I just can't stop laughing whenever I see this poster. Seriously, I defy you to find a picture of a man happier to be disarming and likely dismembering more dudes at once.

Donkey: It’s funny where you end up finding inspiration. The ravenous pack of regular visitors to this site – which has recently exploded from 2 or 3 all the way up to about 7 or 8, officially making us the Internet’s biggest sensation, at least until someone posts a new video of a kitten or dude getting hit in the balls on YouTube – will notice that it’s been a while since I’ve managed to share a new story of brain-raping splendor. I’m afraid that maintaining the aggressive writing schedule required by this site has become more and more of a challenge over time, especially as my attempts to avoid getting repetitive have started to make the once bountiful well of dick and fart jokes seem to dry up more and more each day. But just when I wondered if I could possibly go on, inspiration arrived in the form of a stern rebuke. I recently discovered that this site has been banned by a certain Christian web filtering application. And while some might consider falling into the cross-hairs of the Jesus Brigade to be detrimental to their continued work, I don’t think I could possibly find this fact any funnier. Someone actually thinking enough of this site to ban it is a real feather in my cap. Of course, some of you who are new to our exploits might be asking what I could have done to deserve this cybercock-blocking, and I have to say that I’m not entirely sure. Could it be that my infectious prose have caused hapless victims to be drawn to their computer at the expense of family, friends, and basic bodily functions? Possibly. Could it be because my promotion of the dong-punching glory that is JCVD could technically be considered a method of birth control that would offend Catholic sensibilities? Maybe. Or could it be because I’ve referred to all organized religions as nothing more than an Amway scheme with a far more obnoxious sales force? Probably. But regardless, thank you Christian blocking software; you’ve made my day.

So with the topic of inspiration in mind, let’s travel back once again to our favorite cinematic decade, to a time when action movies knew that awesomeness didn’t require things like a viable plot or even the slightest basis in reality, and witness the journey of a man who found the inspiration required to overcome his handicap to arbitrarily achieve true semi-greatness.

The Plot:

Donkey: Have you ever wondered what a movie would be like if it starred the butt-baby spawned from a torrid love affair between The Hulk and Daredevil as he teamed up with a kid whose antics haven’t been fresh since Problem Child while concurrently battling a villain so remarkably non-threatening that you could just as easily picture him selling you life insurance or a 1995 Chrysler Dynasty? Yeah, me neither. But feel free to read on and discover the magic that absolutely no one asked for.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Exhibit A: Sharp Killing Instruments – Basic Vision Or Language Skills = Negative Fun!

Just pray that this is the only time that the villagers are going to want to play "Smell My Snake", Rutger.

Donkey: Like so many of the stories that your grandfather spouts out to support his endless case that you’re a soft-lipped pussy just because you’ve never been face down in thick jungle brush, ducking below an intense firefight between Charlie and Uncle Sam while grunting your way through the intense firefight of syphilis in your trousers resulting from standing fourth in line for a three dollar hooker, this week’s tale begins in the magical place we call ‘Nam. That’s right, it’s time once again to visit the even lighter side of a national tragedy where we pass through a haze of wonder, dreams, and needless human suffering to meet the film’s hero played by the illustrious Rutger Hauer. As a US soldier whom is unknowingly taking his first steps onto the path of an epic journey, Rutger enters the movie crawling away from the smoking rubble of a fierce battle where he was struck blind. Frightened, alone, and undoubtedly farming a particularly potent swamp-water dong-fungus, his darkest day imaginable – pun intended – suddenly gets much worse when he’s caught in a net Chewbacca-style and taken to a nearby village of what I have to assume are blood-thirsty local peasants. However, instead of taking this foreign enemy hostage to create a rudimentary sperm bank in his lower colon or possibly serve his internal organs on a bed of rice pilaf, these simple villagers instead decide to act as angels of mercy. So with absolutely no explanation as to why they would bother, the movie jumps straight into one of sweet, buttery Jesus’ greatest gifts to humankind: the montage. And we’re not talking some syrupy bullshit trying to touch our hearts and our bathing suit areas with random images of Rutger’s plucky resilience and indomitable spirit in learning to live with his new handicap. No, Rutger’s even more ridiculous recovery includes learning the magical art of Jit-Kun-I’m-Going-To-Stab-You-In-The-Face-With-My-Sword-Do. But how exactly does a newly stricken blind man without the Vietnamese language skills necessary to process the most basic instructions manage to train with a fucking sword, you ask? It’s quite simple, actually. He achieves this feat merely by hugging a little old man while that dude practices a few solitary katas. Yep, it’s just that easy.

Whoa! Hey dude, that's not what I meant when I said, "put the sword in its sheath"!

So in the time it takes him to grow a glorious ponytail, Rutger learns to master blind sword work, developing skills so sophisticated that he can slice through coconuts being thrown past his face. Fuck, we’re off to a good start. I can’t wait until he decides to go out for his fighter pilot’s license after spending a couple of hours dry humping an 8 year old kid playing After Burner.

Exhibit B: Take My Wife Please! Oh Wait…She’s Dead.

So tell me...are you ever going to split kings again, motherfucker? Didn't think so.

With our hero’s vague introduction complete, the film says fuck it and decides to get right to brass tacks by jumping ahead 20 years, completely ignoring the question of how a blind American would manage to survive the last two decades tripping around a Vietnamese jungle after practicing little more than a complicated regiment of coconut slashing/dude fondling. Instead we rejoin Rutger on his path of glory just in time to discover that he has returned home to the United States. Naturally we began to speculate that he’s been drawn back to the land of Big Macs and even bigger asses to witness all the miraculous fads that the 80′s has to offer: the timeless musical juggernaut that is Wang Chung, the taste bud molestation of New Coke, or even the elusive “computer” fad undoubtedly destined to fade into nerd obscurity next to Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. But instead we eventually discover that he’s actually returned to find an old war buddy named Frank Devereaux. Little does our hero know, however, that Frank is actually in Reno at the time, being hung off the roof of a casino. But before you wonder if he’s turned his post-war-stress disorder into a shitty David Blaine performance art, I should specify that he’s not there by choice. Frank’s being hung over the side by the casino’s owner, whom we’ll call Hamshank MacCready, and a cadre of hired thugs led by Randall Tex Cobb, otherwise known as the biker from Raising Arizona whose performance achieved a 9.5 on the “Mickey Rourke Scale of Greasy Douche Bags”. Apparently Frank is a chemist with a gambling problem, and rather than have his legs broken or even his feelings hurt through a series of stinging personal observations, Hamshank MacCready has instead decided to call in Frank’s debts by forcing him to become the chemist solely responsible for his designer drug-manufacturing/amateur horse-porn web hosting business.

Careful, Rutger. She's totally fucked over He-Man and Rowdy Roddy Piper. You don't stand a chance.

Blind to the fate of his sought after friend, not to mention oncoming traffic and the sacred art of mime, Rutger begins his journey strolling along the side of a Florida highway where he’s forced to overcome obstacles that are both increasingly dangerous and exponentially asstastic enough in nature to fittingly represent a state with the collective intellectual capacity to be thoroughly crushed and defeated by the veritable minefield of human comprehension that is voting: a discarded Coke can, a pile of dog shit, a live goddamn alligator, and finally a group of local punks in a bar who perform a duet of offenses in harassing a young girl and gleefully spiking Rutger’s burrito with a metric ton of hot sauce. And while litter, deadly free roaming wildlife, and pestering the handicapped are all things that Rutger can apparently abide, playing keep away with a young girl’s purse apparently earns you a first class ticket on the Beating Express. While inexplicably taking the time to make it look accidental, Rutger uses his trusty Cane-Sword (which is infinitely less fuck-headed than Final Fantasy VIII’s Gunblade, just for the record) to teach the punks a lesson in manners that concludes in a final exam involving unconsciousness. But once these minor annoyances are behind him, Rutger finally arrives at his destination, the Devereaux household, where he ascertains that Frank is divorced and has long since moved to Reno, abandoning his wife played by – well goddamn it – Evil Lyn from Masters of the Universe. Jesus, between that and They Live, we can’t get away from this woman lately.

Sorry about the cigar ma'am, but it's the only thing that can cover the smell of flame-broiled garbage.

But just before Rutger can seize the opportunity to see if he can smooth talk his way into a fabled “soccer mom blowjob”, two cops show up at the front door a few minutes behind him accompanied by our old pal Randall Tex Cobb, asking to see Frank and Evil Lyn’s son, Billy. Tex claims to be some kind of inspector, which is goddamn retarded because even if we hadn’t already seen that he’s actually a goon working for MacCready, this guise still wouldn’t be remotely believable to anyone unless he was a water inspector sent to preach the virtues of conservation via skipping all forms of bathing. Seriously, this guy posing as a cop would still be insulting to officers working undercover at a fucking sewage treatment plant. Having obviously been sent to kidnap Billy and ensure Frank’s continued cooperation, the thugs immediately drop their pleasant facade the moment that Billy steps into the room, opting in favor of the more elegant tactic of grabbing the kid while blowing Evil Lyn away with a shotgun. Things look grim for our blind hero, but thankfully two decades of training have elevated his level of lethality to a few steps above the average housewife, so Rutger doesn’t go down quite as easily. With only a few deft movements of his Cane-Sword, Rutger relieves one cop of the burden of having a right hand and splits the other straight down the sternum, leaving Tex to wisely haul ass straight through the living room window in a desperate panic to get away. With the danger seemingly gone, Evil Lyn uses her dying breaths to demand that Rutger – a complete stranger – swear that he’ll look after Billy. I realize that she’s dying and all, but this seems a little quick to be that trusting. He could be a blood thirsty pedophile for all she knows. Maybe just ask him to look after the kid until the real cops show up? Regardless, Rutger agrees to her plea and after waiting for the life to seep out of her, he takes a moment to close her eyes by brushing his hand over her face lightly, even though we can clearly see that she closed her eyes before his fingers crossed over her eyes.

Unless your hand smelling like ball-sweat magically causes eyes to close, that's not even close.

Exhibit C: Need A Cure For Those Blues, Kid? How About Some Depressingly Bad Comedy?

