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.

They're absolutely right. This seems far more like a bowel obstruction than a game.

Donkey: There is no shortage of things from my childhood that were blatant examples of rampant merchandizing, and I never really had a problem with that. After all, as I have previously mentioned, I grew up loving Transformers and Star Wars. The former being little more than a twenty minute advertisement for toys, so much so that I actually got just as excited seeing a Transformers commercial as I did watching an episode of the cartoon, and the latter quite possibly being the king of merchandising. Hell, I remember the days of getting out of my Return Of The Jedi bed sheets just to eat my C3P0’s cereal before brushing my teeth with my Chewbacca toothbrush. However, there’s one other company from my past that not only rivals George Lucas when it comes to whoring out their intellectual property, but was also the first company to burn me with its indiscriminate cash grabs, and that’s Nintendo. Super Mario Bros was one of the most beloved games from my and damn near everyone’s childhood, and Mario has truly become a cultural icon. When the first Nintendo-based movie, The Wizard, hit the theaters in 1989, I happily sat through it because even though it was little more than a ninety minute commercial for Super Mario Bros 3, it at least had the thin veneer of a semi-coherent plot. I even watched Captain N: The Game Master on television every Saturday morning, forgiving it of the fact that all of its characters resembled their video game counterparts about as closely as a they did the defensive line of the 1974 Chicago Bears. But in 1993, Nintendo released something that not even the baby Jesus could forgive: the live action version of Super Mario Bros. And this is how you make even the most forgiving of nerds cry…

The Plot:

Donkey: Before watching Super Mario Bros, it’s helpful to stop and reflect on the video game on which it was based. A game that involved a plumber, and to a lesser extent his brother, running or swimming across a series of locales while stomping on mushrooms and turtles, repeatedly attempting to save a princess from a dragon whose deadly arsenal including breathing tiny balls of fire and jumping. That’s it. Now compare that to what you’re faced with: a pair of washed up Italian plumbers meet a secret princess from an alternate dimension inhabited by dinosaurs whose leader, King Koopa, plots to merge the two dimensions and enslave the Earth using technology that’s as laughably ridiculous as it is nonthreatening. If you’re wondering how those two are even remotely connected, the answer is Nintendo giving you a giant middle finger. Suck on that.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: To lube us all up for the clusterfuck that we’re about to grope our way through, the original music from Super Mario Bros chimes in while showing the production company logos, which is probably as close to the game as you’re going to get. But you can almost hear them begging: Remember that game? It was a good game, right? A true classic? Try to remember that for the next hour and a half while we take a piping hot piss in your mouth.

Apparently the special effects deparment of this movie was forced to use Mario Paint.

With that initial soothing throwback out of the way, the movie wastes no time in disregarding every other impression of Super Mario Bros you’ve ever had and replacing it with something that a backwater hillbilly who was sired by an irregular can of Spam would call retarded. It jumps right into a prologue that looks astoundingly bad, bad enough that it could have been made out of rejected programming code snippets from Keith Courage in Alpha Zones for the TurboGrafx 16, which theorizes that when a meteor struck the Earth 65 million years ago, it didn’t actually trigger the extinction of the dinosaurs but instead opened a portal to a different dimension where dinosaurs were banished and continued to evolve. Wow. An inter-dimensional portal was created simply from a large impact? What a great theory. I guess the moral of the story here, kids, is that if you’re ever on trial for hitting someone in the head with a hammer, you should just argue that you weren’t killing that person so much as just opening a mystical portal to another dimension inside their brain, allowing their consciousness to be sucked into it. But once that iron-clad hypothesis is stated, the story’s setup takes us back to Brooklyn, 20 years in the past, where a woman drops an egg off at a convent before fleeing back down into a sewer, presumably to deliver pizza to four men in green rubber outfits and a muppet rat. And her timing is spectacular as within of few minutes of the nuns pulling the bundle inside, the egg hatches to reveal a baby girl. But just as you ask yourself how anyone could bring themselves to abandon their fucked up lizard baby abomination, our answer comes when the woman is grabbed by Dennis Hopper, playing the evil Koopa, as she makes her way through the dark sewer. That’s right; the dragon that kidnapped Peach and had you drop its ass into lava repeatedly is being played by Dennis Hopper.

World 1-1: Less Jumping And Coin Blocks, More Crushing Consumer Debt And Corporate Sabotage.

With that bit of exposition done, we arrive in modern day Brooklyn where we are introduced to the stars of the picture, Mario and Luigi, played by Bob Hoskins of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Unleashed fame, and the irrepressible John Leguizamo, or Johnny Legs. Much like the game, they are a pair of struggling Italian plumbers. Only instead of struggling to make it through an onslaught of Bullet Bills while jumping across tiny platforms, they’re struggling with creditors, constantly losing jobs to the ruthless Scapelli Company, what I guess is a large corporation of plumbers. While bumbling their way through a day and just generally being Italian, they meet a college student named Daisy, who instantly gives Luigi tingly feelings in his trousers that he’s never had before. She takes them up on their offer to give her a ride, disclosing to them that she’s the head of an archeological dig that’s being done on a construction site, which the evil Scapelli Company is trying to intimidate into leaving early so that it can get on with its development. Of course, she doesn’t realize that a far bigger threat is lurking in the shadows, as she’s being watched by two of Koopa’s men. But since none of this is as interesting as burying his little bread stick and two meatballs into her pasta boat, Luigi isn’t nearly as concerned with that as asking her to dinner that night. Finding his greasy awkwardness charming, she accepts.

Say lady, do you want to join me and my creepy molester uncle for dinner?

I'm doing some research into whether the meteor killed the dinosaurs as fast as this movie is going to kill my career.

We flash forward to later that night to see that Luigi and Daisy decide that the best way to get to know one another is to go on a double date with Mario and a call girl. Over the course of dinner, which is Italian of course, Daisy reveals that the purpose of the archeological dig at that particular site is to find the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Since a concept like that is clearly about 52 IQ points out of Luigi’s league, they instead bond over the fact that they were both abandoned as children, her being an orphan and him having only Mario to raise him. But as their dinner comes to an end and Mario realizes that buying shitty pasta for a pro isn’t going to get him a back alley handjob, he leaves Luigi to walk Daisy home as he runs his call girl back to the brothel. As Daisy offers to show Luigi around her worksite, so to speak, Mario drops off his trick only for her to be promptly nabbed by Koopa’s goons, whom mistake her for Daisy.

Once the awkward virgins arrive at the dig site, which much to Luigi’s disappointment is not in her panties, they wander down into a tunnel where she shows him a dinosaur skeleton that’s formed perfectly in the ground, pointing out its opposable thumb and speculating that it’s like they were monsters trying to be human beings. But just as she’s delivering her doctorate level thesis, two of Scapelli’s evil plumbers burst out of a side room, running like hell as a sabotaged water pipe erupts. In a clear show of competence that proves why Mario was always the star of the games, Luigi runs back to find his brother at home and cries for help rather than attempting to fix anything himself. But once they get back to the site, Koopa’s goons finally realize that they have mistakenly grabbed yet another innocent girl and finally return to nab Daisy after clubbing the Italian duo over the head.

Save me, Luigi! And for the love of God, bring moisturizer!

Not ready to give up on the one woman who might have been willing to scrape the cheese off his tortellini, Luigi and his brother run after them, only to find themselves faced with a narrow but exceptionally deep cavern and an image of Daisy yelling for help at them through a wall and some bad special effects. As Luigi reaches forward to help the sandy image of her face, he grabs an amulet from around her neck, which she had previously mentioned that she has worn since birth. Once she disappears back into the rock, Luigi sees his chance for glory and jumps into the wall himself, disappearing into it, and leaving Mario to eventually follow after some silent film era comedic apprehension. At this point I was quietly hoping that they had found the secret entrance to World -1, where they would find themselves doomed to swim through the same area over and over until you just want to kill yourself. And in a way, that’s not far from the truth.

World 1-2: Down The Warp Pipe Of Abject Failure

A sneak preview of Super Mario Bros XXI: Mario Goes To Hell For Touching Children

After a considerably asstastic warp scene that could have only been improved if they had passed Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and a phone booth, the brothers find themselves in another cave where they again hear Daisy being hauled off by the goons. But when they run after her, they emerge from the tunnels and find themselves in a crowded city that is clearly not New York. After a lot of frustrating and pointless yelling, Daisy is finally taken away in a cab, leaving the brothers stop and notice that they are surrounded by lizard people. Cheer up, boys. Maybe you just warped to Miami.

Now that our fish-out-of-water-and-into-perpetual-stupidity tale has been set up, the movie returns to King Koopa himself, Dennis Hopper, as he bleats on to a female companion named Lena about how horrible the world that they have been exiled to since the great meteor strike is while complaining that the humans have it too good. He laments that once he gets his hands on Daisy and the rock fragment hanging around her neck, which is a small missing fragment from the original meteor needed to “activate” the meteor again, he’ll finally be able to merge the two worlds together and rule for all time. Just as he finishes his oratory masturbation and searches for a mental tube sock to clean it up with, his two thugs arrive, reporting that they’ve brought back Daisy only to then realize that they lost the rock. When they report that it’s in the possession of “the plumbers”, like that should mean a goddamn thing in an entirely different dimension, Koopa puts out a public bulletin declaring that he needs all plumbers.

Despite seeming gloriously moronic, this is actually brilliant casting. I find Dennis Hopper far more disturbing than a dragon.

Back in the streets, Mario and Luigi do a fine job of returning to form, swiftly losing the valuable stone in their possession when it is first stolen by an old lady mugger only to then be confiscated by a big chick in absurd red suit who takes off in ridiculous rocket boots. And their luck doesn’t improve as moments later the cops show up to arrest a busker named Toad for singing an anti-Koopa song on a street corner, only to notice that Mario is a plumber and arrest the two brothers as well. As they’re processed back at police headquarters, the single moment of shining glory that breaks through the monotony comes when they state their names for the record: Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. You read that correctly. According to this movie, one of the most beloved mascots of all time, has the moniker of Mario Mario. But after a brief stay in an overcrowded jail where Toad conveniently explains that they are in an “alternate dimension”, Mario and Luigi are taken to an interrogation room where they find Koopa waiting for them.

If you thought this was a bizarre way to see one of America's most beloved mascots, just wait for the "tossing the salad" scene.

Goombas: in the game, they're turtles, but in the movie, they're an insult to even the intelligence of a four year old.

Posing as a lawyer, Koopa demands to know where the meteorite piece is only to be met by faces every bit as stupid as you would imagine. Tired of his own ruse after keeping it up for a massive 37 seconds, Koopa then reveals his true identity and sentences them to be taken to the de-evolution chamber. The sentence is to be carried out immediately, but as they trot into the facility, they discover that their fellow criminal, Toad, is already there. As a convenient way of showing how the device works without actually using it on either of them first, the brothers watch as Toad is de-evolved, a process which essentially expands his overall body size while simultaneously shrinking his head and reverting it to reptilian a form, thus making him a ‘goomba’. But rather than face their fate, the brothers take advantage of an apparent severe lack of security and rather easily trap King Koopa in his own machine, sending him in to be de-evolved himself while they escape. While basic logic may dictate otherwise, the movie decides at that point that turning its principal villain into a Pez dispenser in a jacket might kill the infinitely small amount of tension in the story, so when the de-evolution process complete, Koopa simply has slightly more reptilian eyes. Maybe the brothers accidentally turned the machine to its “annoying Goth kid contact lens” mode. Running free and virtually without opposition, the brothers manage to escape on a zip line that runs the length of the prison ceiling before hijacking a police car and embarking on a coma-inducing car chase scene that we have seen far too many times by this point. Once they lose the massive fleet of two cop cars chasing them, Mario and Luigi dart down a tunnel where they end up spit out into a desert. And just in case driving out a tunnel that ends in a sudden drop off down a mountain wasn’t enough of a kick to the balls, the car ends up being gently caught by a cluster of fungus before hitting the ground.

Back at the palace, Koopa’s goons interrupt his mud bath to report their continued failure. Well, I think that’s supposed to be a mud bath. Either that or he took one hell of a shit in that tub. Hearing that the brothers have managed to escape into the desert, Koopa takes his two thugs for yet another visit to the evolution machine, choosing to evolve them instead of de-evolving them, which basically just makes them smart. There’s no physical transformation that goes along with the change though. The two thugs just talk like they’re auditioning for an episode of Frasier. Of course this begs the question of why he waited all this time to perform that procedure on these dunces, but this movie manages to dodge the bullet since nobody gives enough of a shit to bother asking.

Lady, you've got to get me outta here. You have no idea where Koopa makes me lick peanut butter from.

The assault of wackiness stops for a moment at this point, instead turning to creepy affairs of the boner variety. After Lena helps Daisy freshen up for a meeting with Koopa, revealing for no particular reason that it was Daisy’s mother who sacrificed her own life to hide her on Earth at the beginning of the movie, Daisy awaits her royal visit in a chamber where a little dinosaur named Yoshi, the pet of the royal family and a character that servers absolutely no purpose in this movie other than to remind you of the game series that this movie otherwise ignores, appears with Koopa following soon after. He rambles briefly about how the planet consists of the one city and endless desert, before trying to seduce her. When she puts up mild resistance to his ham-fisted advances, Koopa applies as much conviction to finishing that task as he has every other one up to this point, backing off and ordering goombas to take her away.

World 1-3: Wait…What The Fuck Is Going On?

You wouldn't hurt the delightfully stereotypical East Indian guy from Short Circuit, would you?

As the movie shifts focus back to the desert, the new and improved goon geniuses manage to fuck up their apprehension of the brothers once again, leaving themselves stuck in mud in the process. And once restrained by Mario and Luigi, they make the completely unmotivated and unexplained decision of switching allegiance. They explain Koopa’s plan to invade the Earth in its entirety before agreeing to exchange the meteorite fragment for Daisy. When the plumbers explain the fucktarded rocket boot circumstances of losing the stone, the two goons immediately identify the woman who took it as Big Bertha, the bouncer of a nightclub. With their powers of brilliant uselessness and inexplicably fortunate idiocy combined, the four of them manage to steal a nearby garbage truck before dressing the brothers up like two like two pastel colored poster children for roofie awareness and heading to the Big Bertha’s bar. But just as they walk inside and see all the bar’s patrons doing a god awful dinosaur dance that makes the Macarena looking as elegant as the Waltz, the coat check girl recognizes the plumbing duo from nearby wanted posters and calls them in. Once they spot Bertha, whom apparently only owns one outfit which I’m imagining smells like a combination of barbeque sauce and loneliness, Mario tries applying his famed Super Greaseball Charms to her only to get the punch in the face he sorely deserves. Taking a new approach, he goes back just to ask to be hit again, and somehow ends up dancing with her to a slow song clearly from the early 90′s. Apparently Color Me Badd is from another dimension, but then that would explain a lot. As they dance, he steals the necklace back from around her neck and sneaks away, leaving her to wonder why the hell anyone would ever trust an Italian. As our heroes try to make a hasty exit from the club, I damn near have a seizure as the club’s DJ starts spinning Walk The Dinosaur, the greatest song to blow its load into human ears since Spin Doctor’s Cleopatra’s Cat, and Lena arrives with a squad of goombas and manages to steal the rock from Mario. In a completely unexplainable change of character, which is beginning to become a staple of this shitty film, Bertha decides to help the brothers escape, giving them a pair of her rocket boots before laying a smooch on Mario that I’m fairly sure just gave her pepperoni flavored herpes. Armed with equipment as shitheaded as they are, Mario and Luigi jump through the roof of the club and land on the street before jumping again into the back of a passing garbage truck to avoid arrest.

Trust me, lady, unless you have a mushroom power-up handy, he'll bring you nothing but disappointment.

Just to spit Tabasco sauce in our eyes after punching us in the sack, the movie shifts our attention back to Koopa, who visits Daisy’s father to gloat over his self-assumed victory. It turns out that her father is the King of the Mushroom Kingdom, and in this case quite literally as he is the fungus that’s swept out all over the city. I’ll say that again. Daisy’s father is fucking fungus, somehow getting that way after he was put into Koopa’s de-evolution machine. If you’d like to know how a goddamn fungus could be sentient, don’t bother asking because any answer would undoubtedly make you mad enough to punch the nearest baby in the face. After that brief and pointless visit, Koopa then orders pizza. Yes, pizza. But not just any pizza; this is pizza with all kinds of crazy shit on it that a lizard would want, which I guess is supposed to be funny, but just makes me question how they honestly expected anyone to watch this.

I could not have guessed that this was the Mushroom King even if I were actually on mushrooms at the time.

Bro, we look like crippled riders of the slow bus. High five!

Prepared for the final conflict, Mario and Luigi arrive at Koopa’s high rise. As they break in and begin to make their ascent, they open a series of pipes to shut down the building’s heating system. They don’t actually sneak up the heating pipes, though, so I’m not really sure what goddamn purpose that served other than saving King Koopa on some utility costs. As they journey through the building from that point, they find and change into outfits which are supposed to match their outfits from the game, although at this point I’m not really sure why they bother. In case no one involved in the costume department of this production noticed, plumbers and other tradesmen wear overalls all the damn time, and it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to have these two assholes in red and green overalls from the beginning of the movie. Finally having them kind of look like their video game inspirations at this point adds less to the movie’s credibility than a cameo by Steve Urkle. To get up the building as quickly as possible, the brothers naturally take an elevator, realizing moments later that even a dying fern would have the common sense to be more discreet as a squad of goombas piles after them. As the elevator climbs, either traveling six hundred stories or set to elderly motorist speed because they’re in it for far too long, Luigi gets a random idea and begins to rock the goombas standing in front of him from side to side, forcing him to sway to the elevator’s musak. Once all the goombas in front of them are doing likewise, the bothers escape out the elevator’s top hatch, leaving the squad to dance with one another. As they flee the scene, Mario asks why the hell Luigi did that. His brother’s response is simply, ” because everyone loves to dance”, leaving me both speechless and wondering what the statute of limitations is for charging a movie company with raping my will to live.

