched earth motherfu...what? Really?

Milobar: Lee starts celebrating, jumping up and down, pumping his fist in the air.

Donkey: Lee turns to Hilary and Tammy and sees that the hunter has stepped in front of them. He just looks like kind of sad, like he’s just accepting that they’re about to die. What? You’ve got a gun in your hands that you just used to vaporize an alien. Why not just shoot at the fucking hunter?

Milobar: Because the hunter suddenly disappears and the women are fine, aside from having appeared in an Asylum movie.

Do either of you understand a single fucking thing that just happened?

Donkey: And now the three survivors, Lee, Hilary, and Tammy are all just standing there, laughing. They’re talking about how they’re all going to go off and live together and that the reporter should write about what happened. What?! Are you fucking insane? WRITE ABOUT WHAT?! All your fucking conversations that didn’t make any goddamn sense? And why the fuck have these three assumed that just because the hunter has disappeared, he’s gone for good? He’s disappeared multiple times and then come back.

Milobar: As the three most uncharismatic characters in the history of film stumble off in to the sunset, we see the hunter back at his ship. It’s time for the big reveal folks! The helmet is coming off.

Donkey: He’s just a dude. And a douchebag at that, as he has a smoke and chugs a beer. He talks about how he may have finally found some worthy opponents, and that they might have to do another hunt.

I love a good smoke after I fuck an audience right in the brain.

Milobar: The computer asks him if she should prepare the checklist for his arrival on Earth, which makes it sound like the hunter might be a human from Earth and the planet he was just on wasn’t Earth.

Donkey: Fuck, how can that be? So this planet has the fucking Pulitzer Prize? They’re mentioning all kinds of other human institutions. This has to be Earth.

Milobar: I didn’t think it was possible for this movie to make less sense at this point, but it just fucking did. Thanks Asylum! Thanks for punching my brain in the face.

Donkey: I can’t help but notice that the running time of this movie is a true staple of Shitty Movie Night. Like so many others before it, it’s over in eighty two minutes. And fuck did they really stretch it to make it to eighty two minutes.

Milobar: This ‘story’ could have been told in twenty minutes. It made so little sense that it’s almost like they were writing a different script and then just randomly threw in the alien and the hunter as an afterthought, just to cash in on the Alien Vs Predator movies.

Donkey: I’m guessing that it was originally a romantic comedy. And apparently one that was set in a series of underground tunnels, considering that’s where they spent most of the fucking movie.

The Verdict:

Donkey: This is one of the greatest Asylum movies of all time, and a serious contender for the title of their champion. Watching this cinematic bowel obstruction is like farting into a bottle and saving it to dispense into the face of your spouse/sibling/employer at a later time. It’s really hard to do, and even if