Next up on our hero’s journey is a cross-country bus ride to Reno with his new dependent in tow, and as we all know from watching Over The Top, any time a burly hero and brat kid whose shrill voice is practically begging for a brick to the face get together for a long road trip, wacky hi-jinx coupled with shallow attempts to be more touching than a drunken uncle are assured. The first part of that equation comes when the bus stops to gas up at some shithole in the middle of nowhere, giving our heroes the chance to stretch their legs and comedic chops simultaneously. First they exchange heartfelt mocking laughter at each others’ expense after taking turns slipping and wiping out in the mud. But the fun doesn’t stop there as soon after Billy hands Rutger a rock in the guise of candy. Candy that has a both that taste and nutritional value of a hobo’s asshole, I’m guessing. But our blind hero happily plays along, biting down and making an exaggeratedly pained face before spitting the rock out and nailing the kid right in the forehead. If you’re not laughing by now, take heart: that just means that you’ve managed to avoid the fiery depths of comedy hell. This schtick is so goddamn old that a pie fight or series of banana peel related mishaps honestly wouldn’t seem the slightest bit out of place.

Alright, I'll begrudgingly admit that the only way to make a spit-take funny is by ending it with a kid getting nailed in the head.

But with that crushing hilarity threatening to kill us all, the movie then grants a small reprieve by switching to tender mode. After the pair returns to their bus, Billy’s snooping through Rutger’s wallet yields a picture of him and Frank together in ‘Nam prompting Rutger to regale the boy with the story of how he lost of sight. Through a quick flashback, Rutger reveals that he and Frank were the best of friends back in their war days, but that all changed one night when their base got hit with a mortar attack. Sent out to crawl through the jungle brush and flank their attackers while the rest of the platoon tried to defend their post, he and Frank managed to successfully locate the enemy, only for Frank to run like a pussy the moment they were met with resistance. Left behind to be hit by an explosion, Rutger was left blind while Frank managed to get away completely unaffected, save the terminal damage inflicted upon their torrid bromance. What a great story. Basically your dad’s a treacherous coward that left me scarred for life, kid. Suck on that.

Am I the only one who questions the authenticity of any photo supposedly taken in Vietnam where people have smiles that fucking big?

The bus continues its apparent tour of unremarkable hellholes, stopping at another shithole in the middle of nowhere where emotions continue to flow like bad mayonnaise out of an explosive colon. Billy tries to make a collect call home to his mother, only to have Rutger hang up the phone and finally explain that his mom didn’t stay behind because she was too busy plotting new methods of retrieving the Cosmic Key from He-Man, but that she actually bit the big one. At least that’s what I presume that’s what he’s telling Billy, as this is performed in a pull away shot for dramatic effect while all dialogue is drowned out by music so sappy that I could smother my waffles in it, but for all we know Rutger just told him that his mother is busy starring in a German fetish porn film featuring 3 midgets and a particularly determined dog. And midget-themed beastiality might actually be closer to the truth than I would have guessed judging by Billy’s reaction, as he freaks out at the news he’s given and runs across the highway into a corn field. But it’s not only Rutger that chases after him, as we see that a truck of fully armed hillbillies are quickly following behind. And things just go from bad to worse when Billy runs headlong into the familiar face of our old comrade, Tex. Of course, blocking the kid’s flight that quickly means that Tex either watched where Billy entered the corn field and moved at superhuman speeds to get around him because he is, in fact, the Flash, or he was already in the goddamn field just hanging out. Both explanations are equally ass-hatted, and yet somehow equally appropriate.

If this is the face of your enemy, you don't need to be a martial artist to survive. Hell, you barely need to be a sandwich artist.

Regardless, Tex is well aware that Rutger is following along behind and is prepared for his blind nemesis this time. He locks Billy in an abandoned shack in the middle of the field and sits waiting on its roof with a rifle. But at the same time Rutger begins to realize the danger he’s in, sensing the gaggle of rednecks slowly surrounding him. In response he switches to stealth mode and slowly begins to stalk his way through the thick natural cover to take out the well-armed hillbillies one by one. It sounds straight forward enough, but just to give you an idea of the stupidity we’re dealing with, this pack includes a dude named Popcorn who, get this, is eating popcorn at the time. Genius, I know. That kind of brilliance just earned this movie a scratch-n-sniff sticker simply called “Dick Cheese”. And after killing them all one by one, Rutger has only one nemesis left to dispense, so he brings the ordeal to a close by distracting Tex with a scarecrow while he runs up and – no shit – brings the entire goddamn shed collapsing down underneath the greasy thug with a single slice of his sword to the only support post in sight. Of course, I hate to be a killjoy here but beyond the amazingly idiotic suggestion that anyone would build a four-walled structure that’s held up by a single support beam, the movie seems to be forgetting that Billy’s still inside the goddamn thing. No worries though, as after giving Tex a good slice across the chest, Rutger extracts Billy from the rubble, completely unharmed, and flees the scene as fast as possible. And just to make the whole thing that much more pointless, our villainous oil slick wakes up after they’ve left to reveal that he has survived via a Kevlar vest under his shirt, all while giggling his ass off in as evil a voice as one can muster after being spanked twice by a blind man who bested your gun with a fucking sword. Kudos, dicktip.

Billy would go on to explain this experience later in life to be "kind of like the crushing disappointment of discovering there is no Santa Clause...only with more broken bones involved."

Exhibit D: You Could Find Better Villains At A Kitten Lovers Convention

Taking a brief interlude from the thrills of child neglecting action, our attention is turned a back to Reno for a very modest amount of plot development. Our evil antagonist Hamshank MacCready reveals the motivations behind his villainy, whining to his casino manager and right hand man, Ed, that the bank is going to foreclose on him unless he can come up with a large sum of money in two days, forcing him to turn to illegal narcotics manufacturing. Are you fucking kidding me? He owns a goddamn casino, which last I checked, is one of the few businesses that almost never has a cash-flow problem. He’s not the Assistant Night Shift Manager of a fucking Taco Bell, struggling to find a way to pay off a debt while making $6.50 an hour. Ed assures MacCready that their plans are in motion, but having apparently gotten word of Tex’s repeated failures, stipulates that “the blind man is complicating things”. Clearly a master of shrewd and cunning calculation, MacCready immediately demands that Ed do whatever he has to, including procuring the services of Bruce Lee. When Ed quietly explains that Bruce Lee is dead, MacCready rants on undeterred, demanding that if that’s the case then Ed should instead find Bruce Lee’s brother. So just when we thought that the movie couldn’t lose any more of it’s momentum, it becomes clear that its primary villain is not only motivated by the same kind of dilemna that a blue-collar factory worker would face, but that he’s also brain dead enough to be comprehensively demolished by a paint-by-numbers exercise. Did Bruce Lee even have a brother? And if he did, why the fuck would that mean that he knows anything about martial arts? After all, I’m no J.D. Salinger over here, but one of my brothers is barely literate enough to write any more than his name on a cocktail napkin while the other is more likely to eat that same napkin while shitting his pants.

Exhibit E: At This Point I’d Rather Be On A Roadtrip With Fran Drescher, Rosie Perez, And The Rotting Corpse Of Mickey Rooney

Shitty character development isn’t limited to the criminally stupid, however, as we return to our heroes as they hunker down by their campfire for a night of sharing, feelings, and possible casserole recipes or some other equivalently fruity bullshit. And much like an evening with a Viagra-chugging elderly man, the disgusting attempts at intimacy can’t end fast enough when Billy begins to blubber about his father not really wanting him (what gave you the first fucking clue kid…the fact that he moved across the country or the fact that you haven’t heard from him since?). Rutger tries to reassure the boy that he’s not a complete pussy by dropping a small but important fact about himself, saying that he wishes that he could join in for a good cry but that the same accident that robbed him of his sight also took his ability to cry. Of course that’s just a cover story, since any real man knows that crying is simply unacceptable unless you pass out just moments before the threesome was about to start or you’re watching Artex sink into the Swamp of Sadness in The Neverending Story. That’s right, ladies. We’re not made of stone. But anyways, Rutger concludes that he would be proud to have a son like Billy himself, which both gets the kid to stop acting like such a goddamn skirt while also showing how low Rutger’s standards apparently are. The next morning they wake up and hitchhike to Reno where their journey finally comes to an end in the only way we could possibly imagine…catastrophic failure. They manage to meet with Annie, Frank’s cocktail waitress girlfriend. But just before Billy can create a truly awkward moment by claiming that his mother was still breastfeeding him at 10 and demand that Annie step up to the plate if she’s going to be his new mommy, the heroes are ambushed by a pair of brothers belonging to Tex’s hillbilly goon militia.

If Rutger could see that dude wearing a sleaveless cowboy shirt, he'd agree that sometimes it's better to be blind.

Things might seem grim for Rutger and Billy as they are tossed into the back of a panel van for express delivery to MacCready after mandatory banjo solos and oral molestation, natch. But as we’ve seen time and time again, if there’s one opponent that can be easily disposed of by a blind man, it’s fucking chowderheads, and luckily this movie has them in spades. So while the Dim-witted Duo manage to burn their way through their bonds by means of a lighter that Billy finds after fumbling through Rutger’s pocket along side an accidental hand-job, their captors manage to miss this slow and remarkably obvious Houdini routine by occupying themselves within preschool shenanigans. But their uncontrollable giggling soon ends when one brother manages to cut himself on Rutger’s Cane-Sword by running his finger over the blade, apparently having been too busy corn-holing his brother – whom I’m fairly certain from the looks of it might also be his father – to learn that swords are sharp, and after tossing the weapon out the van’s window just to show that inanimate object who’s the boss (NOTE: it’s Tony Danza), it’s right about then that the hillbillies finally notice that there’s a fire raging behind them. Basic logic dictates that the best course of action would be to get out and wait for the world’s worst tag team duo to either burn to death inside or pop their heads out just in time to be served a 22 caliber sandwich, but instead the rednecks decide to pull over and investigate face-first. So naturally they open the back doors with the kind of hushed anticipation you rarely see outside of a 16 year old about to lose his virginity, only to get similarly fucked by Rutger’s flying fists. Wasting no time our heroes join Annie in the front of the van (which happens to not be on fire at this point for reasons I’ll never know) and take off back in the direction from which they came, stopping along the way to find Rutger’s discarded Cane-Sword which they locate using a ridiculous counting method that both is both poorly executed and exceptionally ineffectual. And they find it with not a moment to lose, as the two tenacious hillbillies brothers show up just then in carjacked vehicle of their own, looking for gingivitis-fueled revenge. This, however, is where things go from dumb to Fox News commentator shit-headed. As they scramble to jump back in the van and take off again, Annie’s glasses end up being trampled. So in a stroke of genius, rather than electing to have the person who’s almost blind drive, the team instead elects to have the person who is actually blind do the driving. Because that makes fucking sense. Goddamn it man, I can’t land this plane with my arm broken like this! Quick, strap the corpse into my seat and let’s see what it can do! Then in what may be one of the most ridiculous chase scenes ever unleashed upon humankind, Rutger pilots the van through downtown traffic using navigational directions that Billy screams out with such stunning clarity that he might as well be reciting the digits in Pi with a mouthful of howler monkeys, all while the gunfire of the pursuing hillbillies is drowned out by the sound of Rutger giggling like a madman. This is equal parts preposterous and absolute tedium until finally the madness comes to an end when the pursuing goons end up flipping their car and our heroes come to a screeching stop within mere inches of a brick wall.