While the brothers continue to approach the ultimate showdown, Lena reports back to Koopa with his two favored goons in custody, explaining that they have swapped allegiance. But after Koopa sentences them both to death, he indignantly storms off, dismissing Lena before she has a change to explain that she managed to obtain the meteorite shard that he has been so desperately looking for. She decides that his slighting of her is enough to justify her betrayal as well, running off to find Daisy before planning to continue on to activate the meteorite herself. Of course, she may as well have just skipped the visit and gone straight to the meteorite, as upon approaching Daisy in her cell, Lena decides to kill her, making a half-hearted attempt before being stopped by Yoshi and allowing Daisy to flee from captivity.

Whoa...does anyone else smell burning turd?

Free from captivity in a building and world that she’s never been in before, Daisy’s emancipation would be assuredly short lived if she had not come across expected and, as always, loosely motivated help. She runs down a hall only to find Toad as well as the two rocket scientist goons being taken away to their execution by a couple of goombas. Through a series of wacky hi-jinks that somehow involve Toad being set on fire without any consequence or even sign of discomfort, Daisy and her three new companions manage to escape together as the goons explain they’ve always been loyal supporters of her father. To make that point clear, they take her to visit him for the first time and discover his primordial state. They leave her to admire the wad of indistinguishable slop that for some reason is dripping slime. After realizing that a mass of dried horse sperm that we’re supposed to believe is fungus isn’t much for conversation, Daisy finds a nearby surveillance system and manages to locate the brothers floundering around in another part of the building, trying and failing to jump across a shaft, only to be saved by the fungus. She gets on the intercom and manages to guide them to her, where she introduces them to the fungal mass that’s been helping them all this time. Once pleasantries are exchanged, she lets Mario know that his call girl, Daniella, and the other missing Brooklyn girls were in a cell somewhere in the building. Hoping to get a quick rimjob out of the deal, Mario takes off to find them, leaving Luigi and Daisy to be arrested by Koopa and his men moments later.

World 1-4: Thank You Mario! But Our Princess Has No Interest In Leaving The Castle With Your Chubby, Dim-Witted Ass!

It may look like fun, but it smells even better. That's actually the building's sewage line.

At this point, the movie starts to break down entirely, collapsing under the weight of its own idiocy. I’ll try my best to guide you through it without blacking out from the pain, so bear with me. Having a special talent when it comes to finding rent-a-vag, Mario breaks into the room where Daniella and the other women are being held. Searching for a way out, he opens a vent, grabs a mattress, and takes the women for frozen waterslide voyage with goombas in hot pursuit. And as much as conventional wisdom or even basic common sense would lead you to believe that the magical pipe that they’re sliding down would likely end abruptly at a grate or sudden turn, what actually happens is far more ridiculous. Mario and his whore-flavored mattress burst out the end of the pipe into mid air and find themselves falling, continuing to fall for about three stories before conveniently landing exactly where Luigi and Daisy happen to be, even though I have no fucking idea how those two got there. Koopa, having recovered the meteorite piece after Lena was recovered trying to use it, is also on the scene and tries to hold our heroes at gunpoint, only to be knocked back by a rocket boot courtesy of Mario. This leads to a minor showdown between the two infamous archrivals, resulting in Mario kicking the meteorite fragment out of Koopa’s hand. This falls down to where Lena is for some goddamn reason, and she catches it just before falling into power lines. You’d think this would kill her, but instead it results in nothing more than a Bride Of Frankenstein make-over. With the rock back in her possession, she takes off to try to use it for the second goddamn time. Luigi, Daisy and the gaggle of Brooklyn girls run after her, leaving Mario to run like hell as he continues to battle King Koopa.

Don't play with power lines, kids, our you may end up with some split ends.

The sequence of events then gets even more preposterous, as Lena makes it all the way back to the meteorite and inserts the fragment, attempting to activate it and merge the two dimensions as Luigi and the women arrive to try to stop her. Seeing that he’s too late, Luigi stead feeds the girls back through to portal to Earth, telling them to warn everyone of the trouble that might come, as if these girls have the slightest fucking idea what’s going on. Moments later Lena is killed by the process that she started, being tossed against a wall by a bolt of energy, which manages to instantly turn her into a perfectly white skeleton embedded in the rock. But the reaction of what she’s done reaches farther than that, as Mario and Koopa, still fighting in the streets where we left them, begin to dissolve and warp across to the Earth. They appear at the archeological dig site, surrounded by a crowd of awaiting media and construction workers. In a show of strength to establish his dominance over the humans in his presence, Koopa fires a de-evolution gun into the crowd, conveniently hitting Scapelli and turning him into a monkey. But rather than being horrified, everyone there just finds this pretty much hilarious. But before the police can show up and prove to Koopa that a monkey gun is a fucking ridiculous threat when faced with much more painful bullets, Luigi and Daisy manage to pry the piece of rock out which reverses the process and causes Mario and Koopa to warp back.

Yep. Dennis Hopper was definitely scarier.

By this point we’re screaming at the television screen for this rectal-shredding bowl movement to end, and the movie finally looks to be obliging as Toad gives Luigi and Daisy de-evolution guns of their own as they run back to find Mario. With a horde of goombas around him, Koopa orders to kill the three heroes when the movie delivers one last roundhouse to our heads. Toad begins to play a song, reaching back to his busker days, and all the goombas ignore Koopa’s order and instead begin to dance. That’s right…the mild swaying that Luigi had a small group of them doing in an elevator somehow translated to all of them having an insatiable love for dance. FUCK ME. Seeing an opportunity to counter, Luigi gets another pair of rocket boots from a nearby Big Bertha, jumping in to join Mario as the two of them now face off against Dennis Hopper. They waste no time in using their guns to de-evolve Koopa, just as a random Bob-omb goes off beneath him, rocketing him up in the air and then back down into a random hanging metal bin. He hides in there for a moment while the brothers wait in anticipation before finally bursting out as a dragon that looks so shitty that it should be fighting Shao Kahn at the end of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, before the plumbers simply blast him again, de-evolving him further until he finally becomes little more than a pile of dog snot. As all on-lookers erupt in applause, Luigi and Mario jump away in rocket boots, rejoining Daisy as the city celebrates. As a brief aside, Back in the room where the Mushroom King was, he drops from the ceiling and instantly evolves back into…Lance Henrickson. WHAT? If anyone can explain to me not only how defeating Koopa resulted in a complete reversal of his de-evolution, but how you can be reverted to a fucking fungus and back without any discernable side effects, I’d love to hear it.

It's your kids, Mario. Something had got to be done about your kids.

With the day finally saved, Luigi and Mario return to the meteorite cave with Daisy, who tells them that she can’t go while she’s got so much work to do here. Luigi kisses her, realizing that many more nights of sexual frustration lay ahead, and the brothers finally go through the portal, warping back to the Earth. Some time later, back in the real world, we return to the apartment of Italian mediocrity, where Mario and his favorite call girl are preparing dinner for Luigi when Daisy bursts through their front door dressed like Rambo and declares to the stunned brothers that she needs their help, adding that they’ll never believe this. As the boys grab their tool belts, apparently thinking that she has come all the way back to ask them to help unclog a shitter, Mario declares that he does believe and the movie ends. Trust me, Mario, if you’re hinting that you believe there’s going to be a sequel, then I’ve got some rather obvious news to break to you.

The Verdict:

Donkey: To say that this movie is terrible is an understatement. To say that this movie is worse than trying to teach your ninety year old grandmother to fight off dementia long enough to learn how to play the game is close, but still doesn’t quite truly express the pain that awaits you. Not only does this movie’s story have nothing to do with the game franchise on which it was based, but it absolutely reeks of the time period that it was made, which drags it even further into irrelevance. This can be seen in the completely inappropriate dark tone and appearance of the movie, because apparently the popularity of grunge music translated into kids liking absolutely everything in the early 90’s to remind them of cutting their wrists, but also in the soundtrack which they tout so proudly. The very first credit at the end of the movie is for the song Almost Unreal by Roxette. And beyond that gem, the album also features Marky fucking Mark (remember that the next time you actually think to take him seriously), Extreme, and Megadeth. Seriously…Megadeth. That just goes to show how far the makers of this movie went to find ways to cater to the masses while forgetting to make it even remotely enjoyable to watch. I give this movie half an Italian plumber out of five portals to unimaginable boredom.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Had dinosaurs continued to evolve, they would have ended up looking like Dennis Hopper. Who knew?

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: another journey into the madhouse that is The Asylum, courtesy of…DEATH RACERS.

Back To The Main Page.

Why would we fear the night if these were the good guys? Can't you even follow your own shitty logic?

Donkey: Of all the genres of movies, the one that I have the most mixed emotions about might be horror films. When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to watch horror movies and that was simply the end of the discussion. This was due to a combination of my parents’ natural attempts to shield their children from things that they thought would be too graphic until we were old enough to understand them, as well as my mother’s near complete dismissal of their value. If a movie is centered primarily around gore, she has no interest in it whatsoever. My father, on the other hand, didn’t quite feel the same way. He seemed to find the special effects required to create a particularly gruesome image a combination of fascinating and hilarious, and if there’s one thing about my father, it’s that he loves to share things that he thinks are hilarious regardless of whether or not you have the proper context. This is why if he rented a movie while my mother worked a night shift, we would wake us up and bring us down to the living room just to watch a particularly disgusting scene, only to laugh and send us right back to bed when it was over. So while I didn’t actually see A Nightmare On Elm Street III until I was around 26, I saw the scene where Freddy uses a kid’s veins to walk him around like a marionette when I was a kid and had never forgotten that image all through the years since.

Despite that glaringly inconsistent guarded approach, horror movies never really had much of an effect on me once I started watching them as a teenager, and I find that I have a love/hate relationship with them. Although there have been trends over the years in what style have been popular, like the teen slasher in the days of Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer, or the Japanese horror films like The Ring and The Grudge, most horror movies seem to fall into one or two categories. They are either centered more on plot and psychological scares, where the unseen is more of a threat than what you can see, and then there’s the pornography of blood that comes when a movie is based almost entirely on gore and trying to make you throw up. Personally, I’m far more of a fan of the former than the latter. Few things in life scare me conceptually, but when they do, I usually will love them forever because of it. This week’s movie, Nightbreed, can’t be described by either of those two generalizations. It tries to be different. It tries to be thought provoking. And as you can probably gather from its appearance on this site, it fails miserably.

The Plot:

Donkey: Nightbreed is an odd little film to say the least. It’s the heartwarming tale of Aaron Boone, a serial killer who wishes that he could travel to a secret land of monsters, where all his sins would be forgiven and he could live out his life slashing and maiming to his heart’s content, I guess. It never really says much about that part. He’s tailed closely in his pursuit of this dream by a girlfriend who’s apparently got the lowest standards of any female in recorded human history, and a psychiatrist who has far more nefarious motives than any of them could imagine, unless any of them stopped and took the five required seconds to notice how goddamn creepy he is. But when Aaron actually finds the land of monsters, or the Nightbreed as they refer to themselves, will he find that the society that he’s leaving behind are the real monsters? No, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not spectacular shitheads, which I guess trumps being a monster. But really, everyone in this goddamn movie deserves to be buried up to their necks in dog shit and left to rot under the hot sun, so vilify whomever you want. Like this movie as a whole, it really doesn’t matter.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: As we soon discovered, nothing can prepare you for Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. Nothing except perhaps for the clips of the movie that they show while the title scrolls across the screen. With this kind of completely unnecessary recap coming before the movie has even started, I can only hope that Clive takes this bizarre choice even further and has a two minute recap for even twenty minutes of the film. That would actually probably help for those of us that are likely to be beaten into a coma by this blunt instrument of exhaustion of a movie.

Exhibit A: Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go To Hell.

A man in the undies of a ten year old? Am I watching To Catch A Predator?

Our nightmare begins, very appropriately, with a nightmare. After dreaming of running through dark grasslands while being chased by snarling creatures in the dead of night, we are introduced to the film’s not-quite-hero, Aaron Boone, played by Craig Scheffer. That’s right, A River Runs Through It’s Craig Sheffer. I could hardly believe it myself. One could argue that Nightbreed actually earned this guy his role opposite of Brad Pitt in that film, but then I would have to insist that the role would have been equally deserved if he had won it out of a box of Count Chocula. Not that I’m inferring that he’s a bad actor, but this role is less of a vehicle to stardom than being the spokesman for NAMBLA. That being said, Boone snaps out of his rather tame dream to find himself in bed wearing tighty whities with his girlfriend, Lori, sitting over him. No wonder he’s having nightmares. If my balls were bundled up that tight, I’d probably spend an entire night dreaming that I was in the sterilizing grasp of The Testicular Cancer Anaconda. Seeing that her man has had another one of his nightmares, Lori suggests that the two of them get out of Calgary for a couple of days. I realize that most of you have probably never been to Calgary so you won’t appreciate the universal truth in that suggestion, be having been there myself, I couldn’t agree more. No matter what state your life is in, leaving Calgary couldn’t do anything up improve it. But why only leave for a couple of days? How about a couple of months? Perhaps I can interest you in a couple of decades? But barring a run from the desolate hellscape they find themselves in, she suggests that he go and see his shrink, a man named Decker.

I made Videodrome. It had James Woods in it. You're welcome.

But while Aaron journeys to that undoubtedly forgettable visit, the movie makes a quick detour into Murdertown, which I believe is a suburb of Calgary. A middle-aged couple ends up being slashed to death by a mysterious man in a mask who sneaks into their home and wreaks unholy vengeance, likely for forcing us to watch them make out at the beginning of the scene. But with that random bloodbath behind us, we finally catch up to Boone as he sits in the office of Decker, his psychiatrist played by the overrated director and exceptionally substandard actor, David Cronenberg. They discuss Boone’s recurring fantasy of returning to a place called Midian, a place where monsters go to have all their sins forgiven. Of course, the word ‘monsters’ can conjure up a lot of different imagery for people, ranging anywhere from the Wolfman to Grover, so let me clarify. Think My Pet Monster if he happened to like cutting himself while listening to Marilyn Manson and you start to get the idea. Decker assures Boone that Midian is an imaginary place like Candy Mountain or Kentucky, but murder is quite real. Unless you’re murdering fraggles, that is. Then it’s just hilarious. Decker then pulls out a set of pictures that the police brought to him. Apparently Aaron was describing these murder scenes in exact detail in previous sessions, which Decker thought was just a hallucination, but is now obviously very real. Aaron is understandably alerted – concerned, even – at the news that he’s probably a serial killer, so he asks Decker what to do. Decker hands him some unmarked pills, assuring Boone that he should take them and go confess to the police within twenty four hours.

Things don’t go according to plan, though, as we soon find Aaron wandering through the darkness of night in a haze, eventually ending up in a hospital where it’s discovered that the lithium that he thought he was taking was actually a high powered hallucinogen. Whoops. But if you’re going to sleep off a bad trip, what better place to do it than a hospital, right? Not quite. Aaron wakes up later in a bed to discover his roommate begging out their room’s window to no one in particular to take him to Midian. Well that’s an opportune coincidence, don’t you think? It turns out that this raving scab-eater whom we’ll refer to simply as Captain Hairline will be a rather pivotal character in Aaron’s shit custard of a journey. Aaron interrogates the chap, confirming that Midian is indeed a place where monsters go to take away their sins. When Aaron suggests that they go there together, Captain Hairline ends up under the false impression that Aaron has been sent to bring him there, which Aaron decides to roll with, saying that he would if only he knew where Midian was. Woudn’t you know it, it’s time once again for another amazing coincidence! Captain Hairline just happens to know exactly where it is, rambling out that the location is by Peace River. Armed with all the information that he needs to run headlong into a situation that he doesn’t really understand, Aaron tries to leave. Seeing him go, Captain Hairline comes to the conclusion that he obviously needs to prove his worth to earn his way into Midian by showing his true face. And to do this, he takes out two small blades and cuts off nearly his entire scalp in an attempt to rip his way down to that true face. Yeah, this Midian must be a great place. Sign me up. Recoiling in horror, Aaron backs off as nurses and doctors come running in. Not sure what to make of the psychopath that should, in theory, but a perfect representation of the society that he’s seeking to join, Boone turns to see Decker approaching the room and figures that it’s best to just run like hell.

What, wash this coif? Never. I'd sooner cut it all off in the most painful way you could dare me to.

And just to make this even more terrifying, this knife is infected with Hepatitis C.