I couldn't sum up this scene better than by simply pointing out that not one of them is actually looking where they're going.

Exhibit F: Loose Slots, Bad Craps, Glorious Mullets…The Recipe Ultimate Recipe For Cinematic Glory Or An 80′s Fetish Porn

Fair warning, ladies: the mere sight of these sweet Kentucky Waterfalls is responsible for more wet panties than a bladder control problem.

After finally making it to a safehouse, or a safetrailer such as it is, Rutger leaves Billy in the hands of Annie and another completely unknown woman while he commences Operation: Rescue-Frank-From-Drug-Casino-Go-Kicky-Fast-POW! The mission, of course, will require the right combination of idiotic decisions and inexplicably stupid events to be executed up to this movie’s standards, and things start off nicely when Rutger arrives in the casino to find MacCready wandering around the gaming floor, talking to his mini-boss Ed about Frank and their need to get their hands on his kid. I would point out how stunningly dick-faced it is to talk about your evil plans while wandering through the general public in your own establishment, but when you’re a “villain” motivated by nothing more than a questionable credit history, this is probably about what we should expect and just be thankful that he’s not shitting his pants as he’s talking. Hamshank conveniently goes on to explain that he figures that Frank will have made enough of the drugs by the end of the night that they can sell the product, get the money that the bank needs, and find a new chemist that is more cooperative, thus making Frank completely disposable. And once they’ve given Rutger nearly all the information he needs, the two men conveniently retire behind the protection of two body guards both sporting incredibly glorious mullets that I’m beginning to believe people in the 80′s thought had a direct link with how much ass you could kick.

Dude with a sword? Whatever. A casino is stacking the odds against me? Fuck, it's go time.

With almost all the information he needs and almost no time to lose, Rutger makes his way over to the roulette wheel to create the mandatory diversion required to cover his assault. After a few minutes of ridiculously successful play, Rutger amasses a large stack of chips for reasons that I would love to have explained to me before, prompting the casino staff to finally take notice of his hot streak and decide to make a change. And they don’t fuck around, as a new dealer comes out with the two glorious “business in the front, party in the back” bodyguards and switches the roulette ball for one that we can see is secretly radio controlled. After the new dealer gives the wheel a spin, he quite obviously uses his radio control to make the ball move at the last second, resulting in a loss of all Rutger’s winnings. But since the radio signal was easily picked up by his inexplicably superhuman hearing, Rutger knows immediately that he’s been cheated and jumps into action, slicing open the dealer’s vest pocket and flipping the roulette wheel with his Cane-Sword, revealing the corresponding radio devices in both. Here’s where the sheer genius of the scene comes, though: instead of being the slightest bit bothered or distracted by the fact that some strange dude just finished wildly swinging a fucking sword in a casino, the other customers surrounding them instead realize that the house is cheating and almost instantaneously start a fucking riot. This of course gives Rutger the chance he needs to sneak away to executive elevator that MacCready and Ed used earlier, getting on board just as the mullet-glad guards and freshly arrived hillbilly brothers finally make their way through the crowd and move to stop him. When his musak-fueled ride to the top finishes, Rutger easily disposes of two more huge black bodyguards with Uzis, and then stalls the impending reinforcements by cutting the panel off of the elevator call button panel and ramming his sword into it, which shorts out the system miraculously without causing him to be electrocuted.

Having successfully made it past a crack security squad that would keep all but the cleverest of preschoolers out, Rutger storms into Ed’s office for a deadly confrontation. But when his presence is greeted with a simple “fuck off”, Rutger realizes that he has to kick it up a notch. With only a single backhanded swing of his Cane-Sword, he takes the eyebrows right off his opponent’s face. And yet unlike us, who burst out into laughter at how clearly far away the sword swing was from his target’s face, Ed is actually scared shitless by Rutger’s physically impossible attack, prompting him to reveal that Frank is in a room across the hall while handing over the room key. After issuing the universally accepted action hero method of showing appreciation, wherein Rutger knocks Ed the fuck out, he makes his way across the hall and has an awkward, pseudo-emotional reunion with his old war buddy. At long last we’re finally ready to move on to the final step in Operation: Rescue-Frank-From-Drug-Casino-Go-Kicky-Fast-POW!, which is quite simply to run like hell. But before they go, Frank decides to create a distraction of his own after he grabs the bright blue drugs that he has just created, or what I think are supposed to be drugs – either that or Fun Dip – by setting the lab on fire. The veterans then escape down a stairwell just after the mullet/hillbilly combination arrives on the scene, with Rutger covering their tracks by cutting off the stairwell’s doorknob with a crushingly awkward swing.

This horizontal backslash has about the same likelihood of successfully trimming his eyebrows as a drunken amputee with a weed whacker.

Exhibit G: The Ultimate Battle For The Prize No One Wanted

Once the newly reunited war buddies arrive back at the safetrailer, having likely spent a long cab ride tip-toeing around whether or not to that night of daiquiris and rim-jobs lo those many years ago, they discover that things haven’t quite gone as planned. After finding the random chick who owned the trailer dead, they get a timely call from MacCready himself, informing Frank that he’s holding Billy and Annie up at his ski lodge. MacCready warns that he had better come meet him there with “the stuff” by dawn or he might lost both his casual girlfriend and the dependent that he really didn’t seem to want in the first place in one fell swoop. Does no one else see the problem with this? Seriously?

This couldn't be a more obvious time to hit them if Rutger was hanging out the windows screaming about the last time he banged the hillbillies' moms.

So, as predictable as the rampant ass-widening, childhood diabetes that KFC’s Double Down sandwich is sure to deliver, we arrive at the typical action movie “final battle”. And as much as we might be hoping that they instead say fuck it and head to a titty bar, the Super Friends rise to the challenge and journey to the ski lodge of doom to meet their fate. Of course that titty bar starts to look a like a significantly less idiotic option when compared to their actual approach: the path up to the lodge consists of a very long and exceptionally vulnerable ride on a gondola. But all is not lost, considering their rivals in this picture were drawn from a genetic wading pool. As such, MacCready’s hillbilly brigade is naturally ready and waiting to strike, but instead of hitting their prey while they’re dangling precariously above a fucking mountain, they choose to wait for the war buddies finish their slow moving ride, conveniently allowing Frank to pass the time by preparing for the coming battle by mixing some homemade explosives. Once the gondola finally arrives in the ski lodge’s station, Tex and his gaggle of well-armed thugs finally open fire, blasting the shit out of the car as it comes to a rest. But of course when they go inside to collect what they presume are going to be two corpses/tomorrow night’s dinner, they instead find that the car is empty as a result of the Super Friends managing to sneak out of a hatch in the floor. It’s nice to see that this battle has just begun and it’s already goddamn tiresome.

Now that they’ve successfully slipped into the impenetrable fortress of death and family leisure, Frank and Rutger begin running through darkened hallways with no discernible plan whatsoever until they eventually run into familiar foes in the form of the two hillbilly brothers. But with no sodolicioius panel vans to be seen, the brothers find themselves at a disadvantage. Rutger gets the drop on one of them and puts his sword across the brother’s mouth, using him as a human shield while the other one begins to go right ahead and fire anyways. As you can imagine, this idiocy inevitably leads to the one brother shooting his human pinata kin in the chest. Go fucking figure. But not to be outdone, the newly perforated sibling looks back indignantly before pulling out a gun of his own and returning the favor, shooting the other brother. So yeah, they’re both dead. Thank God. But the fighting for our heroes has just begun as the rest of Tex’s horde catches up to the Super Friends moments later and attempts to give them a led-flavored greeting. Together under fire once again all these years later, Frank finally comes face to face with an opportunity to redeem himself…only to once again show his true colors by running like a bitch and leaving Rutger to die alone. But after suffering through a series of painful flashbacks, Rutger manages to pull himself together enough to escape out of the hallway and scramble into a large theater room. The reprieve is short lived, though, as within moments the hillbilly pose floods in behind him and surrounds Rutger. And with their prey finally at their mercy, after having him hand their asses to them repeatedly up to this point, the gang of thugs naturally decides that the best course of action is to stop and take 20 fucking minutes to cock and prep their guns for what they’re assuming is the inevitable execution. But at the last moment, Frank reappears and finally redeems himself by…shutting off the rooms’ lights. Hmmm…leaving him to die twice VS flicking off a goddamn light switch? Yep, consider that debt repaid in full. Realizing that the ring of morons surrounding him with guns has been suddenly cast into darkness, Rutger makes probably the most intelligent decision in the movie thus far and simply ducks, leaving the retarded bumpkins to fire on each other, killing several of their companions before finally stopping. Confused and terrified in the darkness, the supposedly hardcore thugs stand around more stunned than a teenage girl at Justin Timberlake concert, just pointing their guns at nothing and waiting for the inevitable. And of course, Rutger calmly obliges them, weaving his way through the darkness and cutting them down with ease. The best part of this scene is that the hillbillies are acting like the room is pitch black, and yet there is very clearly a significant amount of light pouring in from doorways around the room’s perimeter. I know that filming in absolute darkness can’t be easy, but really? This is supposed to be pitch black and we can’t do any better than sexy mood lighting?

Holy shit...it's so dark that I totally can't see the things that are clearly illuminated around me.

After killing idiot rednecks in the not-quite-darkness, the final confrontation continues when Rutger and Frank finally make it up to the pinnacle of the lodge where they find a highly irritable MacCready and his hostages. After storming in and going through the obligatory exercise of surrendering their guns and the load of stolen drugs, the main event finally begins. Seeing as this is an 80′s action movie, you don’t need me to reassure you that this clash will be truly epic, but I don’t think anyone could possibly be prepared for the moment that a random Asian dude walks into the room with a sword to face off against Rutger. You heard me. Apparently when MacCready demanded Bruce Lee’s brother, he wasn’t fucking around. So I’m not sure if this is supposed to actually be the long lost brother or just some random Asian guy that MacCready snagged from a neighborhood mall after assuming that he knew martial arts solely because he was Asian, but we’ll assume the former and just call this dude Chad Lee. Rutger obliges his challenge of course, and a sweet sword fight ensues which is in no way completely deflated by the obvious method of speeding up the film to make it look more intense. Eventually Rutger and Chad Lee end up fighting on the edge of a hot tub that has a random severed electrical floating around in it. Figuring that it might somehow make for the most ultimate attack of awesomeness ever to blow its load into human eyes, Chad Lee decides that it would be sheer brilliance to combine swinging on a rope trapeze contraption that just happens to be hanging over the hot tub for no conceivable reason with his final slashing sword attack. And as anyone with more brain functionality than a particularly dim-witted carrot might assume, Rutger’s response is to merely duck and cut the rope, dropping Chad Lee into the electrocuting hot tub. No shit.

This is totally the best idea I've ever had...whoa...SHIT!

But just when we think this grand struggle can’t get any better, it ushers in one the dumbest fucking endings you can imagine, short of involving a boxing kangaroo with a foot fetish. After Rutger finishes reliving the glory of his ‘Nam days by killing an Asian for the first time in 20 years, Tex walks in and wastes another clear shot at Rutger by hitting him square in the arm. To his credit, Rutger manages to keep his head and issues a swift response in the form of a thrown sword directly into his opponent’s gut. With a grimace of pain, Tex rips out and discards the sword before falling to the ground and crawling for the gun that he had carelessly dropped. And with this brief pause in the action, Billy leaps on the chance to make a dash for the Cane-Sword, heroically tossing it to Rutger only to watch him bobble the catch and send the weapon plummeting into the electrocuting hot tub of death. This was so careless that you’d almost think he was – oh I don’t know – a fucking blind man. But as Tex continues crawling towards the gun slowly, Rutger comes up with Plan B and grabs Chad Lee’s sword instead. With one last dramatic slow motion shot, Rutger runs up just as Tex reaches his gun and hits him with a massive slash before he can get a shot off. And while that sounds great, it gets even better when the greasy turd rockets backward out of a window only to fall down a massive fucking cliff, splitting in half as he falls and making him look a lot like Darth fucking Maul if the Sith lord happened to have an aversion to bathing. Just as a side note, while all this is going on, Frank wrestles with MacCready for control of a gun, but that struggle is never actually resolved on camera. So we don’t see Frank actually disarm and subdue MacCready, so who knows what the fuck happens there. I guess it doesn’t matter at this point.

I can hear Schwarzenegger shouting in the distance: "Hey Tex, time to split!"

Exhibit H: Maybe Tomorrow I’ll Wanna Settle Down

Now that our improbable journey has come to an end, it’s time to match its meandering, arbitrary splendor with an equally mind-numbing epilogue, and it just kind of writes itself when you stop to think about it. With an absentee father, his trashy girlfriend, an obnoxious kid, and a blind lethal weapon left to their own devices, they naturally decide to pile onto a bus and start a new life in San Fransisco, on the verge of possibly creating one of the dumbest fucking sit-coms the world has seen since Full House. But at the last moment, Rutger manages to muster a shred of common sense and tosses away his bus ticket. And while his new parents board the bus just ahead of him, Billy takes notice of Rutger’s swift escape, chasing after him while crying about how much he needs either him or possibly the smell of soiled panties to get him going in the morning. I’m not really sure as we stopped paying attention about 20 minutes ago. Giving the little ankle biter one last hug, Rutger tells Billy that he’s quite fond of his asinine existence but that he must go back to his father. To then punctuate exactly how much he doesn’t want to be around the kid anymore, Rutger gets up and wanders through traffic before eventually disappearing behind a passing bus. Yet again, that’s pretty goddamn impressive for a blind man. Not ready to give up, Billy starts running like a lunatic in the direction that he guesses that Rutger went, screaming for the blind man to come back while his his newly adopted parents prove exactly how much they love him by not bothering to even get off the bus to see where the hell he is. Eventually Billy stops at a bridge where he cries out to Rutger, exclaiming that he hates him. But just as Billy stands blubbering, his bus suddenly pulls up and Franks jumps out to retrieve him, begging the question how did this fucking bus know where to go to find him and why did the driver agree to go chasing after him in the first place? But even more importantly, can we possibly top this bullshit? Yes. Yes we can.

It's a common misconception to think that he's crying over Billy, but it's actually over the fashion catastrophe that is those goddamn glasses.

The final groan worthy moment of excellence comes as Rutger walks out from under the bridge where Billy gave his emotional farewell, very obviously crying. This suggests that either he was lying to Billy earlier when he said that he couldn’t cry or the love of an exceptionally annoying child suddenly managed to fix an actual medical problem. Either way is equally idiotic, so who gives a shit. But with that, the movie finally ends with Rutger hitchhiking as he wanders away down a highway, beginning what is assured to be yet another epic journey. Is this the setup for a sequel? Will he see our wandering hero once again slashing his way through both the criminal underworld and the everyday obstacles that a handicapped man must face?

Don’t bet on it.

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie is classic. It’s premise is idiotic and disgustingly stereotypical of an 80′s action film, featuring a hero that’s conceptually ridiculous while still managing to be skillfully executed by a very credible thespian in Rutger Hauer. The villains run the gamut of stupidity, ranging from amusingly ineffectual to shockingly ball-faced. It’s only major weak point comes in the form of Billy the kid, and much like the legendary western bandit of the same name, I’d pretty much beg to have this particular one hung by the scrotum. Seriously, much like a healthy sex life, kids almost always ruin a movie and this one is no exception. But still, there are enough laughs here to make it worth a watch. I give Blind Fury four dry-humping-filled training montages out of five cases of jungle crotch rot.

What We Learned:

Donkey: If your brother dies under mysterious circumstances, the only way that you can possibly top him is to die under absolutely ludicrous circumstances. Preferably involving a hot tub.

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: a double feature like you couldn’t possibly imagine as we dissect two of The Asylum’s newest and most awesomely named films in…”MEGA SHARK VS GIANT OCTOPUS” VS “MEGA PIRANHA” VS COMMON SENSE.

Back To The Main Page.

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

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

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

The Plot:

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

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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

Donkey: As this is our second dance with the master of swagger, brawn, and wooden acting known as Dolph Lundgren, we find ourselves clenching both our tasty beverages and our bowels just a little bit harder than normal, preparing for the spectacle that is about to unfold. To quote Forest Gump, having a man of Dolph’s caliber attached to your film is “like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get…until he pops out of that box of chocolates and smashes your fucking face through your colon”. Or something like that. But when casting Dolph, the very least of what you’re going to need is an exceptionally terrible threat for him to overcome. After all, playing referee to a high stakes game of octogenarian Shuffleboard, battling a rival gang of kindergarten girls to determine who draws the fluffiest kittens, or any other frilly bullshit that the prettier Hollywood elite might be called in to handle just isn’t going to get the job done in this case. Short of the dong-punching glory of JCVD or possibly an elephant with a steroid problem, very little could stand as proper opposition to Dolph. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the only way to make this movie last longer than 3 minutes and 2 clown-shattering roundhouse kicks is to immediately introduce an antagonist from the depths of the cosmos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibit E: No More Mr. Passively Disinterested Guy

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Moneyshot: “I come in peace…”

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

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

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

The Verdict:

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

What We Learned:

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

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

Back To The Main Page.

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

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

The Plot:

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

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibit C: Close Encounters Of The Turd Kind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verdict:

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

What We Learned:

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

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

Back To The Main Page.

Prepare for a 90 minute penis measuring contest.

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

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

The Plot:

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

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

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: Unlike most of our adventures into the land of pain and despair captured on film, this entry is polite enough to prepare us for the ordeal ahead by beginning with an ominous warning. Just as the Warner Brothers logo fades away from the screen, the disembodied voice of Sylvester Stallone mutters, “Okay, let’s do it” while in no way sounding like he has a mouthful of goat semen. This might as well have been followed by the sound of rubber gloves snapping onto his hands while he asks me to touch my ankles, because at this point it seems pretty clear to me that I’m going to feel like a finger has been up my ass by the time this movie is done.

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

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

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

Stallone: “Glad you could drop in.”

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

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

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

Stallone: “Rambo is a pussy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibit C: Stop! Or My Ass Will Chafe!

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

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

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

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

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

Oh hey, shit, there's Waldo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verdict:

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

What We Learned:

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

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

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

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

The Plot:

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

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

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

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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

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

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

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

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

The face of disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice to see you!

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

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

Sarge, permission to deploy marshmellows, sarge!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verdict:

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

What We Learned:

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

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

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

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

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

The Plot:

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

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

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: Ah yes.

Milobar: His greatest role.

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

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

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

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

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

Milobar: …horribly choreographed, shitty fighting with Achilles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: He probably shot the guy in the dick.

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: They might just go into space.

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

Donkey: So it’s just an elaborate diaper?

Blombo: It’s also their air conditioning.

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

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

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

This is like a step class for the criminally idiotic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milobar: They continue to slowly walk towards one another…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milobar: What the fuck is Alexander doing here?

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

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

Milobar: He fights for a cure for the herpes.

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

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

Blombo: That might be the worst nightmare scene ever.

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: It tastes funny too.

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

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

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

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

Donkey: Which I believe is horse semen.

Milobar: I don’t believe. I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: Good lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still not as stupid as the El Camino.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: I guess the suits work then.

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

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

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

Blombo: Like a flashlight?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milobar: Better extend that antenna.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milobar: Geronimo!

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: Of course.

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

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

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

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

Milobar: And here comes the dildo.

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

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

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

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

Blombo: Glorious.