Not convinced that the small sample of crazy that he’s already witnessed is quite enough proof that his plan is complete bullshit, Aaron ends up driving through the great Canadian wilderness. And to answer your question: he’s in a car at the time, not riding a yak. I know. Not what I expected either. His voyage comes to an end pretty quickly when he reaches a set of gates that he’s already seen many times in his dreams. He crosses through them to find a cemetery on the other side just as the sun begins to set. As one would naturally do after a long day of driving, Boone decides that now is an ideal time for a nap. Fuck yeah! What could possibly go wrong in the land of monsters…at night…in a cemetery? But even he couldn’t know the horrors that awaited him once the night unfolds. Smoke puffs out of a nearby vent in the ground which looks completely natural and in no way looks like someone just turned on a smoke machine to create ambience. Boone wakes to find himself face to face with the world’s most terrifying…puppy. I think it might be a pug, but I’m not sure. The terror! After making it out of that harrowing ordeal by shoo-ing the beast away, Boone wanders around and ends up finding the monsters that he was looking for. One looks like the result of Jay Leno convincing his banana mistress to get an abortion while the other looks like he could be the biggest star working in Japanese tentacle porn today. The two of them call Boone a regular human, denying his claims that deserves to be here because he’s killed people. They can smell innocence and conclude that whoever told him that he was a killer had lied. But rather than being overjoyed with the prospect of not being a brutal killer, Boone seems to pout at their proclamation. Why do I suddenly feel like I’m watching the beginning of the video for Michael Jackson’s Bad, or even more awesomely, Weird Al’s Fat? You ain’t fat, Boone. You ain’t fat! However, being tempted by what could be considered virgin flesh in more way than one, the squid monster, whom we’ll call Chuck, decides to take a bite out of Aaron’s neck. Somehow surprised at the revelation of finding that monsters are aggressive, Aaron punches them both out and starts to run like hell. As he scrambles in a blind panic through the dark graveyard, Banana Leno decides to help Aaron to reach the gate before Chuck can finish making him an evening snack.

And yet, he's not a Bob Marley fan. Surprising, I know.

Even death can't stop the onset of hay fever.

But once he’s outside, things don’t get any better for Boone. As he wanders through the field outside of the graveyard, a bunch of car headlights suddenly blind him. Decker had apparently got the whereabouts of Midian from our good friend, Captain Hairline, and helped the cops to track Aaron down. As Decker comes forward to talk him down so that he can be arrested peacefully, Boone shares the revelation that he didn’t kill anyone. Showing his true colors of being the movie’s obvious douche bag, Decker tells Boone that he believes him just before he shouts back to the cops that Aaron has a gun. Apparently short on their quota of people that they’ve group-fucked with bullets this month, the cops immediately jump on the opportunity to open fire before Aaron makes the slightest move. The scene ends with a shot of the camera rising up into the sky while focusing on Aaron’s body, letting the full weight of his death sink into our hearts, ruined only slightly by the fact that the supposed corpse starts blinking about three seconds into the shot. Other than that, it’s INTENSE.

Exhibit B: Did We Say Monsters Were Scary? We Actually Meant Lovable!

At this point we found ourselves hoping that the movie was going to wrap up and actually turn out to be some shitty episode of Tales From The Crypt that someone released on video as a practical joke rather than a full length feature film, since Boone had found his much sought after land of mutant carnies only to be betrayed and murdered by his serial killer psychiatrist, Decker. But it is at this point that the movie decides to switch gears and turn it into an old fashioned game of ‘cat and mouse and fucking moron’. And our game begins when all the major players are brought into the Calgary police station. Aaron is being examined in the morgue while Lori is interviewed by Decker and a Detective Joyce, played by Hugh Quarshie or Captain Panaka from the Star Wars prequels as I will always know him. I’m not really sure why the hell a psychiatrist would be allowed to participate in a police investigation, but hey, why not?

So theoretically, would Boone have stayed dead if the coroner had just applied some rubbing alcohol to this wound?

From this point, the tale of Aaron Boone becomes about as palatable as a tire fire. Once the coroners leave their examination of his body for a moment, the bite wound that he received on his chest from the monster known as Chuck starts to pulse with light as he slowly begins to reanimate. Once he’s not quite alive again and finding himself with a powerful craving for rancid pork sandwiches, Aaron knows that there’s only one place to go. Once he manages to get back to the cemetery known as Midian, we find him entering its underground city with our favorite psychotic more in need of a toupee than Shatner, Captain Hairline. He and Aaron approach the resident monsters while Captain Hairline insists that there’s no other place on Earth that would take them in. I would have to agree. Not so much because of the undead thing mind you, but more from the fact that in this scene Aaron has decided to wear his leather jacket with no shirt underneath. If there’s anything that will earn you the well deserved title of social outcast faster than that, I don’t know what it is.

The two of us should hit a club after this and get crazy amounts of pussy.

Take it from me: when your parents check your Halloween treats for razor blades, they're not fucking around.

After being admitted into their city, Boone gets taken into a room where a bunch of monsters are gathered under the watchful eye of their leader, a monster that we’ll call Old Man Jenkins, mostly because I can’t be bothered to remember any of these useless shitheads’ names. There is a small amount of pomp and circumstance that takes place, or at least as much as there can be when you’re a city of genetic abortions living underground, before Aaron begins the process of joining them. He’s told that everything about his old life must be left behind, which at this point seems to serve no other purpose than to remind me that we don’t know a goddamn thing about his old life other than the fact that he had shitty taste in psychiatrists. But before he’s officially allowed into the club, Aaron must be judged by their god. Or in the more literal sense, he must stand still while Old Man Jenkins puts his hand in a bowl of boiling tapioca pudding until it glows golden. Then he places his glowing mitt on Aaron’s chest, leaving a palm mark. Aaron is scalded by it for a minute until it’s proclaimed that he’s officially allowed in the clubhouse. Elated at the news, all the monsters applaud his acceptance. Wait…clapping? Really? These bad ass monsters turned into a shitty glee club awfully fast.

And while Aaron is busy trying to work his way into the Loyal Fraternity of Sideshow Floor-sweepings, his girlfriend Lori is busy trying to locate his body every since it walked out of the morgue. Apparently a man that’s only two notches above a fourth grade drop out is so hard to find in Calgary that even if he’s an undead suspected serial killer, he’s still worth holding onto the herpes. As Lori takes to the road in an attempt to find Midian herself, she stops in a small town along the way. She ends up crying in the bathroom of a hotel bar where she meets a local skank named Cheryl, whom she bonds with instantly. The two of them end up doing the only thing that you can possibly do in some small godforsaken dump in the southern Alberta other than commit suicide: they get wasted. The next morning they meet up again in the same bar to fight off their hangovers when Cheryl reveals that she met a banker from Edmonton the night before, but since she won’t be meeting him again until that evening, she would be happy to drive Lori out to the fabled land of Midian. And moments later, that’s exactly where they arrive. Lori approaches the cemetery gates alone and crosses through them while the Cheryl cranks up some country music on the radio back at the car while smoking by a tree. But as she does her best to develop the lung cancer that will end this cursed existence, her new banker boyfriend rolls up in his vehicle to greet her, only to reveal that it’s the nefarious Decker.

It really stings when he gets it in your eye, huh?

I gotta tell you, I liked this thing more before it turned into a kid.

While her skank friend is most likely coming to a brutal end outside, Lori investigates the cemetery and comes across a bizarre cat monster lying in the sun. As it seems to be writhing in pain, Lori is beckoned by a strange woman who asks her to bring the monster over to her in a tomb. You know, for a secret goddamn society, these people are pretty fucking easy to find. Lori obliges and brings the monster into the tomb where it quickly turns into a young girl. After expressing gratitude, the mystery woman assures Lori that she knows why she’s come. But just as Lori asks if Aaron’s animated corpse had managed to make its way there, Old Man Jenkins wanders up into the tomb and puts an end to the conversation, declaring that the woman has already said too much. As Lori begs for answers, the monsters all wander down a staircase at the back of the tomb. But certainly not giving up now that she’s found this group of monsters so goddamn easily, Lori follows them down the staircase only to end up the darkness. There she runs into our old monster pal, Chuck. He gives her a proper scare with his bad manners, so she flees back to the surface and races back to the car. Apparently she was prepared to face monsters, but not prepared for them to be even the slightest bit scary. Well done. As she approaches the car, she finds Cheryl the Skank has been killed. And of course, she then runs into the now infamous masked killer who is waiting for her. Rather than maintaining any kind of mystery, the figure removes his mask to reveal his true identity to her. But then Decker let’s her go for some reason, so she hauls ass right back to the cemetery that she just came running out of. Realizing that maybe that wasn’t the brightest thing he’s ever done, Decker gives chase.

Hearing these events transpire from the secret city beneath the graveyard, Aaron vows that he will not just sit back and let Lori die. Despite the protests of his new monstrous brethren, Aaron refuses to relent and eventually goes as far as to begin kicking their asses until they let him go. He races up to the tombs with his faithful companion Captain Hairline nipping at his heels, and confronts his old shrink, Decker. They subdue him rather quickly, but then Aaron and he scalpless companion begin to argue about whether or not to take Decker’s balls, giving him a great opportunity to slip away. Naturally Aaron pursues him and does so while showing off his new undead monster form. In other words, as he’s running he becomes a slightly uglier version of himself. But as Aaron runs, Captain Hairline is left behind with the unconscious form of Lori. Apparently the Captain was a goddamn rapist in his natural life, as he straddles her right before she wakes up to see him hovering over her. Like anyone with any brain function above an overcooked carrot would do, Lori screams. And even though he’s closing in on his prey, when Aaron hears Lori cry out, he is forced to let Decker get away to come back and see if she’s okay. Once he arrives she has fainted again, leaving nothing more than Captain Hairline to stand and try to convince him that he wasn’t going to hurt her. What, this erection here? That’s nothing. I was going to offer that for her to use as leverage to help her off the ground then maybe for her to hang her purse on. Once Aaron is sure that Lori is safe, he returns to face the people that he disobeyed. Old Man Jenkins proclaims that he must take the girl and go, banishing Aaron back to the world of the “naturals”.

This is for all those hypnotherapy sessions where I woke up with that salty taste in the back of my throat while you were smoking a cigarette.

Meanwhile, having managed to get away from a situation that I’m not quite sure how he’d planned on walking away alive from in the first place, Decker wanders into a run down shack that couldn’t possibly pass for a gas station, even in southern Alberta. He borrows the phone and calls back to his secretary, whom arranges for Decker to meet with the cops at the closest station. Once he hangs up the phone, he has a quick conversation with the attendant who owns this hovel, asking about Midian. The man is apparently familiar with it, but has little interest in discussing it. When Decker leaves moments later, the dude seems frustrated to hear that Decker knows about Midian as he locks the front door. But of course just then he notices his back door is still open. As he goes to close it, Decker appears in his mask and cuts the dude’s hand off, before interrogating the dude about Midian and all its monsters, asking if they can die and how. It turns out that you can get the job done with bullets, fire, or various other things, depending on what type of monster it is. Before likely killing this random dude, possibly molesting his shoes, and leaving the scene, Decker declares that he’s here to destroy Aaron and the Nightbreed. It’s his destiny. If my life plan involved anything that astoundingly shitacular, I’d probably jump off the closest bridge.

Howdy, stranger. Welcome to the winner of Southern Alberta's Most Successful Business 1995!

Well I don't think I'll be touching any KFC for about a year...

Back at the aforementioned Midian, Lori wakes up in a casket in a room of bones. Wow. We couldn’t have picked a more dramatic place to leave her sleeping, could we? The strange woman and her daughter are there, and once Lori comes to, they reveal that she’s below the cemetery with the Nightbreed, a group of shapeshifters. The woman then complains that the world calls them monsters, but they do things like fly and turn into wolves and fog, all of which are things that all normal people would envy. To make more of a point than this random whining, the little girl then touches Lori and transfers a series of images into her mind, showing her a holocaust of freaks that is as gruesome as it is retarded. Lori snaps back out of the vision in tears, wanting to go see Aaron down in the Tabernacle, wherever the hell that is. The woman assures her that Lori can’t do that, saying that her entry is forbidden. Undaunted, Lori says, “we’ll see about that”. No sweetheart, I’m pretty sure it is. You can stomp your way down there, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to stop them from making you face the consequences. That’s as stupid as saying, “A table saw will sever my penis if I try to have sex with it? We’ll just see about that…”. But despite her stubbornness being matched only by her glaring stupidity, Lori eventually begins to make her way down to see Aaron. On her journey through the underground city, she comes across a veritable freak show of monsters, the greatest of which is a thing that looks like a roasted chicken with a dude’s head in it’s stomach. What the fuck is that exactly, other than an image that will ruin many Christmas dinners for years to come? If these things are shapeshifters, does that mean that thing actually chose that shape? Eventually Lori comes across our good friend, the monster known as Chuck and his squid head of glory. He offers to make her one of the family, which I think he’s about to suggest can be accomplished through a series of elaborate blowjobs, before she runs away in horror. While this is going on, we see that Aaron has wandered into a room with some massive, fucking weird statue. What it is or what that means I have no idea, and the scene ends there.

Funny...I pegged them to be Catholics, myself.

As we come back to the situation a short while later, Lori’s journey continues as she stumbles into a room where Captain Hairline is dancing with a corpse. He tells her how Boone has now gone down to see the Beserkers, whatever the hell those are, warning her not to follow. Seeing as how good she is at listening, however, Lori continues on anyways. Eventually she comes to a point where a monster grabs her through a wall and pins her, where she would have likely met her end had another monster not come to her aid. She is eventually led down to see Aaron, who is still standing in the shadow of the massive statue. With that proper reunion, Aaron eventually leads her back up closer to the surface under the watchful eyes of the rest of the city. Once they finally make it back above ground, Lori begs Aaron to come with her back to the real world. Don’t even worry about that whole undead thing. I’m pretty sure that most of the night shift at Wal-Mart is comprised of zombies to save on overtime costs. Eventually, despite having finally made it to the city that he’s wanted to be in for so long and managing to be accepted into their ranks, Aaron agrees and the two of them leave the graveyard together.

Exhibit C: Sweet and Sour Jesus, Just Let It End.

Once he’s finished making love to the gas station attendant’s entire shoe collection, Decker finally arrives at the nearest police station where he meets up with Detective Joyce from the Calgary police and a local cop named Captain Eigerman. Decker announces to them both that Boone is still alive, hanging out in the cemetery that comprises Midian. Captain Eigerman, seeming rather unimpressed, says that he doesn’t need any of their help and can bring Boone in alone.

Behold, my terrible monster form which consists of shitty facial tattoos and glowing eyes! Horrifying!

The movie now switches over to a hotel where things get fairly bizarre. A random woman working the front desk yells for some dude named Arnie, before dropping something on the floor. She bends down to get it and when she comes back up to her feet, she finds what we can assume is Arnie’s head sitting on the counter. As she screams, Decker rises up behind her and stabs her. That seemed rather elaborate just to take out to random people working at a hotel, and there’s not a single thing about their death that seems to enable the rest of the scene. Elsewhere in that hotel, Aaron and his girlfriend go step into their room to make some amature pornography while Decker calls the cops from a phone outside. As Lori and Aaron look around their room to make sure that only their cameras will be capturing their freaky Steaming Cleveland session, she notices a strange hole in the wall that she peeks through to the next room. Something seems amiss, so Aaron goes into the next room to investigate, finding a group of brutally murdered hunters strewn about. He starts to transform into his monster form just as a SWAT team that Decker called for arrives. But then Aaron then suddenly takes a long lick at some blood before converting back to normal form just as the SWAT team breaks in. I guess steamingclevelands.com will have to wait a while longer for that new video.

I smell a buddy cop film...

Now that he’s been taken into custody, Aaron is hauled off to the local jail where Captain Eigerman gives him an exceptionally unimpressive beating that would likely do little more than inconvenience anyone other than an eight year old girl. It’s an exceptionally poor beating, and this is coming from someone who has seen A LOT of shitty fight scenes. Once Boone is left in his cell, Decker meets with the others back in the office where he declares that he’s going back out to Midian to rid it of the rest of the monsters. No one seems even remotely curious as to why a fucking psychiatrist is this involved with the entire thing, but instead Detective Joyce agrees, suggesting to Captain Eigerman that they go back out there. The Captain doesn’t argue, assigning a small group of men to head back out with Joyce. Meanwhile a doctor examines Boone and discovers that his pulse is as non-existent as his character development. And while I’m sure that’s a common ailment among the undead, I’m not really sure how he manages to have a rosy complexion without blood flow. Upon receiving the news, Captain Eigerman goes back into his office and starts screaming at Decker, asking him what the hell is going on. And just to add to the random quagmire that we find ourselves bogged in, a priest in the next cell tells Boone tells him that they’ll find a way to kill him, that he’s an abomination, and that he must die.While I don’t necessarily disagree with you, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?

To take a break from this insanity and instead plunge into complete madness, we catch up to the group of cops that arrive at the Midian graveyard with Detective Joyce. They bust into a tomb and find one of the monsters, whom again is not particularly well hidden. They pull him out into the light, which causes him to turn to ash as the cops begin to beat him for no reason. His skin begins to bubble and then, just to kick the awesomeness up a few notches for no reason whatsoever, he FUCKING EXPLODES, much like the Dr Pepper that erupts from my mouth when that bullshit happens. Detective Joyce somehow figures it was the sun who did managed to kill this random monster. Passing out high fives over the job well done, moments later the cops reemerge from the cemetery to discover that their car has been torched. This was apparently the work of Captain Hairline and the old monster woman, who hastily speed into town in a car of their own. I’m not really sure what use a car is to a secret, subterranean society of monsters, but we’ll just go with it. Back at the police station, Captain Eigerman gets a call from his men about the torched car and grabs the priest out of the jail cell next to Boone, telling him that he’s needed.

Exhibit D: No, Seriously…End This. Please.

As the movie transitions to the town outside of the police station, suddenly we see that the whole town is forming a pose, arming themselves with a massive artillery. Apparently Clive Barker has never actually been to Canada. There aren’t that many guns in the entire country, let alone that town. As the ramble heads off to lynch them so freaks, Captain Hairline, the old woman, and Lori break into the jail to spring Aaron. They dispose of the guards rather quickly, just before Lori gets into Aaron’s cell and they start making out. Not just sharing a tender kiss, but seriously making out. As much as I appreciate that attempt at making me throw up, there’s more important shit going on right now, people. Might want to save that for later when she can actually find out that a lack of a heartbeat and zero blood flow should mean that Aaron is incapable of rising to the occasion, if you know what I mean.