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

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

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

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

Blombo: Why are you undressing me?

Milobar: Stop taking my clothes off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: That saw dick is awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blombo: This is awful.

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

Blombo: That’s unstoppable.

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

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

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

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

Donkey:…THUMBS UP!

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

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

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

Milobar: That movie was so ridiculous.

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

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

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

Blombo: Right next to ET for the Atari 2600.

The Verdict:

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

What We Learned:

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

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

Back To The Main Page.

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.

That banner above the movie's title might just be the greatest trifecta of insanity known to man, and yet it still can't prepare you for what's to come.

Donkey: There are few jobs that can be better for an avid lover of cinema than working at a video store. I had the fortune of doing just that for a couple of years in my late teens, and apart from being a pretty damned easy job, it also provided me with a cache of memorable moments to look back on for years to come. Some were enraging, some were hilarious, and some left me in a state of confused wonder. One such case happened in the adult section of the store. For some bizarre reason, the store’s office could only be accessed by going through the adult movie section, so when it came time to cash out at the end of your shift, you had to make that journey and cause significant discomfort to anyone who was in there, perusing the selection of spank material. But as I was making the trek one day, I was stopped by a man who asked me, “So what’s good in here?” It took a moment for the question to even register, and then another moment to actually believe what I had heard. This was basically tantamount to asking me, “So what do you suggest I jerk off to?” I pointed him in the direction of women-over-forty section, reassuring him with a haughty thumbs up and moved on as quickly as possible, wondering who the hell asks that goddamn question to a stranger in a porn room.

But that confusing ordeal was nothing compared to the day I first put copies of Double Team on the store’s new release wall. I had never heard of the film before, which was surprising when you consider how many Cannes Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and various other critical awards that it didn’t win. Seriously, I think new flavors of Nerds candy get more advertising than this movie ever did. But looking at the cast of this movie, proudly displayed on its cover, it was clear that advertising was the least of its problems. Jean Claude Van Damme. A fine choice, as he always brings the awesome. Mickey Rourke. A sure sign of B-movie quality, since this was before his triumphant return in recent years and during the time that he was being used to describe the severe phobia of showers. And then there was…Dennis Rodman? Could this movie possibly be as bad as it promised to be? It was a question that haunted my dreams for over a decade until we finally got the answer: no. It’s worse. Much, much worse.

The Plot:

Donkey: If you, like me, have ever wondered what a Bond movie would be like if James Bond had spent less time spreading crotch fungus and more time doing the splits and showing off his balls, then Double Team is the movie for you. If you can stop drooling long enough to clap your hands and smile when there are loud explosions on the screen, then this movie is for you too. If you’re a fan of coherent plots and passable acting, then this movie is not for you.

Double Team is the tale of Jack Quinn, a government agent whom has been brought out of retirement to make one last attempt to capture Stavros, his deadly rival played by Mickey Rourke. When this attempt fails, JCVD is proclaimed dead to the world and shipped off to a secret island, where he is made to join a secret counter-terrorist organization. But when Rourke takes JCVD’s pregnant wife hostage, JCVD has no choice but to go rogue and escape the island, seeking the help of an arms dealer with a heart of gold and a head covered in Technicolor despair named Yaz, played by Dennis Rodman, in a desperate attempt to save his family.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: The movie begins with the final mission of JCVD’s assuredly illustrious career as a government agent. A career that has undoubtedly been filled with thrills, spills, and unnecessary groin stretching. He’s been sent to recapture a truckload of plutonium that was stolen from a military base outside of Croatia before it can be sold to the Iraqis. There we have it folks. After all the whining done by the liberal elite and their ridiculous need for “facts”, this movie answers where Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were. You’re welcome, Bush administration. The scene begins with JCVD standing in an empty warehouse in front of a very fancy looking truck.

The plastic over the truck would fool all but the best government agent.

Moments later that same truck comes bursting through the large cargo doors of the warehouse, diving down and smashing through other vehicles in its path. This scene then turns into the truck making an incredibly stereotypical Bond-like getaway as it’s being chased and shot at by unidentified soldiers, which culminates in the truck coming up to a train crossing just as a train begins to go by. Undaunted, the truck takes an unexplainable and ridiculously high jump, smashing through the top of one of the train’s cars before landing on the other side and continuing along on its way. I don’t really understand this whole opening scene. He’s stealing back plutonium by stealing a fancy truck that was left alone in an empty warehouse? The scene is therefore suggesting that the group of rogue bandits stole a truck full of plutonium and then left the plutonium on that truck alone in a warehouse without leaving so much as a single guard behind to watch over it. The only way you could find a group that stupid is if they had left to go produce an Asylum film. But even if you look past that massive elephant in the room of logic, you’re still faced with a second elephant that is waiting to rape your brain. The truck begins the scene with a small trailer attached to its back end, and by the end of getaway, that trailer’s gone. So he either ended up stealing back the truck and leaving the plutonium behind, or they had a trailer attached to it purely for aesthetical purposes. Either way, I feel like someone just pissed down my throat via my nostrils after eating a metric ton of asparagus.

But with that introduction to the madness that is to come complete, the film moves on to the South of France, three years later where JCVD appears to be enjoying his well-earned retirement as he’s flirting with his wife by reaching under her dress to tickle her mysterious lady parts in their pool. Suddenly they turn to see some random dude standing at the side of their pool, beaconing for Van Damme’s attention. The random agent, whom we’ll call Sergeant Expendable, has come to coax JCVD back into service. He refuses at first, of course, insisting that he’s retired, but Sergeant Expendable pulls out every persuasive cliché that he can think of, first telling Van Damme that he obviously misses the game, and then appealing to Jean Claude’s personal pride by telling him that Stavros has returned. Stavros, of course, is the film’s antagonist and JCVD’s rival, played by the outstanding Mickey Rourke.

The face of the enemy is a horribly plastic, disfigured one.

As JCVD is left to ponder the assault on his pride that must have been equal to agreeing to be in this picture in the first place, the movie cuts to Rome where Sergeant Expendable sits down in his car, only to be held at gunpoint by Mickey Rourke, who was waiting in the back seat. Rourke babbles on about being thankful that this guy managed to bring JCVD back into the game, because now it will be fun again. He then gets out of the car and tells Sergeant Expendable that he’s left a little surprise behind. We then see a bomb attached to the back of the driver’s seat that’s only got a few seconds left on its timer. Sergeant Expendable tries to dive out his door, but his elbow accidentally pushes down the lock. So naturally his attempts to open his door are in vain as his pathetic flails are mercifully ended by the explosion. So once again the legacy of the great Remo Williams continues, as yet another government agent is defeated by the basic workings of a common door. But now that I think about it, what the fuck was the point of this scene? Just to watch a random government agent die? A scene of Mickey Rourke trimming his toenails while humming the theme song of The A-Team would be just as goddamn relevant.

Sorry, Jean Claude. RuPaul passed on the script so you're stuck with me.

Our next stop on this random tour of the globe stops in Antwerp, as it appears that JCVD is perusing the red light district. He goes into the backroom of an S&M club and finds Yaz, played by Dennis Rodman, who is in the middle of getting a tattoo. Their introductory banter quickly turns to Dennis’s hair which looks like it was dyed by someone who hated the world but sadly chose cosmetology over the biological training required to create the super virus that could destroy it. And the truly great part about Dennis Rodman’s hair in this film is that it changes from one ridiculously insane color and pattern scheme to another in each scene of the film. This means that unless Dennis is actually bald and just wearing a different hair-like helmet every day that the movie is suggesting that he’s actually stopping every night to carry out a ridiculous dye job that would take hours. But it’s back to business now, as apparently Rodman is an arms dealer and JCVD has come to do a little bit of last minute shopping. Strange, as you’d think if JCVD was a government agent, the government would supply him with as many weapons as he needed. But they distract us from this thought as we’re treated to the first of many basketball references with the following unmotivated exchange:

JCVD: “Offense gets the glory.”

Rodman: “But defense wins the game.”

If that idiotic quip seems like it was shoehorned into the movie about as gracefully as a fat man unwrapping a Twix bar after a four day fast, you still have no idea how right you are. And that’s just fucking stupid. Do we really need to point out the fact that Dennis Rodman is a goddamn basketball player? Really? If Steven Tyler was playing a goddamn doctor in the film, would you have him say, “Sure I can perform the surgery to save your ailing infant, ma’am, but first BWWAAAACHAAABAAWWWW ROCK!”

JCVD apparently found what he was looking for as he’s soon back to meeting with his strike team, forming a strategy on how they’re going to ambush and capture Rourke, which is going to be done in an amusement park. The plan takes about thirty seconds to go over, and it consists of, “Who’s my sniper? You? Good, shoot him with this converted tranquillizer sniper rifle”. And that’s it. What a great fucking plan. With all that preparation being done, I don’t see what could possibly go wrong.

The film then transitions to the fateful amusement park scene, where it’s a rainy night and the perfect time to be riding a rollercoaster. As the government team is set up all over the area, looking highly suspicious and not even remotely undercover, Rourke and his men arrive. But JCVD’s spidey-senses begin tingling and he detects that something is wrong. He declares that the group that his team is watching is the wrong group. JCVD shouts for someone to find the driver of the car that Rourke’s group had arrived in, and eventually they pan over to where we see Mickey standing in ridiculous high top sneakers that go half way up to his knee. A woman walks up to him, opens her trench coat and reveals Rourke’s young son. Lady, why the hell was that kid in your coat? He looks a little old to be riding around in your womb. Mickey suddenly realizes that he’s being ambushed as he cuddles with his son, so he leaps up and shoots the sniper perched next to Van Damme, whom we remember is quite literally the sole recipient of the mission’s ‘plan’. And please note that he shoots her from about one hundred yards away. Through her sniper scope. Into her eye. Seriously. That’s awesome. I’m surprised he didn’t just accomplish the same thing by kicking a bullet in her direction. And since the only part of the ‘plan’ is now dead, all hell breaks loose as people start firing guns all over the damn place, which eventually results in Mickey Rourke’s wife/girlfriend/personal oiler and child being gunned down. After taking a moment to show just the right amount of action movie despair over the loss of his only child (2.3 seconds), Rourke flees the scene only to be pursued by JCVD. During this time, we see that they both have this bizarre slow-down vision, like a shitty precursor to The Matrix, which allows them to dodge bullets. So I guess these two are super heroes, and ones that prove to be about as useful as the Silver Surfer.

The pain! The sexy, sexy pain!

Eventually JCVD follows Rourke into a dark and abandoned building, which appears to be a hospital, where soon the mono-e-grease-o face off will begin. Rourke is waiting for JCVD in what appears to be the hospital’s nursery, as he’s surrounded by babies in cribs. Wait, if there are still babies in this hospital, then why isn’t there anyone else there? Shouldn’t there be nurses, or maybe even a security guard or two? Or when shit started hitting the fan, did the staff say, “Fuck it, these things haven’t been around long enough for anyone to have gotten really attached to them…leave the babies and make a break for it”? And once his battle with Van Damme finally begins, Rourke leverages these tiny hostages as he sends a crib rolling towards JCVD that has both a baby and a grenade it in. Jean Claude quickly tosses the grenade into an open elevator and starts to run with the crib, just before the explosion goes off behind him. JCVD makes a face that looks like he just made a romance explosion in his pants as he falls, passed out, and the scene fades to black.

JCVD wakes up slowly, bandaged and in a strange bed. He sits up to see a computer next to him, as a narrator is going through a profile of him that will soon turn into an A&E Biography. It flashes what I would assume is an old picture of Van Damme as a toddler, and then one of him as a very young boy. That’s got to be one of the greatest pictures I’ve ever seen.

With a haircut like that, you know you're going to have to learn how to fight.

The narrator concludes by saying that JCVD was charged with capturing Rourke, but he failed because he went soft. I’m not really sure what happened in the last scene that would constitute saying that he went soft. He should have just left that baby to explode and continued on after Rourke, I guess. But the baby-hating narrator continues, saying that JCVD still has usefulness, despite his failings, so he’s been brought to…THE COLONY. Of course, if Van Damme doesn’t like it, he’s perfectly welcome to kill himself. If he knew what was to come, Jean Claude might have taken that option much more seriously. But seriously, what kind of fucking job did JCVD have that was so unforgiving that if you didn’t catch your prey after a single attempt, they made it look like you were dead and took you to an island colony to live out the rest of your life in forced servitude?

Regardless, JCVD goes out the front door of the house that he’s laying in and is greeted by his biographer’s narrator, played by Paul Freeman or as most people will know him, Belloq from Raiders Of The Lost Ark, who is standing by a golf cart. Belloq gathers up JCVD and takes him for the grand tour of the Island of Misfit Toys. We soon discover that everyone on the island is someone that was supposed to have died, being either a government agent or one of their rivals. As Van Damme’s being introduced to people next to a swimming pool, we find out that one of those people is an old BFF of Van Damme’s that he thought he had killed. This guy rises out of the pool, comes over the shake Van Damme’s hand to tell him there are no hard feelings, and punches JCVD in the face before the two of them are separated.

JCVD is then presented with a watch, which he must wear at all times on the island. It also functions as a pager, with an LCD screen that tells him when he must return to his room and check in using a thumbprint scanner. Everyone then moves into a giant communications chamber where we see the entire point of this island. This group of Hawaiian shirt wearing middle-aged men is an agency that keeps governments as clients and deciphers information regarding terrorist activities for said clients. They do so by sitting around a massive holographic display where they are monitored as they assess incoming information and computer simulations. The first example that they deal with involves a passenger jet which the White House Press Secretary is claiming in a press conference was shot down by Koreans. They look at the flight data and various recreations, as JCVD watches the press conference over and over again, until finally he declares that the Press Secretary is lying. Upon hearing this, they discover evidence that this is the case and congratulations are passed out accordingly. So to sum up what we’ve just seen, JCVD’s expertise literally just came down to saying, “that dude’s lying” without giving so much as a reason why he believed that was the case. Awesome.

Moments later we see JCVD standing out on the edge of a cliff, looking out at the ocean and pining for either his freedom or a pair of inexcusably tight pants. Not really sure which is the case. As he looks down, Van Damme sees that the surrounding ocean is being guarded by an underwater laser grid system. Belloq joins JCVD and tells him that no one has ever escaped the island. Beyond the technical barriers like the thumbprint sign in and the laser grid system in the water, everyone is assigned a secret guardian whom watches over their assignee and makes sure that they don’t escape. It’s kind of like your office’s Secret Santa system, if Santa only delivered painful and merciless death.

The movie then turns to JCVD’s wife, who is sitting and staring out into the rain, hoping that even though she believes him to be dead, her ballerina will somehow come home. She gets a phone call and we discover that she’s been commissioned for an art exhibit, which we later discover has been set up by none other than Mickey Rourke. We can only imagine that he’s keeping her close so that Mickey can rape her mouth in the same way that he wished he could have with JCVD when he had the chance.

The movie turns back to the island and we see that a cargo plane is flying into view, which gives JCVD the first inklings of his master plan of escape. The plane flies in and dumps a bundle of supplies into the ocean near the island. The laser grid is turned off just before the cargo hits the water and a team of people are there to pull the delivery up onto a raft right away. A similar load is also prepared and left on another raft to be taken away, so the plane loops back around and picks it up using the same “sky hook” technique that Batman used to capture the Chinese accountant in The Dark Knight, where a hook on a cable snatches up the cargo as it flies by. There are two questions that I have in seeing this process. First, who is just working on that island? If it’s so top-secret that its residents can never leave, how the hell did you manage to convince people to come work here? Second, what exactly are they leaving for the plane to take away? Is that just garbage? Is there no other way to get rid of it? Or are they producing something on that island? I’d like to think that’s the case and that when the residents aren’t analyzing terrorist data, they’re busy assembling McHappy Meal toys.

Get used to it. This is just one of many, many times you're going to see his balls.

Seeing his window of opportunity, JCVD is inspired and begins a rigorous routine. He begins marking his calendar, monitoring his progress as he tries to bring his body back into fighting/dancing shape. And how does he do that? By doing the splits, naturally. But in order to make it look legitimate, he’s doing the splits by putting one leg up a door frame and leaning into it. And much like Gymkata and almost every other JCVD movie ever created, we get a sweet taint shot as he’s wearing shorts that are just a little too damn short. But it’s not just his crotch that needs to be finely tuned. We see JCVD lying in the bath tub, using a lit cigarette as a timer as he tries to hold his breath under water for longer and longer.

This montage of sweetness is interrupted by another scene where the group is analyzing another terrorist act. As they all sit in their circle, watching incoming footage, JCVD deciphers a code that has been left for him. It consists of graffiti that’s been left on a wall that says, “I have your butterfly”. Because JCVD’s wife has a butterfly tattoo, he knows exactly what this means and who has left it for him. But instead of telling anyone else, JCVD says that this is not work of Rourke, but a copycat. Jean Claude knows the ante has been upped now, so it’s time for….MORE TRAINING!

JCVD kicks his routine into high gear, with deeper and deeper splits. He uses his bed sheet tied to a bucket of rocks as a pulley to exercise his legs, and then begins to kick the bucket as hard as he can until it explodes and sends rocks everywhere. That just seems like it’s inviting anyone with half a brain to investigate what the hell he’s doing. He might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says, “Ask me about my complicated escape plan.” But then the scene turns to something even better. Once again JCVD uses his bed sheet, but this time he’s got it tied to the front of his bathtub as he loops it over his neck and shoulders and begins to lift it off the floor. The ridiculous hip thrusts and the expression on his face make it look like he’s having sex with that bath, which is only amplified as he slowly raises his arms and puts his hands behind his head, using nothing but sheer crotch power. This is singlehandedly the most ridiculous, yet sexiest exercise I’ve ever seen in any movie.

Fuck the runner's high, I'm switching to the JCVD exercise regiment.

Preparations continue as the movie shows JCVD taking an exacto knife and cutting off a layer of skin from his thumb, which he will use with an elaborate system reminiscent of the breakfast machine in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure that will go through a series of motions before ending with an eraser touching JCVD’s severed thumbprint to the scanner. I’m sure that like me, you’re asking how the hell he managed to get his hands on an exacto knife in the first place. And since no answer is forthcoming, let’s just say that he made one out of soap, discarded fishing lures, and intestinal cramping. Finally, everything is in place.

Calling it a grid might be a little generous. It's more like a laser clusterfuck.

As the cargo plane once again approaches the island, we see JCVD standing on the edge of the cliff, waiting. Back in his room, the elaborate system that he set up works its magic and hits the fingerprint scanner, successfully telling the security system that he has checked into his room. As the cargo is being dropped, JCVD dives from the cliff and touches down just after the laser grid is deactivated. As Van Damme begins to swim underwater toward the raft where the load is waiting to be taken away, he is suddenly attacked from behind. It’s his old BFF in a scuba suit, trying to grab JCVD from behind and get his revenge. But the Muscles from Brussels will have none of it. He tosses a series of punches and kicks, which anyone who’s ever tried to do anything underwater could tell you shouldn’t move fast enough to hurt a geriatric fly on life support, that results in his attacker losing his breathing aparatus and being pushed back. Van Damme then swims on and comes up underneath the raft, just as the workers have finished preparing the load to be picked up. Seeing the plane is only seconds away, JCVD’s hand punches through the bottom of the raft and latches onto the bundle, just before it’s snatched away by the plane. He and the cargo package soar off into the air to freedom. Back in the water, we see that JCVD’s BFF has finally got himself composed, just in time for the laser grid to come back on and cause him to explode. Damn. So wait a minute…let’s review that. That guy was wearing a scuba suit, therefore he must have known ahead of time that JCVD had planned on escaping. Why didn’t he stop him before he made it into the water? And what did he plan on doing if he had actually managed to round up JCVD underwater? No matter what he had done, there was no way that he could have got them both out of the water in time to escape the laser grid. So was he intending that they both die?

Anyways, we return to the movie and see JCVD holding onto the dangling cargo netting as the plane slowly pulls the load into its rear door. As the cargo finally makes it all the way in and the first member of the flight crew comes to check things out, he’s surprised by JCVD, who has the courtesy to ask him if he has a parachute before he kicks the dude out the open bay. JCVD then leaps to his feet and runs to meet the other two crew members in the bay, attacking the first one with a sliding leg attack that the man should have seen coming three weeks in advance. But quickly those two men are also tossed out the back of the plane, as Van Damme takes a gun and manages to get into the cockpit, where he successfully completes the hijacking. And just as he soars away into the horizon, the movie turns back to the island where Belloq enters JCVD’s room and discovers that he’s escaped. Curses.