Seriously, how hard is it to get laid in Calgary that this is your best option?

Once the pose makes its way out to Midian, they begin to spread gasoline and lay fuses. While all this is going on, Detective Joyce happens to peek into Decker’s bag and find the mask of the serial killer. But before he can alert anyone with his discovery, Decker quietly kills him in all the commotion. The pose finally sets off their grand explosion, which in turn begins to wreak havoc on the city below, which turns out to be more distasterous than anyone could imagine. Suddenly the ground begins to open, exposing the city to the surface. As monsters scramble everywhere to avoid a flaming death, Old Man Jenkins implores his panicked horde to stay, arguing that this is their home. Just then Aaron rushes in and says no, it’s time for them all to fight. And as if to queue some kind of bloody Benny Hill sketch, at this point things go completely nuts. While all kinds of shit is exploding and collapsing around them, the pose of cops and anal raping rednecks begins to shoot and kill monsters with wild abandon as all kinds of random fights errupt. There’s even a cop with a goddamn flame thrower running around. A flamethrower? Are you kidding me? What fucking police force has a goddamn flamethrower? Overcome by the wholesale slaughter, the priest tries to beg Captain Eigerman to stop the madness. Instead Eigerman almost kills the priest.

Canada's answer to crowd control.

As his people are being killed in mass numbers, Boone makes his way downstairs to find Old Man Jenkins again. Boone pleads for him to release the beserkers, which OMJ finally agrees to after conceding that his people aren’t warriors. What? Saying that they aren’t evil creatures who are out to terrorize the world is one thing, but don’t tell me these assholes can’t fight. This isn’t a goddamn preschool their running. And just to throw in another branch on this tree of bullshit, we see the priest make his way downstairs as well. where he gets the same bowl of boiling tapioca that Boone faced earlier in the film splashed onto his face, mutating him as he screams in agony. But as we turn away from the random character that we’ve only known for ten minutes and know nothing about, we turn back to Old Man Jenkins as he gets shot just before he can release the beserkers. But all is not lost as Aaron arrives to finish the job. As was suggested would be the case. The beserkers rush out and the tide of the battle begins to change. Now that they’re faced with real monsters, the humans begin to flee, much to the chagrin of Captain Eigerman, who starts to call them all cowards before trying to shoot his own men with an empty gun. As his tirade continues with him swearing that he’ll kill them all while demanding someone hand him a gun, the scene ends with one last punch to the balls as some random dude shoots a fucking rocket launcher at the attacking beserkers. Wow.

To lead my people in my holy name, you must stay celibate. Ha, just kidding! That would be retarded!

Back underneath all the fighting, Chuck takes Lori into a room with a bunch of shitty paintings on a wall, saying the the prophecy is true. Apparently Boone was supposed to be their savior, but instead Chuck insists that he’s their destroyer. It’s a little later for pathetic attempts at character development now, don’t you think? But while that’s happening, Decker and Boone find one another and begin their ultimate showdown on a rickety rope bridge, naturally. This might seem dramatic until you take even two seconds to remember that Boone is already dead, so by all means of logic this should be shortest fight on record. It’s not like Decker can kill him, which is proven at the end of the fight when Boone takes a machete through the chest without being so much as dropped to his knees. Seeing his opportunity to kill his opponent and share an awkward moment, Aaron grabs Decker and hugs him close, impaling Decker on the knife in his chest. Once the battle is over, Lori runs up and pulls the knife out for Boone, just as something calls his name. Lori asks him not to go, but Aaron says that he must as he’s responsible for all of this. He goes back down to the big fucking statue that he found earlier in the movie to find people waiting there. As he walks up to it, it comes alive and holds him, telling him that he’s destroyed their refuge, but that was inevitable. Boone must now build the monsters a new home to make up for the one he destroyed. The voice then says the Boone must find him, heal him, save him from his enemies before declaring that he’s no longer Boone, but is now called Cabal. Boone, Cabal, or Fuckwad – whichever you prefer to call him – is then dropped with the phrase echoing in his head, telling him to save the statue from his enemies. With that finished, the remaining monsters all leave as the place continues to explode and collapse. I understand the initial explosions, but what’s causing all these goddamn fires? Did they have a goddamn oil refinery under that cemetery? But finally, once the monsters have gotten a safe distance away, the whole thing goes up in one massive explosion.

This is my reaction when I think of a possible sequel too.

The movie ends with all the surviving Nightbreed in a barn somewhere in the night. Before leaving for destinations unknown, Cabal asks Captain Hairline how he’ll find him again. The Captain assures him that Cabal will find him, and that he’ll need him. I’m not really sure what for, other than as a grim reminder to shampoo and condition his hair on a regular basis, but I’m beyond asking questions at this point. But before the final curtain drops, the movie takes us back to the burning rubble of Midian where we find the deformed priest talking to the body of Decker. He says that he saw the monster god and that it burned him. Now he wants to burn it back. The priest reaches in and puts some of that same boiling tapioca into Decker’s body which, after a breif moment, causes him to reanimate. And with his scream, the movie ends. WHAT?

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie is complete ass. I’ve had fever induced nightmares of being caught stealing a horde of pirate’s gold away from my high school gym teacher while he does push ups in a tub of coleslaw that make more goddamn sense than this movie. I’ve read different sites and message boards on the net, so I realize that there’s a large subsection of people out there that really like this film, but for the life of me, I can’t understand why. I have to assume that the book is much better than the movie, which I’ll grant is usually the case. But the movie misses the mark completely. I understand the whole “the monsters are actually good and it’s people that are really the douche bags” idea, but it’s just done so poorly here. If you’re going to try to make the monsters the sympathetic characters, then step one is to actually make them sympathetic. Not a single ‘monster’ in this movie does anything more heart warming than not killing someone, and if that’s the bar that you set for decency, then I’m goddamn Mother Theresa. No one shows this better than our good friend Captain Hairline. He’s a man so psychotic that he cuts off his own scalp at the beginning of the movie in an attempt to rip his entire face off, and once he’s established as a ‘good guy’, he instead does shit like dancing with a corpse to show that he’s not actually any different than we had thought. Yeah, he’s a regular Edward Scissorhands. Granted the humans in this movie are bigger fucksticks than the monsters, but that doesn’t exactly make anyone on either side endearing. It just means that a bunch of assholes that I don’t care about are killing each other. And as much as I could say that this movie might have been a good concept that was simply executed poorly, that wouldn’t be a problem if it just held to most basic quality of any movie and was actually entertaining. But goddamn it, this movie is boring. Watching it again just to write this review was goddamn painful. Not TMNT III painful, but painful nonetheless. Therefore I’ve got no choice but to give this movie half a scalpless wonder out of five complete wastes of my time.

What We Learned:

Donkey: If you think something is under your bed when you hear that bump in the night, fear not. Chances are that even though it’s likely some asshole who was willing to face the pain of cutting his own face off to gain access to a secret society of monsters, he’ll cry and run if there’s a hillbilly nearby.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: our most ambitious undertaking to date as we pit our throwing star skills against all five iterations of THE AMERICAN NINJA QUINTILOGY.

Back To The Main Page.

This movie is so goddamn lazy that their tagline is the fucking title with two words on the front.

Donkey: There are certain senses that we just can’t explain. One of them is the very basis of this site: the sense of humor. Although we can share the moments that resulted in Diet Vanilla Cherry Pepsi Jazz spit takes and tell you why they caused intestinal rupturing laughter and a mild case of Jazz Hands, we can’t actually make you find it funny. You’ll either join us in seeing the hilarity in two grown men practicing their illegal street racing techniques in go-karts or you won’t. Similar to this is the sense of fear. We all have things that fill us with dread for reasons that we can’t fully explain and others can’t understand. I’m not entirely sure why clowns, ventriloquists’ dummies, and Bronson Pinchot make me want to curl up into the fetal position and cry for Captain N to come save me, but they do. If you’re one of those few iron clad souls who doesn’t happen to share my dread, then those particular things will come across as pedestrian at best or flat out tedious at worst. Enter Evil Behind You.

As best I can guess, this movie tries to scare you. The problem is that if you don’t find shitty computer generated character models or intense boredom scary, you’re in for little more than a full out assault on your ability to maintain consciousness. So barring a deep phobia of refreshing naps, this movie will completely miss the mark. And while a movie failing to scare its audience is certainly not uncommon, it’s how badly this movie fails in every way imaginable that makes it truly remarkable.

The Plot:

Donkey: There are a lot of things you could accuse Evil Behind You of having, but I’m not sure that a plot is one of them. The entire film takes place primarily in two non-descript rooms, detailing the droning exploits of four idiots with random and completely unnecessary flashbacks thrown in for good measure. The entire experience of watching this movie can be summed up by imagining two people screaming, “There’s something behind you!” “No there isn’t, you asshole! Oh wait, maybe there is! My bad!”

That’s it. Seriously, that’s the plot. Sure there’s something about a serum, a doctor being held by terrorists, and an alternate dimension or some shit like that, but that’s all just filler which couldn’t have less of a point if it was replaced by footage of the director feeding his fish while singing More Than A Feeling.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

You see this brain, kids? You won't be needing this for a couple of hours.

Donkey: If nothing else – and trust me, there will be absolutely nothing else – you can applaud the producers of Evil Behind You for knowing what an audience wants. This is why the adventure that they’ve laid out before us this week begins with what all the kids are clamoring for…an educational video! It’s supposed to have been created by a professor that went missing soon after it was made in the 1950’s, documenting his discovery of an alternate dimension operating within ours. That being said, asking Evil Behind You to do something as simple as fabricating a shitty video from the 50’s is clearly on par with asking it to find a cure for cancer while wrestling a rabid tiger to the ground, as this particular one looks like it was filmed about three weeks ago. Regardless, the doctor blathers on about the existence of the other dimension, saying that its beings are aware of us even though we’re not aware of them. And to preemptively negate any of the infinite number of accusations that he’s fucking insane, the doctor declares that this is reality even if we can’t see it, giving a not entirely relevant example of ice, water, and steam being the same thing existing in three different states. And just to give some real scientific meat to his rad hypothesis, he starts to ask us questions about things that we’ve all experienced, but have never thought much about due to the fact that we’re not terminally shitheaded. “Have you ever sensed an eerie presence? Have you ever turned when you heard a noise and found nothing was there? Have you ever seen something out the corner of your eye, only to discover it’s nothing?” Oh wait, even more awesomely, have you ever started drawing a picture of He-Man fearlessly riding Battle Cat into an army of mermen led by a cyborg Skeletor engulfed in flames, only to black out and wake up lying on a picture of Father O’Shea touching your bathing suit area? Even though the simplest of brains would consider those situations to be meaningless, the doctor gives you another theory: aliens, bitch. And just to prove that he and his nutjob theory aren’t fucking around, he reveals that he’s injected himself with a serum that should allow him to move between dimensions. The film then ends soon after, as he appears to become nearly as agitated as I’m quickly becoming with watching this movie.

Oh man...am I waking up in an industrial room after a drunken night of lesbian love AGAIN?

As that ass wad of a prologue fades away while leaving the taste of undigested peanuts in our mouths, the movie can now begin. The first scene opens in one of the two rooms that comprise the entire set of this film, which we will henceforth very cleverly refer to as The Room. In it, two women, Lisa and Deborah, regain consciousness only to discover that they don’t know where they are or how long they’ve been there, wondering aloud if they’ve been drugged. Unless they’re raging alcoholics who black out on a regular basis, I’d say that’s a safe bet. But then, they didn’t make that assumption right away themselves, so I guess that says a lot about their character. They stand up and take a remarkably long time to notice that David and Tony, their respective significant others, are lying handcuffed in hospital beds right in front of them. Upon further investigation, they discover that the men have had some kind of surgery done on them, or their one ear at least, and they’re all locked in The Room with nothing but a two way mirror. So the movie is kind of like Saw, only we’ve replaced Leigh Wannell with a girl who looks like she got cast solely for how close a bra can push her boobs to her chin while Cary Elwes is replaced by three other people who will bring new meaning to the phrase “Oh my God, shut the fuck up or I’ll reach through this screen and beat you to death with your own glaring lack of talent”.

She totally robbed the cradle. Of course, she was old enough to still be in one at the time, but that's not important.

As her husband Tony begins to wake, Deborah formally introduces the two of them. In response, Lisa introduces herself and her still unconscious boyfriend David. Then to make unnecessary and pointless small talk, Lisa asks if Tony is Deborah’s husband, which Debbie confirms before dickishly proclaiming that yes, there is an age difference between them. Apparently Tony is supposed to be significantly younger than Debbie, but the movie didn’t see fit to cast people far enough apart in age to possibly see that. It’s not that these two roles had to be played by Betty White and Macaulay Culkin, but come on. You can do a little better than people who look like they’re separated by a two year age gap at best. With the introductions out of the way and not so much as a single line to set up any kind of transition, it’s time for…

Unnecessary Flashback Number 1: The movie suddenly whitewashes to a scene where Lisa is sitting on a living room couch while her sister screams on a phone at what is either her boyfriend or her favorite john. They argue over what one has to imagine is either anal sex or a Dirty Sanchez, as she yells, “I just don’t like it when you do that” and “I’m not the prude, you’re the pervert”. After she begs the dude/possible talking horse not to leave her and offers to go to counseling with him, he finally hangs up on her. With that, her sister’s rage boils over to a comically ridiculous level as she turns to Lisa and screams that Lisa was never there when she needed her. She might be trying to make up for it now, but it’s too late. The sister tries unsuccessfully to call the dude/imaginary friend back, then throws her cell and screams, “I wish I was dead!” Lisa goes to pick up the phone and say a little prayer for her sister, asking that the Sweet Chili Jesus not make her sister pay because of her. At this point when we first watched this movie, we had no idea what the fuck was going on and were not prepared for the laughter required to make it through what happened next. Apparently Jesus wanted to respond to Lisa’s request for mercy with a big old fuck you, as suddenly we hear a gunshot and the camera switches over to a pair of feet hanging out a doorway, implying that the sister was lying dead after she just made her own wish come true instead. What? Suicide? Over an argument with your boyfriend?

She took the midnight train going anywhere...YEAH!

As we return from that arbitrary vision of the past and arrive once again in The Room, Tony begins what will essentially be an hour long freak out. He becomes inexplicably cold and swears that there’s someone in the room, first behind him, then at the end of the bed, then in the sheets with him. As Debbie struggles to calm him and show him that no one is there, Lisa starts to freak out herself and tries to wake up her boyfriend, David, for comfort. And with that, it’s time for…

I add nothing to this movie.

Unnecessary Flashback Number 2: The movie transitions to a scene where some dude tells David that he has to go back and deal with the past, not bury it. And that’s it. That’s fucking it. Was that a shrink? A pastor? A concerned drifter that’s camping out on his couch? The movie doesn’t explain it, because like everything else in this film, it really doesn’t matter.

As David wakes up to find himself, his girlfriend, and two assholes in The Room, Tony suddenly feels better without reason. Lisa and Debbie argue about whether or not the fifth person in the room, a guy that they’ve discovered over on another bed on the other side of Tony, is infected before finally noticing that there is yet another guy in the room, lying in a bed just to the left of David. After arguing about whether or not the two new dudes are infected with God knows what, thy check both the mystery dudes’ conditions. As Lisa tentatively approaches the guy in the bed, he moves slightly, the girls both scream in unison, and it suddenly cuts to…

Unnecessary Flashback Number 3: Now we visit two girls late at night in their bedroom with Uncle Joe, the uncle that apparently likes to express his love with his penis. As he tells one girl that she looks pretty tonight in her pretty pajamas, the other girl turns away. And that’s where the scene, thankfully, ends. I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be Lisa and her sister, but they didn’t once refer to each other by name, so far all I know, that could be completely unrelated to this movie.

As we unfortunately return to The Room and its four inhabitants, the movie decides that it’s time to spice things up, since this whole fucking ordeal has gotten quite old by this point. And nothing spices up a situation like blatantly unmotivated conflict! Deborah literally hits a mental switch, going from ‘Reasonable Human Being’ to ‘Psychotic Thunder Twat’, calling Lisa both stupid and subservient within a five minutes span. And sure, that creates some awkward tension, but it’s not quite to the point of being retarded yet. Let’s kick it up a notch further. While this is going on, Tony starts freezing again and tells them to take the blanket off one of the two random dudes and give it to him. Rather than help her husband in any way, Debbie waits for Lisa to comply and bring the blanket to Tony instead. As she tucks it in around him, Tony shows all the class that I’d expect out of someone named Tony and hits on her by saying he’s getting warmer now while staring at Lisa’s tits. He gets slapped by Debbie, of course, and threatened by David. But before they can really stop to think about how much of a fucking moron he is, Tony changes the subject by sitting straight up in bed and once again saying that there’s something in there. After dismissing him as the moron that he is, David suddenly feels the same thing, also claiming that there’s something behind him. So the two of them alternate having hissy fits for the next couple of minutes, with both men scream that someone’s in the room only to calm down again and proclaim that the mysterious presence has gone away moments later. And just in case their constant screaming wasn’t bad enough, Debbie continuously screams back at her husband that there is no one there. Listening to a goddamn car alarm going off is less infuriating than this garbage.

Hahahahaha...BOOBIES! Yay!

Your problem is that this top doesn't match your complexion, Silly Billy.

Just as this movie is getting too goddamn tiresome to even write about anymore, we’re introduced to a pointless crew of supporting cast members. A group of Middle Eastern terrorists stride into The Room, led by a white doctor who examines Tony to try to stop all the goddamn yelling while muttering to himself that it’s not supposed to be like this. Once the group eventually begins to shuffle out again, David demands to know why the doctor is helping them. The doctor says that he has no choice as he’s ushered away in handcuffs at the command of an exaggeratedly evil Middle Eastern voice that shouts over an intercom. David calls bullshit, exclaiming that there’s always a choice. Yeah, that’s pretty easy to say when you’re not on the business end of an assault rifle, tough guy. Hey, you know what we haven’t had in a while? Yep, you guessed right. Time for…

Unnecessary Flashback Number 4: This time we see Lisa sitting by a pool with David, telling him that it was her fault that her sister was molested as a kid by their uncle. She should have told someone. Bringing all the untalented sympathy that he can to the scene, David says that no one should have to go through that, that Lisa has to stop blaming herself. Lisa responds to his palpable lack of acting abilities with all the emotion of a chunk of petrified turd, saying that her sister would still be alive if it wasn’t for her. David assures her that if she wants to blames someone, she should blame Uncle Joe instead of herself. Lisa shakes her head, saying that she doesn’t blame Joe because he was sick…she blames God because he could have stopped it, but he didn’t. Wow. I didn’t realize that she was seven years old. Santa Clause didn’t stop her either, you know. Maybe you should spread some hate his way. And I’m pretty sure that it’s always good to blame Gary Busey for pretty much anything, so you might as well add him to the list. But that little nugget of brilliance is where the scene ends.

Fuck, this movie is going nowhere. Hey, you two...time to get nearly naked for no reason.

As we come back to The Room, the four idiots plead to the mirror to let them go. A few seconds later the scene transitions to the movie’s only other set, a room that’s on the other side of that mirror. We’ll refer to this room as The Lab since they’re doing some apparently scientific things in it. The doctor argues with the terrorists that are holding them all captive that he can’t do his work while he’s shackled up. So who are these terrorists, and where the hell did they come from? What is it that they’re after? Are they trying to find a way to mine plutonium out of captive stupidity? Or are they using the doctor to come up with a new formula for Five Alarm Chili so that they can travel from county fair to county fair, winning chili cook-offs for the glory of Allah? I have no idea, but there is one thing I do know: I could go for some chili right about now.

This is either a fierce submission hold or she's holding back Debbie's arm so she doesn't puke on it.

Back to in The Room, tensions continue to run high purely for the sake of having some kind of dialogue rather than having all the characters stare blankly at one another. Debbie and Tony argue about how it’s his fault that they’re in this mess, Debbie tells Lisa that she’s dressed like a whore, and Lisa calls Debbie a cradle robber. The whole thing comes to a ridiculous end when Lisa turns to face David at his request, only for Debbie to grab her hair, yelling that Lisa should never turn her back to her. With reaction speed as fast as you’d expect from a senior citizen taking their first self defense class at the old folks’ home, Lisa puts Debbie in an arm bar only to immediately apologizes for doing so, to which Debbie says that she should be sorry. Seriously, I just want to repeatedly try to put my head through a brick wall right about now. What is the goddamn point of all of this? Lisa finally turns back to David, who tells her that it’s his fault that they’re there, that he had an alternate motive for bringing her wherever the hell it is they were going. Oh shit. You know what this means. Time for…

Unnecessary Flashback Number 5: David shows up at someone’s door, which is answered by a young couple that we’ve never seen before and that the movie doesn’t bother to introduce. David says that he didn’t come hurt anyone and the scene ends. Once again that was as short at fifteen seconds long as it was pointless. Seriously, at this point watching this movie is more frustrating than being tea bagged by some screeching ten year old Halo player online.

In the name of Allah, the one true prophet, I will now rock the mic.

As our waning attention turns right back to The Room and I begin to weep uncontrollably, Tony lurches out of bed saying that someone’s there again, prompting David to agree and for Debbie to tell him to shut the fuck up. The scene then cuts to the doctor and the terrorists who are watching from The Lab, where the doctor says that something’s going wrong, that his equipment is showing that there’s too much brain activity. Buddy, if there’s one thing that is not involved in this goddamn movie, it’s brain activity. The doctor concurs with the two screaming assholes on the beds, saying there must be something else is going on in that room. As the four balls of cock snot turn to the mirror and demand to know what they did to deserve this, the doctor explains to the terrorists that all this mayhem won’t allow them to get the results they want from the serum. The terrorist leader, whom some amazingly fucking clever screenwriter named Abdul, gets on the intercom and tells the four shitheads to calm down, that their freaking out is going to jeopardize the test. When Lisa shouts back that they don’t care about the test, he says they had better, because they’re going to just keep going until someone gets it right.

Ah yes, the fatal chair-to-the-knee attack. Take that, Rowdy Roddy Piper!

As the four douche troughs try to compose themselves, Tony demands to know if David feels the same presence in the room that he does. David agrees, telling Lisa to get behind him. Before she can comply, the body of the dude who had been passed out/dead on the floor this whole time sits up and starts growling, snapping his handcuffs before jumping on Tony and proceeding to begin kicking his ass. As Debbie once again proves her undying love by doing absolutely nothing, Lisa comes to Tony’s aid by beating the random assailant to death with a metal chair with all the viciousness of teenage boys reenacting a shitty WWE match. Once she’s finished, David tries to comfort Lisa out of her murderous rampage while she declares that they’re not lab rats and pulls the electrodes off David’s head. Back in The Lab, the doctor says that he can’t tell what’s going on if he doesn’t have the equipment plugged into the subjects. Abdul concedes the point, so the doctor gets on the intercom and tries to calm them down, explaining to the four dildos that the two men have been infected with a new strain of bacterial meningitis that would normally destroy their brain in 24 hours. They need the equipment hooked up properly in order to survive. And of course, now that there’s a moment that could only be described as totally fucking unrelated, the movie cuts to…

Unnecessary Flashback Number 6: It’s time to ride along in vague disinterest as Lisa visits her dead sister’s grave to clear her conscience. After once again professing that it’s her fault, that she should have found a way to stop Uncle Joe, Lisa says that she can’t hold on any longer. She explains to the grave stone that she’s got a new guy in her pointless life now and she can’t keep pulling away from him, so she’s come to ask her sister what she would want for her. After a moment of silence, Lisa shakes her head and says that she didn’t think God would let her sister answer. You know, I think when you stop and consider that she was screaming about how everything was your fault just before she blew her own fucking head off, your sister has pretty much already shared her thoughts on the subject.

Once that bullshit is done, the scene cuts back to The Lab with such terrible editing that they might as well have cut out and returned right in mid sentence as the doctor explains that the serum they injected the men with should cure them. He then saunters into The Room to connect the equipment back up to David where he shares a few moments of aimless dialogue with the four thespian disgraces before heading back into The Lab. Once he leaves, the tired routine of Tony and David sensing a presence while Debbie tries to shout the idiocy out of them begins anew. All the while they are being monitored back in The Lab where the doctor soon discovers that the hostile bacteria that they were injected with is dead and their brain cells are regenerating. This delights the terrorists, as that apparently means they have a vaccine that they can use on themselves for the bacteria should they decide to unleash it, provided that they don’t mind going batshit crazy when they take it. Being reminded of their intentions, even though we have no goddamn idea what the are, the doctor begins to protest, only to have them ensure his continued cooperation by reminding that they’re holding his son hostage in another location. Damn those evil non-Christian, non-white stereotypes!

They continue to try to find ways to fill out the movie with artificial tension, this time with the two girls arguing over whether or not to preemptively kill the other random dude in the gurney before he wakes up and possibly attempts to kill them. But before that issue is given the proper debate that it deserves, David decides that now’s finally the time to let Lisa in on his dark secret. He tells Lisa that the real reason they came wherever the hell they are is because he needed to see Jenny. What? Who? Apparently not nearly as confused by this fucking curveball as we are, Lisa reminds David that he had said at some point in the past that he didn’t love Jenny anymore. He says that he thought he didn’t, but he had to see to be sure. I think you know what’s coming…

So, now that the air's clear between us all...want to get drunk and make some bad decisions?

Unnecessary Flashback Number 7: David sits down in the home of Jenny and his old best friend, whom ran away together right before Jenny and David were to be married. Confronting them face to face over the ocean of pain that they have caused them, David makes a horrible production of fake sniffing in a poor attempt to make it look like he’s crying. Either that or he’s allergic to his own bullshit. David opens up and reveals to the two traitors that they hurt him so much that now he can’t trust someone that he loves because of them. In response, the two day players say that they never meant to hurt him, they just love each other so much that their passion couldn’t be denied. The three of them ask for each other’s forgiveness, clearly only moments before they’re about to whip out a guitar and sing Kumbaya.

With that shallow yet tender moment of forgiveness coming to a close, our focus returns to The Room where Debbie heckles David’s story, saying that he’s obviously fucking around on Lisa. David tries to tell Lisa more, likely how they had a freaky three way lubefest soon after the end of that story, but he’s once again interrupted as Tony lurches out of bed. And since this goddamn routine never gets old, we go ahead and watch as he and David feel a presence while Debbie tells him that there’s nothing there and to just shut the hell up. But just to change things up a little, Tony lurches forward again, declaring that water MUST kill it. Well obviously. Who wouldn’t immediately think that ordinary tap water would kill an evil, invisible presence? He retrieves a cup of water from the small table beside his bed and throws it at nothing. As no one could have possibly imagined, nothing happens. Clearly exasperated at lack of success with this single thing that he tried doing, Tony flops back down and declares that nothing will work.

Wait, I know how to make them go away...Hey phantom, can you spare a quarter?

No seriously, I'm crying.

Meanwhile, back in The Lab, the terrorists watch the four ass warts with mild interest, finding their acts of insanity rather entertaining. The doctor then begins to beg to talk to his captive son for a moment, just to verify that he’s still alive, and Abdul decides to oblige him. Once Abdul makes the call and hands him the cell phone, the doctor does an exceptionally poor job at pretending to sob while he has a brief conversation with his son, which ends with him reassuring that the boy’s mother can’t come to the phone, but that she loves him very much. And just in case you’re wondering what he’s talking about, which we are all very clearly NOT, let’s bring on…

Unnecessary Flashback Number 8: To really hammer home the obvious, both that this movie is far more awful than it is subtle and that it has no budget, it then flashes back to a scene in The Lab where the doctor and his wife are struggling with the terrorists, just before they shoot her dead in front of him. THANK YOU, Evil Behind You, for spelling that out for me. I thought the doctor meant that his wife couldn’t come to the phone because she was busy on another line, talking to Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends. Don’t I look quite the fool now?

If you do not help us, Rahim and Ackbar here will pleasure your wife in ways you will never live up to.

Things continue to escalate back in The Room. Tony and David agree that there are more of them now. Not to be outdone, Debbie steps up her shitty efforts and yells even more for them to shut the hell up with some of the worst acting we’ve ever seen. The story finally starts to progress to the point where we can see an end coming, however, as moments later Tony has somehow gained the ability to touch the phantoms, even managing to kick one off the edge of his bed. But just as it looks like he might be put his two weeks of karate lessons from the local community center to good use and kick some serious invisible ass, Tony senses one of the creatures behind him, which decides that now’s finally a good time to bite him on the neck. After some exceptionally unconvincing thrashing about, our beloved Tony dies. But within seconds, just before we could pause the movie and finalize our plans to hold a small impromptu funeral service for our beloved ingrown scrotum hair, Tony regenerates in the same way that the random dude did earlier in the movie, breaking his shackles and getting out of bed to go on a murderous rampage. He charges Debbie first and using the power of bad special effects, he strangles her to death. Well, one assumes that he does since they show her feet just off the ground and kicking a little, but never actually show him holding her up by the throat. Once she dies to a round of our cheers, Tony moves on to attack David. But just as he’s climbing onto the bed, two terrorists come in and shoot him. Game over, right? Well he still manages to turn and kick their ass, but finally dies shortly thereafter.

Before Lisa and David have so much as a moment to celebrate the fact that their roommates have finally been put out of their misery, the one remaining random dude in the room suddenly turns zombie as well, rising up from the bed next to him to attack David. Wait, what the fuck took this dude so long? He’s has been lying there for well over an hour now, whereas Tony got a hankering for some brain-eating within two minutes of biting the big one. Regardless, in response to the new assault, David puts his legs up around the guy’s throat and executes what has to be one of the most pathetic attacks recorded on film, making a lazy twisting motion that I guess is supposed to be him breaking the guys neck. The nameless extra falls to the floor for a moment, seemingly dead from that attack that even a newborn kitten would call totally pussy, before he springs back up a moment later. As the random dude tries to resume his attack, he’s shot dead by Lisa, who took the gun off one of the terrorists.

But again, before they can rest on their laurels, David detects more of the phantoms in the room. Right about now, the movie decides that it’s time to reveal the beasts. He points out that he can see them standing over Debbie’s body. It then cuts to a shot of Debbie’s corpse on the floor, being stood over by two of the worst computer generated character models of monsters I’ve ever seen. But now that we’ve had a taste of this shit sandwich, the movie decides to jam it down our throats. David starts seeing the monsters everywhere, including one that is standing over Tony’ s corpse. And just to take it to a new level of craziness, Tony suddenly appears in ghost form, stepping away from his carcass only to be dragged into the ground by a badly animated fiend. Debbie and the random dudes share the same fate one after the other, causing David to conclude that they’re demons, dragging them all down to hell. I might be inclined to agree, provided that those “demons” were even close to looking like they’re actually touching any of them. I’d say it looked more like they were beginning to slide down invisible slides while a shitty Slayer laser show was going on around them.

This would honestly look better if it was claymation.

Watching these retarded events from the safety of The Lab, the doctor starts rambling to the terrorists about his presence there somehow being the result of divine intervention. He goes on to explain that his father was the professor in the shitty video at the beginning of the movie who had proven that another realm existed and was killed to conceal the evidence. When the terrorists grow as tired of his ranting as I am, they threaten him and urge him to shut the hell up. But he says that they’ve run into something more important than any of them, that it’s now a God thing. They smack him and tell him to keep working. Working? On what? What the fuck is he even doing?

The movie shifts our attention back to The Room for a moment, only long enough for David to ask Lisa to pray for him and for her to refuse. Sigh. The tone of the movie begins to shift so drastically at this point that it’s almost like you can see the thought process of its producers: Hey, wait a minute…this movie sucks. Who the hell would watch this pointless drivel? Hey, let’s insert as many references to God as possible into the final scenes to make it a “Christian” movie. They’ll watch anything that says Jesus enough times.

Back in The Lab, Abdul gets off the phone, one can only imagine having just finished talking to someone in Sprint’s support center about switching his long distance plan, and without explanation tells the others to get Lisa’s purse from wherever they were keeping all their hostages’ stuff stashed. They do moments later and end up pulling out what looks like a shitty cell phone. Abdul declares that they’ve been tracked this whole time. Their position is compromised, so they must take everything and go. Who would be tracking them? And why? They’re holding four assholes, two random dudes, and one rather unimpressive doctor. Somehow I don’t think alarms bells are going off at CIA headquarters for any of these people. After setting his group in motion, Abdul tells his second in command that he’s going to stay and destroy everything as to not leave any evidence behind. He pulls out a shitty looking bomb and declares that they have ten minutes to get the hell out. Sweet. One way or another, this pain will all end in ten minutes.

In The Room, things continue to go from ridiculous to insulting, as shitty Doom characters jump out of the walls around the last remaining couple. As David warns Lisa of the gathering menace, she tells him the he must fight them. Um, okay. He’s chained to a fucking bed, lady. How about you cut him some slack? He says that he can’t fight them, not without God’s help. Right…what? When she asks if He’s going to help, David says that he doesn’t know, but he needs Him right now. At that point the demons decide to go ahead with their fiendish attack, first by walking up and starting to paw harmlessly in the general direction of Lisa while David tries to shoo them away. It might come across as threatening if it looked like these animated disasters were actually touching her or at least trying to, but they’re fumbling is not exactly what I’d call precise. In the face of this impending doom, David declares that he’s going to go to hell, explaining that he just doesn’t believe enough. Suddenly the doctor shouts words of encouragement over the intercom, saying that David must take heart in the fact that Christians can’t be possessed. What? Seriously? Has this guy never seen a possession? You don’t tend to see too many Buddhists suddenly claiming to be possessed by agents of a pitchfork wielding man in red pajamas. It’s pretty much exclusively Christians. If anything, David should take heart in the fact that bad actors can’t be possessed because they simply aren’t equipped with the necessary skills to convey the situation. And just to prove how fucking stupid that assurance was, moments later David finally gets possessed. But since we’re running short on time, he literally gets up as a zombie and tries to kill Lisa within five seconds. As she struggles to fend off his awkward advances, much like I’d imagine she’s quite used to doing every second or third night, the doctor convinces the terrorists to let her into The Lab to get away from her murderous boyfriend. He then starts shouting/rambling about Jesus and demons, seeming to either be starting the world’s shittiest sermon or dismissing a possession. I’m not really sure where the hell any of that just came from. The terrorists are as impressed as I am, and decide it’s probably best for everyone to shoot him in the goddamn chest. Moments later a couple of the terrorists go out to similarly shoot David, which despite being hit multiple times, miraculously leaves only a spot of blood that’s no bigger than it would be it he had accidentally cut himself with a grapefruit spoon.

Long ago, someone actually convinced her that florescent lights were God.

God earns 365 gold. But the gold slime runs away!