We travel back to Antwerp’s red light district next, where Dennis Rodman is outside his S&M nightclub/weapons lair, getting onto a motorcycle in an outfit that would make Liberace blush. Just as he’s about to pull away, we see the bike’s back tire lift, keeping him from going anywhere. Dennis turns and sees that JCVD is holding up the back of his bike with surprising ease. I don’t think this movie realizes how heavy a motorcycle, especially one with a very large man on it, really is. There’s no way that JCVD is lifting that thing. After a brief and pointless struggle, Dennis Rodman lets JCVD back into his cache and loads him up with guns, before he has the common sense to ask for payment and discover that JCVD isn’t carrying any money. Van Damme promises that he’s got access to three CIA accounts, which he will hand over to Dennis in payment. Rodman again shows that he’s nothing like an actual arms dealer and agrees. Pushing his luck, JCVD then also asks for help in getting back home, which once again Rodman agrees to. Goddamn, this is just neighborly. I hope Rodman offers to do his taxes next.

So hitting the ground at full speed in an inflated ball is supposed to save them how, exactly?

In the next scene, JCVD and Dennis are in a plane, getting ready to jump out. They eventually dive and come together in the air, where JCVD pulls a chord on Dennis’s suit. This causes them to be encompassed by a goddamn inflated ball, which is naturally painted to look like a basketball and protects them as they hit the ground. That is so unforgivably stupid that I’m surprised they didn’t go through a goddamn hoop first and have Rodman yell something about making a three pointer.

Now that he’s back on land, JCVD continues on to his house, where he sees a woman with what appears to be a baby inside. It’s clearly not his wife, but could it be a nanny taking care of his young child? No. JCVD sneaks around the back and enters his home, slowly making his way up to the crib just as the strange woman walks away from it. He peeks in and sees that instead of a baby, there’s a bomb inside that’s only got two seconds left on it. He turns and leaps away, probably getting only about two feet away, just as a massive explosion goes off. But rather than incinerating him as basic human intelligence dictates would be the case, instead He somehow comes rocketing out of the house along with the flames. He then jumps over a van that is racing onto the scene, when it crashes into the house causing yet another explosion and we get a sweet camera shot where he’s diving away from the massive fireball behind him. Just as random henchmen start coming to investigate, he somehow manages to twist himself around in midair and land on his back on an inflatable raft in his pool, where he immediately starts shooting the henchmen with unmatched accuracy. Once he has them dealt with, JCVD climbs out of the pool and turns to see the woman who was dressed as the nanny as she stumbles around the flaming rubble that was his house with a gun. Considering she had just walked away when he discovered the bomb, she couldn’t have been more than ten feet away either when it went off, so it’s just as fucking stupid that she’s still alive, but at least she has the common courtesy to look like hell. JCVD looks over at her, then decides to turn his back to her for some reason that only him, Jesus, and Gino Vanelli knows. She begins to shoot at him, which is apparently much to his surprise, before he returns fire while she commits her dying act of lobbing a grenade in his direction. It lands in the pool beside him, he gets an extremely constipated look on his face, and once again we get an awesome shot of him diving through the air as a massive explosion goes off behind him. Of course, I wouldn’t think a grenade that’s completely submerged in a pool could create an explosion considering it’s surrounded by water with no flammable substance to be found anywhere. But apparently, I’m an idiot.

Why did I fill my pool with diesel?! ARRGGGGH!!!

That scene of true excellence comes to a close as JCVD stumbles away from his house and discovers a car that one of the henchmen must have been driving a short ways down the road. Inside it’s playing a message from Mickey Rourke on repeat, which is telling JCVD that he has his wife and that the baby’s due tomorrow while a postcard on the windshield shows him where to go. Insidious. As JCVD stops to digest this information and consider cleaning the sourfudge loaf out of his underwear, Dennis Rodman emerges from the darkness just in time to smack down the last remaining henchmen with a combination of karate chops and love. JCVD turns to Rodman and explains that he needs to get to Rome immediately. Rodman grins like he just cut a fart and tells him not to worry, he’ll take care of the transportation.

The movie takes a moment away from cancer inducing action to deliver some spine-jarring comedy in the next scene, which shows Rodman in a tight, ridiculous orange hood, stealing a car that looks to be smaller than an Austin Mini. As he goes to drive away, he cracks open its sunroof and sticks his head out the top…get this…because he’s too tall for the car! HILARITY ABOUNDS!

After a quick scene with Belloq that shows that he clearly knows where JCVD is going, as the entire colony is keeping tabs on him somehow, the movie proceeds to the hotel in Rome that Rourke told JCVD to travel to. Rodman walks in and collects a package that has been left for Van Damme with the front desk attendant before he takes it outside to a café where JCVD is sipping on a coffee. After a poorly acted exchange, JCVD admits to Rodman that the three accounts that he had promised him were CIA fronts that had no money in them. Rodman demands to know why JCVD’s been lying to him, at which point JCVD reveals the contents of the package that Rodman had picked up at the hotel: a sonogram of his unborn child. Rather than being horrified, the arms dealer with the heart of gold instead agrees to join JCVD and stop Rourke. But as inspiring as this is, it’s immediately destroyed by another goddamn basketball reference.

Rodman: “It’s time to get off the bench.”

JCVD: “The best defense is a good offense.”

WHAT?! That doesn’t even make sense. But they top it off with a ridiculous signature handshake: a fist bump followed by a quarter turn of the wrist, just to lock into place. The only way that could be dumber is if they showed the discussion where the two of them decided on that, followed by the couple of practice tries that would be required to do that routine.

Hence begins the world's worst porno.

The movie then turns to them planning their attack, while talking to each other with their faces so close together that they only way it could be described as appropriate was if they were going to start making out at any moment. Their plan consists of JCVD sending a fake message back to The Colony telling them where Rourke will be and suggesting that they act, which he knows will be intercepted by Mickey Rourke. How, I’m not sure. But moments later we see that Rourke has in fact caught wind of the message, just as anticipated.

Yo yo yo, my homies. What is up with it? Know where can I get my hands on some of the dope?

JCVD’s grand scheme soon comes to fruition, as we see a square with a whole shitload of things going on in it. There are vendors, a wedding, and a bunch of people just hanging out. And once again, showing as much subtlety as a coked up elephant in china shop, there are various government agents standing around everywhere making very poor attempts to look like they’re undercover. Dennis Rodman strides into view and crosses over to meet the greatest spectacle in the scene, however; JCVD in a ridiculous wig, trying to look like a punk. Goddamn, that looks glorious. If that doesn’t scream NARC, I don’t know what does. They sit and wait, looking around at the spectacle before them when JCVD notices that there’s a car waiting at a traffic light nearby with his wife sitting in the back seat. He runs for it, screaming her name as it takes off. Trying to give chase, JCVD eventually comes face to face with Rourke, where another unintelligible conversation ensues. But seeing JCVD and Rourke standing together causes all the government agents to jump into action, and once again everyone starts shooting at everyone else with no discernable goal in mind. And once again, like the carnival sting earlier in the film, I have no idea what’s going on.

Eventually JCVD ends up running off towards a building after a sniper that had been set up on one of the roofs. I’m not sure why he’s picked this person to target, but whatever. Dennis Rodman is also in pursuit, and you know that means it’s time for more basketball bullshit. He grabs a dude standing on the opposite side of a car from him, brings him over the hood and tosses him into the window of a passing bus, yelling, “he’s up, he’s in”. Fuck you, Dennis. With that done, we turn back to Van Damme who has followed the sniper back to the door of the hotel room where, unbeknownst to him, they had been keeping his wife a short time ago. A very unremarkable fight scene ensues, as Jean Claude disposes of the sniper and another random Asian dude that kicks his shoes at JCVD and then proceeds to attack him with a switchblade that he holds between his toes. I’m not sure, but I think watching this scene just caused my sperm count to drop. But before it ends, JCVD looks around the room and finds a sticker with his wife’s name on it stuck to a mirror.

We are treated to a quick scene where Rourke has taken JCVD’s wife to a church hospital to give birth, while warning his hechmen to be on the lookout for Van Dammes before the movie returns to our heroes as JCVD knocks on the door of a monastery and is greeted by a friar. The monk beacons Van Damme inside and takes him down to the basement of the church, which is a room full of computer equipment and a large group of monks who are hanging out with Dennis Rodman. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this room might be the source of ninety five percent of the kiddie porn on the Internet. But these future guests of To Catch A Predator are apparently allies of Rodman’s, as Dennis supplied them with all their hi-tech gear. The monks start running a trace on the sticker that JCVD found, which is apparently the label off of a prescription. If these elderly men are like most I’ve met in my time, they’re search will consist of opening a SPAM email they received promising them discounts prescriptions on Viagra before they get a virus and their entire system is shut down. But before they can acquire anything useful on their own, they suddenly received a bunch of data that’s being sent to the by The Colony, telling them of Rourke’s exact location and where he’s keeping JCVD’s wife. How the fuck do they know that? And how the fuck did they instantaneously hack into this system to relay that information? But rather than question how retarded this whole thing is, JCVD just sends them back a message saying thanks for their blessing.

High five for pictures of naked children! YEAH!

JCVD and Rodman then make their way through secret underground tunnels as they travel to the hospital where Rourke is keeping Van Damme’s wife. This is exactly what a shitty movie needs. More goddamn tunnels. If they exit out of a goddamn culvert, we’re turning this movie off right now. Thankfully that’s not the case as they finally reach a grate that they must exit out of, which Dennis Rodman immediately begins to wire with explosives that he just happens to be carrying on him. The bomb has a wire on it, but it’s too short for them to detonate the explosive from a safe distance, so the two of them stand back as Rodman tries throwing random skulls that are at their feet in an attempt to somehow set the bomb off by hitting the wire. His first toss misses, so it’s time for another shitty basketball reference:

Rodman: “Airball!”

JCVD: “You need more practice.”

Rodman: “I never miss twice.”

Seriously, cut that shit out. Even atheists would agree that every time you make a ridiculous basketball reference, God kills a puppy with a sledgehammer. But with that bit of genius dropped on the world, Rodman hits the wire on his second toss which causes the desired explosion. Finally they make their way out into the city and continue on.