As David lays dead on the floor, Lisa runs over, verifies that he’s dead, and then looks at the ceiling and gives God a stunningly tedious speech about how He’s taking everyone from her. Almost as if he was sent by The Almighty to shut her the fuck up, David suddenly revives and tells her how much he loves her. He then says, “Christ, forgive me for wasting so much time”. Well at least someone involved in this production acknowledges that this goddamn movie is a waste of everyone’s life. He then turns to Lisa and says, “Please don’t hold this against God” before asking for his jacket. She covers him with it and once again he dies. Eventually David’s soul steps away from his body and is surrounded by demons, like all the others before him. But as he calmly sits there in the midst of them, a fucking sword flashes out of nowhere and smites the demons. Sweet mother of Christ, none of us were prepared for that kind of hilarity, unlike David, who doesn’t appear to be surprised by the events in the slightest just before he ascends while bathed in white light. But just to drag this bullshit out even further, he comes back down seconds later and sits down behind Lisa as she finds the engagement ring he had for her in his jacket. She takes a really LONG GODDAMN TIME to put it on and says, “I do…I so do” to fucking no one. Taking one last moment to look like he’s spanking it onto her back in celebration, David then ascends again. So to make that clear, he came back after dying three goddamn times. Please…no more…

Mmmm...you smell just like your mother.

Having once again decided to just stand back and watch this horrifically shitty tableau play out, the terrorists finally wonder what really happened and go to fetch Lisa. But just then the doctor decides to reveal that he too is not dead, jumping on Abdul’s back and wrapping his handcuffs around his throat while Lisa kicks the ass of his second in command when he appears in The Room to retrieve her. Having Abdul rather poorly subdued, the doctor makes him call and tell his compatriots to let his son go. He then positions himself while continuing to struggle with Abdul on the floor to hit a buzzer that opens the door for Lisa using his foot. After taking her sweet time to get moving, she runs in and finds the doctor, who tells her to get out of there before the bomb goes off. But before he gives his life to make sure that she can escape, he asks her to find his son and take care of him now that he and his wife will both be dead, adding that he doesn’t want his son to hold this against God. Fuck, are you kidding me? That just doesn’t seem even remotely appropriate at this point. Lisa then gets the Abdul’s keys from his pocket and the vaccine out of the doctor’s before she flees for safety while Abdul and the doctor continue to cuddle on the floor.

To put the final garnish on this dookie platter, the movie shows Lisa driving away in what we presume is Abdul’s SUV. Succumbing to her need to rawk, she turns on the radio, only to get a mix of love songs, I’m sorry you’re dead songs, and religious crap. Man, this really isn’t your day, huh? Just in case anyone cares what’s happening back in The Lab, the movie shows the timer on the bomb count down to zero and then simulates an explosion by flashing the back of Lisa’s head with a flashlight.

That's totally an explosion. Or a car behind her. Either way, really.

I'm sorry professor, I just can't take a man who's got Bert's monbrow seriously.

Thinking that the insanity is over, she keeps driving just to find the professor from the beginning of the movie in the middle of the goddamn road. He asks her for a ride only to be refused at first, but then tells him to get in. Once they get going, the professor tells Lisa that despite what’s going on in her life right now, God still loves her. While she ponders this truly random and shitheaded statement, he then says to watch out for his grandson, who’s standing on the left shoulder of the road just ahead. Before Lisa can react to these astounding developments, the professor disappears, leaving only his glasses behind on the backseat. Noticing that he’s gone, Lisa stops the truck and while she’s staring back at the empty seat, the kid walks up and knocks on the window. Without hesitation, Lisa pulls the kid in, says that she’ll take care of him, and rolls off into the darkness.

Oh God...it's a ginger kid! Leave him to die!

Just before we can breathe a sigh of relief, the movie punches us in the face one last time. Back in The Lab, Abdul is pulled down into hell by the demons, leaving his second in command sitting alone in the darkness. He calls out for Abdul just before a demon flashes across the screen and the movie cuts to the credits.

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie is a virtual smorgasbord of failure, with almost every aspect you can imagine finding a way to stand as its own shining monument of inadequacy. There is quite literally not a single positive thing that I can say about it. It even fails as a shitty movie, as it’s so goddamn boring that the movie practically dares you to manage to stay awake long enough to actually remember its moments of idiotic hilarity. It’s quite appropriate that they somehow managed to make this into a religious movie, as much like an actual sermon it makes no sense and I walk away from it feeling like someone has just finished butting out cigarettes on my taint. I give this movie one unrelated flashback out of five hilariously dead sisters.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Every single thing that can’t be explained in life is apparently the work of aliens/demons from an alternate dimension/hell. It’s a good thing that God has a +4 Sword of Smiting or we’d all be fucked.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: the Muscles from Brussels stops in to give a lecture on space, time, and doing the splits in…TIME COP.

Back To The Main Page.

If there's any justice in this world, the person who described this movie as fun for the whole family is being forced to chug a piping hot mug of piss right now.

Donkey: Because of the heavy toll that was being taken on our very sense of being, the first couple of months of Shitty Movie Night involved more than just nightmarish films of continually descending quality. The three of us supplemented the rest of the evening by playing a videogame called Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. It was a glorious adventure through legendary and horribly ridiculous locales in the Marvel comic universe, starring a small band of chosen heroes selected from a large stable of Marvel characters. And as one would assume when talking about comic book characters, that stable varied quite drastically from thoroughbred stallions to walking glue sticks with all the killing power of a poorly executed knock-knock joke. At first we were quite content to encourage the onset of arthritis with this button-mashing crusade while using our personal champions. Hence the game boiled down to hours of Milobar consistently using Iron Man’s special attack that blanketed half the screen with explosions while I ran around with a blind man in red tights that I was trying to pretend wasn’t Ben Affleck and Blombo used Deadpool to live out his lifelong dream of doing nothing but twirl. Good times were had by all. But eventually, to make the game more challenging and far shittier, we decided to try using characters that were either utterly useless or aggressively contemptible. The Silver Surfer and Mr. Fantastic were natural picks for this team, and despite the game trying to insist otherwise by focusing on the character, I was adamant that Captain America be included as well. And after gleefully piloting that shield-clad douche to his painful, repeated demise, it occured to us that someone actually tried to make a movie about this jackass years ago.

The Plot:

Donkey: Captain America is less a feature film and more a dim-witted child’s third-worst idea born in the mind of an over-hyped virgin and translated to the screen by someone too lazy to even try to hide the fact that it’s infuriatingly idiotic. The story centers around the clash of two men, locked in an eternal struggle to determine who will become the most generic stereotype. During World War II, German science is used to engineer a young Italian man into a meatball-headed menace called the Red Skull, capable of burying the entire world’s population under a combination of unprovoked fist shaking and provolone cheese. To counter this, the American government enlists a man to undergo a similar yet more useless transformation into the uncleverly named hero, Captain America. Equipped only with a shield imbued with unexplained magical powers, our hero manages to prove his worth by concluding his maiden mission with a fifty year slumber in the iceflows of Alaska. Now, nearly fifty years later, he is revived in the late 1980′s to once again save the world from the Red Skull. And possibly feathered hair and neon colors while he’s at it.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Milobar: Captain America. One of the shittiest super heroes ever concocted in one of the shittiest movies ever made.

Donkey: That’s a combination sent straight from the gods, my man.

Milobar: Is this another movie with Wilfred Brimley in it?

Donkey: Nope, not this time. You’re thinking of Ronnie Cox, the man who played the villain in Total Recall and Robocop. Both are outstanding movies featuring outstanding performances of his. Captain America, on the other hand, is one massive turdblossom on this resume. But this movie does also feature Ned Beatty, so that’s a bonus. I guess when the whole world knows you for having your ass viciously raped, the only way to get back at them is to take part in a movie that spends ninety minutes sodomizing its audience.

Milobar: The movie is filled with fucking TV actors. Captain America, the Red Skull, the girlfriend. They’re all obscure TV actors.

Donkey: The movie opens in Germany in 1936, showing the origins of Captain America’s angrily infected phallic nemesis, the Red Skull. It’s very similar to the opening of X-Men and the origins of Magneto. And by that I mean that it would appear similar if you’ve just finished five hours of deep breathing exercises in a backed-up septic tank.

Milobar: This scene reminds me of when people talk to me about the ‘good old days’. It’s an entire family of douche bags sitting around a living room in candlelight, listening to a young boy play the piano. Fuck that. Give me the Internet. Give me a widescreen Hi-Def television and a Blu-Ray player. Give me some goddamn videogames.

Donkey: The family is sitting in a living room, listening to a late night piano recital, which I’m sure that when you consider it to be their entire source of entertainment and one that is being recorded for future use, is in no way a pressure filled nightmare for the young man performing. Suddenly a group of Nazis storm in and take away the boy, nabbing him for what they state is his superior intelligence. The last thing I would accuse anyone who’s involved with this film of having is above imbecilic intelligence. And before they drag the boy off, the Nazis make him watch as they gun down the rest of his family.

Milobar: They’re supposed to be Nazis, but these guys are wearing uniforms that make them look more like they’re Americans.

Donkey: Authenticity is definitely not this movies strong point. But then, it’s also one of the least of its worries. It’s produced by Stan Lee, after all.

Milobar: But at least he doesn’t have a cameo in it where he plays himself, like in Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer. Don’t you know who I am? I’m Stan Lee! That is still bullshit. If you’re in some kind of alternate reality where your comic book characters actually exist, then they didn’t have to be invented by anyone in that alternate reality. So Stan Lee is no one in that reality.

Twice as strong, twice as smart, but five times more cuddly.

Donkey: Stan Lee has done a good job of making sure that he’s barely notable in this reality, nevermind alternatives. The Nazis take the child to a secret lab where they are going to be performing an experiment on him. But first, it’s time for a PowerPoint presentation. Wait…what the fuck is that?

Milobar: That’s a rat that they’ve already used the serum on. The same serum that they’re about to inject into this kid to make him the Red Skull, which is the German version of the Americans’ Super Soldier serum. At least this isn’t as fucking stupid as the origin story of Captain America in that newer animated film that we saw, Ultimate Avengers: The Movie, where the Nazis actually turn out to be shape-shifting aliens.

Donkey: As they’re set to begin the full pedicure and colon injection procedure, the female doctor who is leading this experiment freaks out, objecting just before they’re about to begin. Are we to understand that she didn’t know what was going to happen?

Milobar: She was the one who designed the process, after all.

Donkey: Say what you will, if you’re doing important research like this, you’re likely involved with the inner circle of Nazis. And if that’s the case, you have to have seen some shit by this point. You know these guys aren’t out to conquer the world with mean-spirited observational humor and poorly executed shin kicks. So there’s nothing here that should be a surprise at this point. But despite her underwhelming efforts and subsequent escape, the experiment is carried out as planned.

Milobar: The movie transitions to 1943, and takes us to the White House. They note that Hitler already has a young boy named the Red Skull who was created using the Super Soldier Serum seven years ago, so they’re going to use the same serum to create an entire battalion of super soldiers for themselves. So if Hitler has had the serum for seven years, why hasn’t he created an entire battalion himself?

Donkey: I’m going to guess that in this movie’s insane reality, by this point Hitler had already turned away from this successful military program to focus his attention on more absurd pursuits, like finding Gandalf’s staff of wizardry and man-love. But now that the Americans want to get into the game, they have to find someone stupid enough to volunteer for the procedure. Cut to the home of Steve Rogers, carpet bowling/grammar rodeo champion, just before he leaves to join the program. I have absolutely no idea who this guy that plays Captain America is, as I’ve never seen him in anything before or since this. But I will say this for him: he’s absolutely perfect at portraying a character so mediocre that he possesses only passable skills at being entirely average.

Milobar: Steve and his mom are hanging out in the kitchen when she hands Steve his father’s medal and asks him to never take it off, no matter where he goes. You know mom, this might not be the easiest thing for me to wear everywhere.

Donkey: No shit. As much as it would have been incredibly appropriate for her to hand him his father’s clown wig and demand that he don it forever, it’s not like she’s just handed Steve something practical or subtle like his father’s watch. This is a medal for something that Steve didn’t accomplish, his father did.

Milobar: Here, and wear your brother’s Olympic gold medal for Speed Skating. Wear it forever. But I didn’t win it, oh well, just one more awkward story for me to tell to women at the bar.

Donkey: With his farewell party winding down, Steve and his friends get ready to take one last picture when he notices that his girlfriend Bernie isn’t there. He’s just noticing this for the first time? Now that’s love, baby. So he asks everyone to wait, as they can’t take the picture without her.

Milobar: Hey Steve, she’s getting laid, leave her alone.

Donkey: She’s pooping. Give her some privacy.

Milobar: She’s getting laid and taking a poop at the same time.

Donkey: Man, if she’s eating a chili cheese hotdog at the same time, that’s the ultimate combination of pleasure. To try to find her, Steve first runs and checks her house, then runs off to an ocean boardwalk where he finds her pining away. This seems like a long goddamn time to leave your friends just hanging out, waiting to take a goddamn picture. I mean, waiting around for someone to take a piss would be annoying enough. This guy’s running all over the damn city.

Milobar: Hey guys, is this some kind of prank? Do you think he’s even coming back?

Donkey: Just before Steve ships out with the Nazi doctor whom has apparently defected to the States, Bernie pleads for him to come home safely, saying that she’ll wait for him forever. Forever, huh? That’s the kind of bold statement that’s just begging to be proven wrong. It’s right up there with, “I could totally dodge a bullet using the slow moving power of Shinanju”.

Milobar: And by forever, I mean that I already starting blowing your cousin last night. What? Come on. You’re leaving. What do you expect? And I love how the movie doesn’t bother to say why he was chosen for this project. And of course they explain that the Super Soldier Serum can turn a man with disabilities into an athlete, but what would it do to someone who was already an athlete? Wouldn’t it be more useful to give that person the serum?

Donkey: Bored and unemployed scientists theorize that this guy has the most scorching case of anal warts in the western hemisphere, and that curing him of that will make him so grateful that he’ll work harder than any other man alive.

Milobar: Well you have to keep in mind that someone who’s already in really good shape had the dedication and training required to get into really good shape. If you make someone into an athlete who has never been one, isn’t there the risk that they’ll just let themselves go because they’re not used to having to maintain that kind of body? They could end up an eight hundred pound slob by the end of the month.

Donkey: But he’d be an eight hundred pound slob that can lift the shit out of a burger. Stack on that third patty and bring on the bacon! Let’s top my massive portion of meat with more meat! The military takes Steve to their hidden, underground laboratory which is underneath a diner. And in no way, shape, or form is that suspicious.

Milobar: How does that make any goddamn sense at all?

Donkey: It doesn’t. And it’s even more ridiculous because they didn’t enter the diner, get into a secret elevator, and go down fifty stories. They went into a secret door that had coat hooks on it and walked down a single flight of stairs. So it’s literally right beneath the diner.

Milobar: And it’s not like there’s only two dudes down here. There are a couple of dozen people down here, which means that people go in and out on a regular basis. It wouldn’t be that hard to notice that six people just went to hang up their coat and didn’t come back out.

Donkey: It only gets better when you see how large this fucking underground chamber is. It a massive and undoubtedly echoing room, that has all kinds of large machines in it. So unless that diner is called “Frank’s Unnecessarily-Loud-Ambient-Noise-Filled Diner”, that’s going to be pretty fucking obvious to any patron who isn’t distracted by their pulse consisting primarily of gravy.

Milobar: If you look carefully, you’ll see that chamber has sunlight coming in through what has to be windows. So if there are windows to the outside, then anybody walking by those windows can see these guys.

Donkey: As they begin the procedure of giving Steve the serum, a nearby General declares that he will become a symbol for all that the country stands for. If Captain America is the best symbol that you can come up with, then the country stands for unbridled and arbitrary mediocrity.

Milobar: The one power they forgot to give him was the power to induce world wide recession, because that would seem to be the best representation of the country these days.

Nevermind the Spark-o-matic 5000, Steve. Just concentrate on the injections.

Donkey: While the process of injecting high-fructose corn syrup directly into Steve’s testicles is being carried out, there are a bunch of machines behind him that are making a ton of noise and spitting sparks out all over the place. I hate to break it to the people who made this movie, but if a machine starts tossing sparks like that, it usually stops working pretty damn fast, so this whole procedure would come to a screeching halt. Unless you’re spot welding, there shouldn’t be sparks anywhere like that. But mere facts aren’t enough to stop anything in this film, so handshakes soon follow as the procedure is completed.

Milobar: Suddenly, one of the random dudes in the room pulls out a gun and shoots the doctor.

Donkey: I think he might have screamed something about Hitler just before shooting, revealing that he was a Nazi, but it’s just as likely that he cracked under the pressure of being in this trash heap of a film. But despite being shot himself, Steve lunges into action and punches the attacker backwards into what appears to be an old mainframe where the dude is immediately executed. That’s a pretty damn shitty device if the moment someone bumps into, they’re executed.

Milobar: You can touch it, just don’t accidentally fall into it or you’re fucked, as you can apply exactly one pound of pressure to this device before it electrocutes you.

Yeah yeah, he might die, whatever...where do you keep the mustache wax, doc?

Donkey: As the movie rolls on to show Steve lying unconscious in a military hospital, a colonel who has an absolutely glorious mustache inquires about Steve’s condition. Now that guy should have been Captain America.

Milobar: I agree. I wish that douche had a mustache like this guy. That would have been the gay frosting on the shitty pie that is Captain America.

Donkey: Captain America should have been played by Burt Reynolds. Now THAT would have been a movie. Captain America would be strutting around while sucking in his gut and asking everyone what kind of horsepower their car has.

Milobar: That should have been the name of the movie: Burt Reynolds is Captain America.

Donkey: Sweet Army Mustache Guy explains to the resident physician that they need Steve ready to go within forty eight hours so that he can be dropped behind enemy lines in Germany to stop a missile that has the ability to reach the US. The doctor tells him that’s not possible, as Steve’s lucky to be alive at all. Unlike us, the movie’s viewers, whom couldn’t be more disappointed if you stole the concept of happiness. Suddenly they turn to see Steve standing next to his bed, fully recovered and ready to go. And go he does, as Steve is soon fully dressed as Captain America, sitting in a plane and flying over Germany with Sweet Army Mustache Guy, or SAM-G, if you will. SAM-G asks Steve if he’s comfortable with the shield that they’ve given him; the sweet signature shield of Captain America. Cap’n replies that he could have used another month of training with it.

Milobar: Personally my response would be that I could use a few more weapons. Like a gun, or maybe anything more effective than a shield. Perhaps something designed for offense rather than just defense.

Donkey: Captain America then asks SAM-G when there are going to be more men joining him in his special platoon of super soldiers. The Sweet ‘Stache Of Freedom responds by explaining that the female doctor responsible had the procedure stored entirely within her head, so now that she’s been killed, there won’t ever be anyone else like him. What? What fucking government organization would allow a project to go forward that isn’t documented extensively?

Milobar: How the fuck did she get funding for that without having that shit written down somewhere? Don’t worry about it, it’s all up here in my brain. Just give me five hundred million dollars. Wait, what did Captain America just scream as he jumped out of the airplane?

Donkey: I think it was something about gargling balls in his throat.

Wings on a mask: the clothing equivalent of brown wood siding on a car.

Milobar: That wouldn’t surprise me. Now that he’s on the ground after parachuting down, we see that he’s wearing the old school uniform that has the wings on his goddamn head. I hate this fucking movie.

Donkey: As Captain America sneaks up on the enemy encampment, he throws his shield at a guard tower that spots him, destroying its wooden supports, and his shield comes back to him. FUCK YOU. Explain to me how you could possibly engineer a fucking shield that would smash through something that solid and then manage to return to you. It’s a round piece of thick metal, not a goddamn boomerang made of molten lava.

Milobar: Captain America is an insult to any and every type of intelligent concept in life.

Donkey: And the way they capture this on film matches the stupidity of the concept itself. We see a close up of his hand releasing his shield, a shot of an explosion, and then we see the same close up of the hand catching the shield again. So I guess he threw his shield and blew shit up. Either that or very convenient things are happening while he plays catch with an unseen playmate.

Milobar: Then he’s walking towards a soldier in a hall, who’s backing away and shooting at Captain America. Of course by shooting at Captain America I mean shooting at the ground. Awesome.

Donkey: Once Captain America makes his way past all the guards and enters the chamber holding the missile, the Red Skull is revealed for the first time.

Trust me, it's even itchier than it looks.

Milobar: He’s looking ‘office hot’, I’ve got to say.

Donkey: He looks like he could use some aloe and rubbing alcohol or that’s never going to heal. Captain America and the Red Skull clash briefly, like two old men arguing over the last leisure suit in a thrift shop, before our hero is stabbed in throat by the Red Skull’s needle/joy buzzer and sinks into unconsciousness.

Milobar: And in typical ridiculous movie villain style, they weld Captain America to a missile before they launch it.

Donkey: Just moments before the launch, Captain America gives the Red Skull the old “come close, I’ve got to tell you something” and the fucking guy falls for it. Captain America grabs the Red Skull’s hand and tells him that he’ll have to come along for the ride.

Milobar: Why don’t you just punch him in the nose with your free hand until he lets go of you? If you just start beating on him, he’s going to pass out at the very least.

Donkey: Apparently the Red Skull is straight out of the Village of the Damned in Gymkata, as he pulls out a knife and cuts off his own hand without hesitation. Take that, Cap’n.

Milobar: Wouldn’t it be just as easy, and significantly less fucking crazy, to cut off Captain America’s hand?

Donkey: Or stab him in the goddamn throat. You’re already sending him to his death for the love of sweet baby Jesus.

Milobar: Even if you don’t want to kill him, you could still just stab him in the arm or something. There’s lots of options you could choose from rather than just cutting off your own goddamn hand. But that’s why Italians have never won a goddamn war. Their first instinct is to cut off their own damn hand rather than actually FIGHT their enemies.

Donkey: As the missile is heading towards the US, the movie cuts to little Tommy, who’s playing in his bedroom somewhere in Washington DC. He’ll soon be witness to one of the greatest spectacles in cinematic history. And then everything about his movie goes downhill from that point.

Milobar: Yes, the missile scene. I remember describing this to you guys before we watched the movie and Blombo didn’t believe me. I guess you just have to see it to believe it.

Fuck green and blue screen technology. Just have the kid stand in front of a projection of the missile. It will look fine.

Donkey: As young Tommy wanders out of his house in the middle of the night so that he can stand in front of the White House and take pictures for some fucking bizarre reason, he turns to see a missile coming in his direction. He uses his camera to get a close up view of the missile and sees Captain America strapped to the damn thing, having time to snap off a single picture. But just before the missile is about to smash into Tommy and the White House, Captain America kicks the damn thing with the back of his heel a couple of times, somehow causing it to DRASTICALLY CHANGE COURSE. The missile flies just over Tommy’s head as it begins rocketing up and over the White House. Moments later we see it crash into the ice somewhere in Alaska.

There are two things that are insulting to even a child’s mind right off the bat about this bullshit. First, if you could just kick the damn missile and cause it to change direction, why didn’t you do that before you were twenty fucking feet away from the target? This thing came over from Europe so he had plenty of time to do that before this point. And secondly, why the hell didn’t the missile explode on impact when it hit the ice?

Milobar: And I’m not sure if anyone else understands geography and how far Alaska is from Washington DC, but it’s more than a thirty minute fucking flight. And normally missiles only hold as much fuel as is needed to get to their target.

That's right, Sam, this picture will always remind me of the existential blackness that I stared into last night.

Donkey: The movie goes back to young Tommy, showing his picture of Captain Useless and the missile to his geeky friend Sam, begging him to believe what he just saw. Fuck, I barely believe it and I saw it myself. Especially when you consider that the picture he held up, telling him that he’s never going to forget this, is what appears to be a picture of nothing.

Milobar: We need to show that time has passed! Cue the extended newspaper montage!

Donkey: This is a goddamn ridiculous montage. Eventually, after far too long, it gets to the goddamn point and we see that little Tommy grew up to become the President of the United States. A president who gives meandering, vague speeches as we soon discover.

Milobar: What a poignant message.

Donkey: What the fuck is he talking about?

Milobar: Hey guys… is the President drunk again? And of course, in this ridiculous movie, the President wears sneakers, jeans, and a white collared shirt.

Donkey: The sport coat pulls it all together into a tight, professional ensemble, though. The President enters the Oval Office to find a military General who asks him to make concessions on his environmental bill. The President gives him the strong arm tactic, telling him to basically shove that idea up his ass until it tickles his tonsils. But this whole scene just doesn’t seem very likely to me. Something tells me that the President would at least be a little more courteous to the people in charge of protecting his ass. But moments later, we see that the disrespect was well deserved, as the General is part of a secret cabal.

Milobar: A cabal that just happens to have someone who looks an awful lot like the Red Skull, just without his Red Skull makeup on.

Yes, I realize padded chairs would make these meetings more comfortable, but goddamn if I don't look badass sitting in this thing.

Donkey: Watching this gathering of the evil organization, I can’t help but tune out while they read the minutes of their last meeting and ask if someone will second a motion to get a quote on replacing the carpet in the foyer of their evil lair to wonder where they get their chairs. They’re highly ornate and very evil looking. That’s not the kind of thing you just go pick up down at IKEA.

Milobar: I’m willing to bet they got them off of eBay.

Donkey: As they discuss the boldly ambiguous menace that is President Tommy, the Not-Red Skull suggests to his group that instead of killing him, they just control him with a brain implant that he invented. But instead of explaining further, the movie just cuts to a different scene and moves on. Don’t worry, Captain America. I didn’t really care to know the details anyway.

That abrupt cut takes us to Alaska where Captain Shithead smashes his way out of a coffin of ice, after it was cut out of the ground by two dudes who have no plausible reason to have found him, before standing up and walking off like he has just finished a two hour nap. Back in DC, the President sees a picture in a newspaper accompanying the story of a man who has been cut out of ice in Alaska. He recognizes Captain America and immediately puts the pieces together.

Milobar: He immediately calls Sam, his childhood friend who’s now a reporter. And when Sam picks up the phone and hears, “I know who the Rocket Man is,” he knows exactly what the President is talking about. That isn’t fucking nuts one single bit, not at all.

Donkey: Meanwhile in Rome, the Not-Red Skull also buys a newspaper from out of the window of his limo and sees the same story as the President. Why the fuck would a story about a dude being found in ice be on the front page of a newspaper in Rome?

Milobar: Apparently life is pretty boring in Rome. I’m willing to bet there’s a picture of Captain American in the paper every Tuesday.

Donkey: The movie then shifts back to Northern Canada, where Captain BlueBalls is wandering aimlessly through the woods. At the same time, Sam is driving around looking for him. But he’s not the only one, as two helicopters carrying agents of the Not-Red Skull fly around before dispatching three motorcycles. Wait, where the fuck were those motorcycles? Did they have them in the helicopters?

Milobar: They were in the back, next to the hover bikes.

Donkey: Wow, I didn’t even see those there and I’ve been standing next to them the whole time! And when Captain Cumdumpster sees that people, who managed to find him far too quickly I might add, are following him on the motorbikes, he decides to just go ahead and attack them without having the slightest idea as to who they are.

Milobar: That sounds about right for someone representing the US.

Donkey: The only way to follow up unmotivated brutality is with blatant inconsistency. After attacking complete strangers on motorbikes, which could be Search and Rescue workers for all this asshole knows, he jumps into the truck of a strange guy who pulls up and just says, “Get in.”

Milobar: So Sam the goddamn news reporter was driving up a road in the wilderness just as Captain America stumbled out onto it. What the hell are the odds of that? Think of how hard it is to find someone in a goddamn mall. And the outdoors is a lot bigger than a goddamn mall. And I don’t understand where the fuck he got his shield from. Why would they attach that to the missile when they launched him?

Donkey: Sam asks Captain Anal-leakage who those people were, and the Cap’n says that they were Nazis. WHAT? How the hell would he know that? They weren’t exactly in uniform.

Milobar: I’m willing to bet that he’d call anyone who was chasing him a Nazi.

Donkey: Yeah, I can see this idiot wandering into a corner store, walking out with an unpaid Coke, and then declaring that the clerk who comes chasing out after him is a Nazi. Sam starts probing Cap’n for information on the Red Skull, just before he explains that he knows that the Red Skull got plastic surgery and is now the leader of a secret international cabal that is responsible for all kinds of terrible things. Wait, if this dude knows this for a fact and he’s the close friend of the President, why hasn’t he convinced the President to pursue the Red Skull?

Milobar: Suddenly Captain America pulls a slick move.

Look, Captain America, if you get back in the car, I promise I'll turn off the Wang Chung.

Donkey: Cap’n tells Sam to pull the truck over, claiming that he’s about to be sick. I imagine he’s about to chuck up fifty year old pizza that’s in the process of thawing. When the truck finally stops, he gets out and wanders about twenty feet away, where he just kind of bends over until Sam comes up to see if he’s alright. But once Sam gets that close to him, Captain Cockmonger turns and runs back to the car, albeit not very quickly, jumps into the driver’s seat and drives away.

Milobar: Considering the Nazis that were just chasing him had motorbikes that they could have easily just jumped back onto and followed them down the road, it’s quite likely that he’s just left Sam to die. Even if they didn’t use the bikes, they could have just gotten back in their helicopters and followed the one road through the woods until they found him.

Donkey: Then the movie gives us yet another montage, this time of Captain America traveling south, set to one of the most low rent soundtrack songs I’ve ever heard. And how the hell is it that both Sam and the Red Skull’s agents could find this dude wandering through northern Canada, but neither manage to find him traveling through the States when he’s still wearing the same damned uniform, just with a jacket over top of it.

Milobar: I’d love to know what the hell he did for food that whole time.

Donkey: A lot of handjobs, I’d guess. After Captain America finally makes it home, he stands in front of what I think is his old girlfriend’s house. A young woman drives up, giving him a special tingle in his pants (which have to smell delicious by now), so he immediately grabs her once she gets out of her car. Hey, it ain’t the 30′s anymore, buddy. You can’t just grab and rape any chick on the street. You’ve got to at least buy them a non-fat mocha first. As the young girl understandably starts yelling, her parents come to the front door and Captain Happyhands discovers that it’s his old girlfriend and his best friend, whom are apparently this girl’s parents.

I'm suprised that she's not just wearing a t-shirt that says "OLD".

Milobar: She waited forever, huh?

Donkey: Of course they both recognize him and eventually an awkward reunion takes place. Bernie, you look the like the four hundred pounds of shitty make up that they’ve caked on your face has aged you at least two or three years since I last saw you!

Milobar: Every time he talks about Bernie, I keep thinking that he’s talking about a dude.

Donkey: I wish. And I can only dream that it’s the Bernie from Weekend At Bernie’s, because if Captain America is going to have a sidekick, it really should be an animated corpse.

Milobar: Or Another Weekend At Bernie’s, the glorious sequel.

Donkey: Captain America makes himself right at home with his best friend and old girlfriend, and their daughter, Sharon. And the reunion continues to be no less awkward. Oh Bernie, I’ve been in the ice for fifty years.

Milobar: And you’re such a glorious GILF.

Donkey: Do you have any idea what kind of backup I have going on in these balls? Come on. Just touch it.

Milobar: I haven’t had a chance to jerk off since I woke up.

Donkey: Meanwhile the Not-Red Skull and his daughter are still back in Rome, where the daughter tells him that she thinks they should follow Sam, the President’s reporter friend. She believes that he’ll lead them right to Captain America, mentioning something about Sam having won two Pulitzer prizes. That’s just digging the hole further, as once again, why isn’t the President acting on Sam’s information about the Red Skull? It’s one thing if he’s a nutty recluse living in a shed, but if this guy’s won the Pulitzer twice, he commands a little respect.

Milobar: Yeah, especially since the President is best buddies with him, you’d think a lot of people would listen to him. How the hell did Sam get his hands on these top secret files about Captain America? Oh wait, it’s probably because he’s friends with the President. But then, why didn’t the President look up this stuff on Captain America and find out who the masked dude that he took a picture of as a child was?

Donkey: Especially since he’s obsessed enough about it that he carries that shitty picture of Captain America around in his wallet.

Milobar: Of course the bad guys jump in a jet from Italy to The America and are there in 15 minutes!

Excuse me, ma'am, but can I interest you in this copy of The Watchtower?

Donkey: And even better, the jet makes the sound of a Transformer flying as it takes off. There’s nothing like ripping off an inappropriate sound effect from a kids’ show. While Captain Catheter and Sharon are hanging out at her apartment, as she tries to help this idiot catch up on fifty years of history, Sam finally show ups at Bernie’s house.

Milobar: As Sam is talking, the bad guys suddenly show up and start shooting every motherfucker.

Donkey: Steve and Sharon return to find the carnage and dramatic moments that can be matched only by episodes of You Can’t Do That On Television ensue. Captain Cakefart mentions that they need to find the doctor’s diary, as it probably has the Not-Red Skull’s real name. While I’m sure that would be useful information, isn’t it easy enough to find this asshole just by looking for the guy that’s clearly had a ton of horribly plastic surgery? And he’s a captain of industry too. It’s not like the Red Skull is hiding in a cave somewhere.

Milobar: As Sharon rushes into the kitchen and finds them bagging up her dead mother, the paramedic has to restrain her, totally going for the her boobies and copping a feel.

Donkey: With Bernie and Sam dead, we see Captain America and Sharon hanging out in her father’s hospital room.

Milobar: They’re passing the time by watching some sweet Wheel Of Fortune. You know, Captain America has got to feel like an asshole right now because these people are all dead because of him. It’s not one of those movies were they would have died regardless of whether or not he showed up and he just couldn’t save them in time. They were only killed because he decided to make a house call.

Donkey: A news broadcast cuts into Play Hangman With An Aging Token Blonde to deliver a special news bulletin, declaring that the President was kidnapped from his hotel room in Rome by twenty armed men. What? Twenty armed men? Twenty? That’s it? Is this movie insane?

Milobar: But the real question is, are you guys bad enough dudes to rescue the President?

Donkey: Only if we fight Karnov and get a cheeseburger out of the deal. Captain Average realizes that he has to step up his non-existent efforts to accomplish nothing, so he and Sharon go looking for the lab under the diner where he was conceived, which is oddly still there.

Milobar: And busy like a motherfucker.

Donkey: Captain Douche charges into the washroom just as villains apparently begin to show up outside. He smashes through a wall and finds the old secret door behind it, leading down to the lab. Wait, if a wall was covering it, doesn’t that mean that people had to have renovated this place? Didn’t they notice the door and the secret lab behind it?

Well, look at the bright side: at least no one left the lights on.

Milobar: Ok, seriously, when the new owners bought this place, did they not walk around the building and see the windows that clearly look into the giant, secret basement? And as Steve and Sharon go downstairs, it shows that everything is still there, exactly as he remembers it, including the goddamn doctor’s diary, which Steve finds in the drawer of a desk. None of the military people who ran this secret lab thought to take it?

Donkey: Alrighty, we got what we wanted out of this highly classified experiment. Throw a padlock on the door and call it a day.

Milobar: They hide underneath the stairs as the Red Skull’s men come down with guns, and then just go up the stairs once everyone has passed. And nobody is the wiser.

Donkey: They pass through a door and Steve turns back to close it behind him. Hearing a muffled scream, he turns back forward to see Sharon is in the hands of a dozen villains who were standing there waiting for them. These dudes were either just hanging out alone in a room in the dark in the off chance that someone would come in or they took a pause from their pursuit to have a few rounds of illegal cockfighting in a back room.

Milobar: Faced with this, Captain America jumps down a set of stairs that are next to him and we see that there’s an even bigger fucking room underneath this lab. It’s like a giant boiler room with equipment and weird shit. This room makes no goddamn sense.

Donkey: But as he’s being stalked, Cap’n gets an idea. He pulls the end off of a big industrial pipe, giving him a makeshift shield, which he uses to take out his attackers. I understand that his shield is supposed to be special, but without it as an option, wouldn’t it make more sense to grab something better as a weapon?

Milobar: Considering that back in 1943, he said that he wished he had at least another month training with his actual shield, and it’s only technically been a couple of days for him since then. So it’s not like he had a lot of time training with a shield, so why would he feel the most comfortable wielding one as weapon?

Donkey: Even the random thugs end up picking up big pipes off the ground. Why didn’t Cap’n?

Milobar: Captain America don’t play with no pipes. But the bad guy that faces him with one sure spends a lot of time spinning that pipe around without actually attacking anything.

Donkey: Cap’n punches him once, picks him up and throws him down a random ventilation shaft that goes…where?

Milobar: It goes to forever, because you can hear that henchmen screaming as he falls for quite a goddamn while.

Donkey: With that pesky problem apparently solved, the film moves on to the next chapter, as Captain America and Sharon end up in Rome. Just as a convenient plot device, Sharon mentions offhandedly that she learned Italian over a single summer that she spent in Venice. Are you kidding me? What kid picks up an entire language in a summer while on vacation?

Milobar: Especially a blonde kid.

Donkey: Hey, it could be worse. It could be a ginger kid. Right, Blombo?

Milobar: Come on, everyone knows that ginger kids can’t read, regardless of the language. Ginger kids have a hard enough time recognizing pictures. And you know, this chick sure is chipper and bubbly for someone whose mother just died.

Donkey: How did they even get to Rome? Last I checked you had to show ID at the very least to fly. But now that they’re there, it’s time for Captain America to pull the same stunt on Sharon that he pulled on Sam earlier. He steals the car, telling her that he can’t take her into danger just before he drives off. But I’ll tell you what I can do…

Milobar: …I’ll put my foot up your ass. That’s how your mom liked it. Or how about some pudding farts?

Donkey: Now flying solo in this pointless quest, Captain America makes his way back to the house where the Not-Red Skull’s family was killed in the beginning of the movie, wearing an outfit that manages to look even more fabulous than he does in his uniform. But since the house’s current owners don’t speak English, he’s faced with the choice of giving up and going home or killing every single person in the building so that the can search for clues. But just as he’s preparing his mind for the slaughter to come, Sharon shows up and puts her Italian tongue to use, managing to talk them into letting her and her flamboyant companion into the house. Once inside, they’re treated to a long story by the house’s two current occupants that the movie doesn’t see fit to share with us.

Milobar: The woman who owns the house just said a ton of shit in Italian that they didn’t bother subtitling. Two people spoke for several minutes and only three lines were displayed between them.

Donkey: The current occupiers quickly produce a box of stuff that their parents found in rubble after buying the house, which contains a recorder that was used the night of the incident to tape the piano recital. So they’ve had this tape for that many years and no one has bothered to listen to it? And it has survived that many years? Have you ever tried watching a VHS tape that’s anywhere near a decade old? This goddamn tape would be dust.

They're sitting oddly close, huh? Well, as long as they don't pull out guns and take a couple of minutes to aim, we'll be fine.

Captain Atrocious and Sharon take a moment to strategize in an outdoor café, or at least point out their lack of any strategy whatsoever, when the Not-Red Skull’s daughters walk by and bump into them very much on purpose before sitting at a nearby table.

Milobar: They literally sit two feet behind them and pull out guns, while Steve and Sharon are watch them the whole time.

Donkey: And even though they’re aiming guns at people two feet away, Cap’n and Sharon somehow manage to duck and roll out of danger before getting shot in the goddamn face. They flee the scene and end up being chased down an alley by a Porsche. And if I’m not mistaken, these are the same alleys in which we got to see so many identical chase scenes in Gymkata.

Milobar: These are the exact same streets. They might have been filmed at the same time.

Donkey: I’m praying that Captain Cornhole will come around a corner and find the uneven parallel bars if that’s the case. To finally get away after an entirely forgettable chase scene, our two heroes end up stealing a bicycle and end up jumping it into the ocean.

Milobar: And hilarity ensues.

Donkey: After unfortunately making their way back to shore instead of drowning, they go back to the tables in the café where this all started and Sharon finds the purse of the Not-Red Skull’s daughter. Why the hell did she leave that thing behind?

Milobar: That makes perfect sense. Nothing says lifetime criminal mastermind like leaving all your ID and personal belongings behind at the scene of a crime.

Donkey: After peering at the daughter’s driver’s license, they finally discover the whereabouts of the Not-Red Skull and the President, so they’re off to save the day. As they approach the fortress, they seem surprised to find that people are there on the lookout for them. So Sharon kicks Captain Creampie out of the car they’re approaching in and races off by herself to create a distraction.

Milobar: This movie is so retarded it wants us to believe her little dinky car is going to outrun a Porsche. The only thing that prevents her escape? Italia-gang blocking the road.

Donkey: Rather than going off on his own, Captain America runs up to the spot where Sharon was stopped moments ago to find them all gone, as the Italian Stallions have absconded with her. But he only ran about fifty feet at best, so this didn’t take that long and he should have been damn near in plain view. Why didn’t they just wait around for him to get there and grab him too?

Milobar: I’ve totally lost interest in this movie by now.

Subtle.

Donkey: Captain ShitStain starts his daringly obvious seige by climbing the outer walls of the Not-Red Skull’s fortress. He’s in a bright blue outfit and it’s the middle of the day for fuck’s sake. Any idiot guard should see him. Someone shoot his ass! And in the meantime, the President has broken out of his cell using a very small vial of acid that he managed to snag while being interrogated earlier. Because that’s the kind of thing that you just leave lying around like throw pillows. And somewhere deep inside, my very soul starts to cry. The President, trying to escape on his own, is quickly surrounded by the Not-Red Skull and his men. The President suddenly gets an idea, confirming with the Infested Penis of Doom that he’s needed to be kept alive in order to complete the plan. So in a desperate act of heroism, the President leaps off of the tower they’re standing on. As he’s plummeting to his death, Captain American manages to catch him by the hand and save him.

Milobar: It’s just like the end of DOA:Dead Or Alive, where someone is there to catch them at just the right moment.

Donkey: A minute ago, the Not-Red Skull and his men were admitting that they needed the President for their plan. Now, only moments and one suicide attempt later, they’re just opening fire with extreme impunity.

Milobar: The President tells Captain America to go get Sharon, as she was in the cell just below him. How the hell does he know who she is? The President’s never met her.

Donkey: The President then declares that he’s not leaving, not bailing out on Captain America. Well if this supposed hero really was interested in the good of the nation, I’m pretty sure he should insist that the President fuck off. It’s a good thing he didn’t, though, as the President sure can kick ass.

Milobar: He’s Dick from Robocop. He built ED-209, assholes. He ain’t fucking around.

Donkey: After a predictable struggle between our heroes and faceless villains, the final confrontation finally begins between the principal players. Captain America walks into a courtyard to find the Not-Red Skull, his daughter, and more random henchmen holding Sharon hostage. And they start the festivities with a bizarrely odd exchange. The Red Skull calls Captain America, “an oddly clownish symbol that nobody cares about”. Captain America responds, “I care”. What? So you care about…YOU? No shit, huh? Well that’s big of you. But this is topped just seconds later when the President shows up and a random thug tries to shoot him. The Cap’n throws his shield and cuts the barrel of the thug’s gun clean off.

Milobar: Obviously, and completely physically possible.

Donkey: Fuck this movie. As a side note, in the comic book, do you know if the Red Skull actually had his red skull most of the time, or if he usually had this shitty plastic surgery?

Milobar: I don’t know. Fuck the Red Skull. Fuck Captain America.

Donkey: We’re now close to the end and it occurs to me that he’s only had an actual red skull for ten minutes.

Milobar: I’m willing to bet this actor just didn’t want to have to wear the make-up.

Donkey: Yeah, and I imagine that it would be pretty hard to find someone else to actually agree to be in this shit, so I can see why the movie’s director would cave to that demand.

Buttons are for pussies. Real men use puzzle boxes as detonators.

Milobar: Jesus, apparently Captain America’s one weak spot is his legs, even though nobody bothers shooting them while he charges in their direction with his shield only covering his upper body.Donkey: Fuck, aim a little lower please. But finally the Not-Red Skull stumbles up to a random grand piano that’s sitting out on the fortress roof by itself. And aside from being incredibly out of place, the piano has the detonator to a bomb in it.

Milobar: And that detonator is a very typical Italian device. It’s a very elaborate detonator that has cogs, moving parts, and things that slide up and down very slowly. You know, normal people would have just made it a goddamn button.

Donkey: As the Red Skull is content to blow them all back to hell, Captain America makes his final charge. But just when all seems lost, he uses the tape recording of the family massacre to distract the Not-Red Skull with suppressed memories of unimaginable pain while he gets into position to toss his shield at him. The Not-Red Skull is knocked over the wall of the fortress, falling harmlessly to the ocean below. FINALLY, IT’S DONE. And as he’s about to walk away, I love how Captain America stops to look directly at the camera as he passes by. I think he’s checking to see if anyone is still awake.

Um, Steve, what the fuck are you looking at?

Milobar: And that bullet wound was on his other shoulder in the previous shot.

Donkey: Captain America and Sharon then stand and stare off into the distance at NOTHING.

Milobar: And once again the bullet wound is back on the other shoulder. Fuck, this movie is terrible. It’s just goddamn boring.

Donkey: Much like the character, so I guess it’s extremely appropriate. Almost genius even. I think I love you Captain America?

The Verdict:

Donkey: Fuck this movie, and fuck Captain America. This film is every bit as corrosive to the concept of entertainment as the hero on which it’s based. Though it has staggeringly hilarious moments, it’s mostly just aggressively boring. I give this one frozen national shame out of five.

Milobar: From now on, whenever I hear a Movie Executive complaining about how online piracy is killing the movie industry I’m going to slap him in the balls with a VHS copy of Captain America. Shitty movies like this are what is killing the industry you goddamn morons. First produce something that A) makes sense, and B) doesn’t make me feel dumber for having watched it, and then I might think about paying you for it. I give this movie one rural American virgin aspiring to be President out of one mother/daughter/Captain America three-way.

What We Learned:

Donkey: It’s possible to freeze a man for years and revive him, but it’s not possible to make it worth your while when he’s a massive douche. Go back out into the woods and play hide-and-go-fuck-yourself, Captain America.

Milobar: It is absolutely not creepy in any way to be flash frozen, woken up fifty years later, and then start fucking the daughter of your previous girlfriend. It’s called scientific progress assholes!

Don’t forget to check back every Thursday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Giant mechanical catastrophies fight for ultimate supremacy of nothing and the right to give you an ulcer in ROBOT JOX.

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 you somehow manage to pull it off, you quickly realize that it was a fucking stupid idea in the first place. Just stick to burping and blowing it in their faces when they open a door for you. Isn’t that right James, you asshole? But as I’ve said before, it’s that kind of hilarious failure that results in a great Shitty Movie Night, and Alien Vs Hunter delivers in every way imaginable. I give it five walls of dirt out of five reuses of the same fucking scene.

Milobar: After watching this piece of garbage I’m honestly having a hard time forming cohesive sentences. Fuck, that movie was so aggressively confusing I think it made everything else in my life make a little less sense. My hat is off to you Alien Vs Hunter. You would think your name alone might suggest that we would get to see an Alien fight a Hunter, but instead all I saw was a bunch of assholes wandering around the sewers for an hour and a half. And that’s just the tip of the mindfuck iceberg. I give this one five catacombs out of six dude we’re in their ship and that totally sucks.

What We Learned:

Donkey: If you’re going to make a movie, you don’t need an intelligible story, coherent dialogue, likable characters, decent actors, moderately believable special effects, entertaining action sequences, a variety of more than three sets, or any semblance of basic continuity, as long as you’ve got….umm…shit, what does this movie have? Oh yeah, the Greatest American Wad of Cocksnot.

Milobar: If anyone ever has a gun pointed at you, just do a duck roll. You’ll somehow magically come up swinging on a rope and shooting an M16, and unless that motherfucker trying to kill you has a fancy space suit that looks like it was cobbled together out of a Halloween costume from 1985 and a flat of recycled beer cans, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be eating shitty asshole steaks for dinner!

Don’t forget to check back every Tuesday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: The depths of space collide with the depths of the arbitrary as we sail along with THE ICE PIRATES.

Back To The Main Page.

Finally a movie every bit as thrilling as its cover art.

Donkey: With two successful weeks of shitty movies under our belts now, we were on top of the world. We had laughed, we had cried, we had been haunted by dreams of Elder Gods stopping in at Budget Cuts. And as there was no shortage of the very basics that fueled our binge (bad movies, Dr Pepper, and Sweet Chili Heat Doritos), it seemed like nothing could possibly bring us down from our magnificent high. But as it was for the near dozen people who had bet on Betamax as the wave of the future, that was simply not the case and a hard lesson was about to be learned.

Having several exciting movies in mind for our next adventure, we instead chose what was immediately accessible. Blombo suggested that we peruse the old copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles In Time that he happened to have on VHS, so we decided to give it a try. After all, who could resist the sweet siren song of VHS? Neither I nor Milobar had ever seen the movie, but the image of Vanilla Ice onstage, chanting out “Go ninja, go ninja, go…” at the end of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze came easily to mind and gave us the assurance that pure shittiness was ahead. But while we prepared for events on par with shameless white rappers selling out to the highest bidder, we were not prepared for the deep, yawning oblivion that awaited us.

The Plot:

Donkey: To be entirely honest, I couldn’t really tell you what this movie was about. I know it involved April O’Neil accidentally getting sent back in time to feudal Japan after coming into contact with an ancient Japanese scepter, and the Ninja Turtles traveling back in time to rescue her. But frankly, I have only brief, scattered memories of this movie that are a challenge to try to form into anything remotely coherent. I had to read a Wikipedia entry to fill in the rest. But as powerful as it may be to regurgitate the entire plot of the movie so that you can truly understand how terrible it is, I think it would be even more insightful to explain why those memories are so broken.

You see, this movie could only be described as painfully boring. So much so that while Blombo and I somehow managed to stave off the complete shutdown of our nervous systems to actually watch it, Milobar almost immediately slipped into a deep, snoring, REM-level slumber that lasted the length of the movie. Had there been anything even remotely worth seeing, we would have woken him. But such as it was, a monotonous dream about being a divorced, middle-aged longshoreman who spends every day of his life moving piles of crates from one side of a shipyard to another would have been more entertaining than this goddamn movie. I cannot stress this enough; the movie was goddamn unremarkable and uninteresting in every way imaginable. I would have rather watched raw, unedited footage of the social habits of manatees pumped full of valium. It’s this kind of movie that really draws obvious attention to the fact that you’ve wasted two hours of your life that could have been spent on much more productive things, like rock polishing or horse porn.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: There is precious little here to even speak of. The most obvious point of interest (although referring to anything in this movie as interesting is so grossly misleading that it should be punishable by torture) is the physical appearance of the Ninja Turtles themselves. This one element of the movie is truly symbolic of the entire series in general. In the first movie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they appeared to be inspired (as everything was at the time) by Tim Burton’s 1989 masterpiece, Batman. Though it had elements to it that were certainly goofy and childish, the overall movie was somewhat dark and took itself rather seriously. The appearance of the Ninja Turtles in that film could be described the same way. Granted, they’re human-sized turtle costumes, so there’s an inherently element of silliness. But all things considered, they still looked as “real” as you could at the time the movie was made. The second film was remarkably different, as it had begun to sail off course and drift far deeper into juvenile territory. Accordingly, the Ninja Turtles themselves seemed far more animated and cartoonish. With this third film, the journey into the land of the ludicrous was complete. The turtles are so animated and infantile that you can’t possibly take them seriously. They look so fucking stupid that it wouldn’t be surprising to find them dishing out hugs to mask the fact that they’re petting your children inappropriately as your family wanders around Disneyland. But the same could be said about the movie itself. It no longer takes itself seriously in any way and is obviously aimed at very, very young children who don’t quite have the IQ to know the difference between the film and a particularly unentertaining carpet stain.

The Verdict:

Donkey: The plot, characters, and every other aspect of the movie are completely moronic at worst and truly mind-numbing at best. We couldn’t even find something to chuckle at in this movie by accident. The only credit that it can possibly be given would be that it employed the irrepressible Corey Feldman, which is always good policy. I give it zero shit-filled diapers out of five. If you’re under the age of nine, have fun. Otherwise, fuck this movie.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Shitty Movie Night as a concept, despite seeming to be incredibly easy and obvious to pull off, is a fine art. In order to appreciate the whole ordeal in the first place, you need to understand and appreciate irony and the arbitrary when it comes to the realm of comedy. But with those fundamentals in mind, you need to understand where that kind of comedy can be found. Kids’ movies do not work on any level. They’re inherently and very purposely stupid as they’re aimed at an audience too dumb to realize that eating paste might not be worth the bowel obstruction. So it’s like making fun of the poor kid in your class for being poor. It’s so obvious that it loses the entire point and essentially backfires, so much so that attempting to make fun of it is on par with beating the shit out of the world’s most adorable kitten to prove how tough you are. Well done, douchebag. Mittens will never screw with you again.

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