The movie turns briefly to JCVD’s wife, as she has finished giving birth to her child. Rourke tells one of his men to wait a few minutes and then kill the wife and doctor. Unsurprisingly, moments later that man finds a way to fail to do both.

Meanwhile, JCVD and Rodman finally make their way into the hospital/ancient ruins. JCVD heads up to find his wife while Rodman takes on a group of random guys while spouting exceptionally unfunny lines about being quiet in a hospital. JCVD finally finds his wife and her doctor, who are inexplicably still hanging out in the same room even after an attempt had been made on their lives only moments earlier. But the reunion is quickly spoiled, as Van Damme realizes that Rourke has made off with his son. Just then, Rodman rejoins him and tells him to go after Rourke and leave the women to him. JCVD agrees, figuring that Rodman wears enough make up that he’s definitely safe to leave his wife with, and runs off, beginning one of the most epic final battles known to man.

JCVD wanders into the middle of an ancient, open coliseum where Mickey Rourke is waiting for him. He has JCVD’s son in a bassinette and, naturally, he’s standing there with no shirt on. Because we all know that if you’re going to have a final showdown, you have to play shirts versus skins.

Why am I glistening like this? One word, mister: Filth.

But just then, Rourke reveals one final mini-boss that JCVD will have to face before they can begin their dance of death, as a tiger suddenly comes loping into the arena. And like all final battles, Rourke has also added one last infuriatingly unnecessary obstacle, pointing out that there are many small crosses all over the dirt floor of the coliseum, all of which are marking the location of landmines. The tiger strolls up to the baby in the bassinette, as it sits between it and JCVD. In a desperate and yet supreme showcase of power, JCVD races up, kicks the tiger and sends it skidding away.

The CG of this tiger skidding away from the kick is so good that I'm surprised they didn't use a cardboard cut out.

But just as all seems lost, Dennis Rodman comes ripping into the arena on a motorbike which he apparently produced from his lower intestine, as I can’t think of any other place that he could have been hiding it. Rodman tears past JCVD and snatches away the child, somehow managing to avoid all the landmines that he shouldn’t know are there. And to add insult to injury, he then proceeds to rip around the arena for no discernable reason, rather than just leave straight away. And yet he still manages to not hit any of the mines. Eventually he leaves and we see him traveling down a nearby corridor, where he sees a sizeable hole in a wall near the floor. And even though there’s a goddamn tiger roaming around on the loose that could easily find and access this area, Dennis decides that this is a great place to stash the kid so that he can go back and kick some ass. Brilliant. Don’t forget to smear the kid with barbeque sauce before you leave, professor.

Shhhh! Now stay quiet and try not to look so delicious!

Back in the arena, JCVD is squaring off once again with the tiger. But realizing that doing the splits and trying to punch it in the dong will probably be futile, he wisely decides that the better course of action is to run like hell. He darts out of the arena and down a hallway where he comes to a rickety wood structure that couldn’t pass for a bridge in the most desolate areas of Mongolia, where he kicks a beam that causes the whole thing to collapse, dropping the pursuing tiger down to another level where a random henchman that’s trying to shoot Van Damme serves as a convenient meal. Just then, Rodman joins back up with JCVD again and advises this time that they bail, as the whole place is going to explode soon. From what, exactly? You know what, nevermind. JCVD tells him to take care of his son, as he’s going to go end things once and for all with Rourke.

Agreed: the loser of this fight has his career tank slightly harder than the winner.

So once again, Van Damme strolls into the coliseum and battle finally begins. As one would imagine, several minutes of extremely generic martial arts fighting ensues, which takes them out into and adjoining hallway before making their way back into the arena. And as this is going on, Belloq finally arrives on site, hopefully to once again act as the vehicle for the scorching vengeance of a petty and spiteful god and melt all these useless shits. Rodman runs across the arena to get a piece of the action, only to immediately step on a landmine, making the fact that he managed to avoid them earlier all the more insulting. But before a hilarious “oops” scene that results in a janitor having to gather up chunks of skull with badly dyed hair on it can take place, Rodman finds a way to reset the pin in the landmine and saves himself. Meanwhile, our two main characters separate from grappling for a moment, when JCVD puts his foot down right next to one of the crosses marking the location of a mine, and Rourke snickers at his bad luck. But Van Damme moves his foot, showing that the assumed landmine is not there. Just then, Rourke himself puts his foot down in a place that is not marked by a cross and hears the telltale click of doom. Rodman then pipes up, telling Rourke that he swapped the location of a bunch of his crosses. WHAT? Isn’t it fairly retarded to move the crosses around, leaving unmarked landmines all over the place? JCVD could have just as easily stepped on that, or even Rodman himself (since I doubt he’d remember where they all were). How is turning an already difficult obstacle into a random one a better move? But regardless, our two heroes enjoy a moment of self-satisfaction about leading Rourke into his inevitable doom. Well, it’s inevitable unless you count the fact that Rodman himself just managed to replace the pin and step off of a mine. If you look at it that way, then they’ve left him with a minor inconvenience at best. But Rourke would have to act fast, as just then the tiger strolls back into the arena. Rodman and JCVD run to safety, leaving the tiger looking over at Rourke and seeing its next greasy, chlamydia-ridden meal.

As they dash down a hallway, JCVD and Rodman return to where the child was left, finding it in the waiting arms of Belloq. At the same time back in the arena, the tiger makes its lunge at Rourke just as he lifts his foot off the mine, and they both go up in a blaze of shame. This of course causes all of the other landmines to explode, resulting in a massive inferno that comes roaring down the hallway after JCVD, Rodman, and Belloq as they try to run to safety. Before going on, I’d just like to point out the fact that all of the landmines exploding just because one went off is certifiably insane. Minefields in the real world wouldn’t be much of a threat if they did that. One unlucky bastard would step on one, the whole bunch of them would go up in flames, and the area would be clear. The whole point of landmines is that you have to make your way through a whole FIELD of them, hence the term MINEFIELD. But anyways, as we turn back to our heroes, we see that they are clearly not able to outrun speeding flames, so they instead duck behind a Coke vending machine, which is one of a group of them that is conveniently placed along that hallway. Those might not seem so grossly out of place if there had been so much as one other modern device seen anywhere in this complex in any other scene, but these are the first. So why the hell are those there? And as they duck behind this Coke-laden change-guzzling savior, the flames of the explosion scream past them as they are fully engulfed and yet totally untouched. A few seconds later, the fire is gone and they are left standing there, laughing and strangely craving a Pepsi.

Two hours later, a cop arrives and wonders why the Coke he just bought burns the shit out of his tongue.

I want a lock of your hair, your shirt, and for you to spank me while calling me Molly.

Finally safe, JCVD takes a moment to look at his new son as he moves to get into their getaway car. But before he can climb in, he turns to see Belloq standing a few feet away pointing a gun at him. DAMN! Belloq asks for a souvenir, consisting of, no shit, JCVD’s shirt and a piece of his hair. An awkward moment passes while JCVD tries to digest this bizarre autograph request, which is broken by Rodman pulling out a coin and tossing it into the air. As it hits the ground, it explodes into a plume of smoke and JCVD uses the distraction to dive into the car and tear off to safety. As Rodman and Belloq stand waiting for the smoke to clear, Belloq starts laughing like a lunatic at what just transpired and they both join in the giggling insanity. After a truly baffling farewell, Belloq takes off in his own car, leaving the black man to take the rap with the police. And that’s it. THAT’S where the movie ends. And really, why not?

The Verdict:

Donkey: With an outstanding career like Van Damme’s, it’s really hard to pick a true champion, one film to rule them all. After all, we’ve already discussed the brilliance of Street Fighter: The Movie, nevermind the dozen other contenders to come. But Double Team makes a strong case for the title. After all, the perfect way to counter the awesomeness of Van Damme is with the boldly insane combination of Mickey Rourke and Dennis Rodman. Then further destroy things by making Van Damme perform ridiculous exercises that will be burned into the brains of your viewers for the rest of their lives. Then flush it all away with an ending where your heroes are saved by a Coke machine. A fucking COKE MACHINE. This one’s a no-brainer. I give it five shameful basketball references out of five.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Duck and cover is most certainly bullshit, but standing behind a Coke machine can save you from any and all infernos. Remember that when the bombs fall, people.

Don’t forget to check back every Thursday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Comic book movies reach a new low in both movie and character quality as we examine…CAPTAIN AMERICA.

Back To The Main Page.

The perfect fighter that not even the army can destroy? Indeed. Oh, unless you count twice with a stick. Then yeah, they kind of can.

Donkey: Stockholm Syndrome is the psychological condition in which captives begin to sympathize with their captors. I never thought I’d understand it myself, but for some reason that kept coming to mind, and I began to wonder if there’s a similar condition in which you start to believe that you’re eating ice cream if someone shits in your mouth often enough. If that’s the case, then trust me, we had achieved it. For several months we had endured a constant see-saw assault on the senses that few could withstand, as we teetered between laughing with wild abandon and shouting our way through angry exasperation at the spectacles that were bared before us. We were in love with the thrilling rollercoaster of true shittiness that we had found ourselves on and we didn’t want it to stop. So once again we turned back to the insanity of the very appropriately named The Asylum Films.

As we have already documented, The Asylum is well known for releasing poor quality films that mirror big budget titles as they are released either in theaters or on DVD. Of course, that mirror might as well have been crafted by a drunken hamster with an inner ear infection at the Unnecessarily-Spinning Mirror Factory, only ten minutes after he’d been told that he was going to be fired at the end of the day. But regardless, we have all come to understand that as The Asylum’s modus operandi. But their true genius shines through when they release a shitty imitation of a movie that hasn’t been on anyone’s radar for YEARS. And thus we come to Universal Soldiers. Although led by the immortal Jean Claude Van Damme (which means that you know that we’ll lovingly review it eventually), the original film, Universal Soldier, was released so long ago that many people have probably forgotten it even exists. So why the hell knock it off now? Our curiosity was piqued. It was time to stuff another chocolate log down our throats.

The Plot:

Donkey: Though it bucks the trend of relevance to current titles, Universal Soldiers certainly doesn’t discard all of The Asylum’s tried and true habits, as the movie’s plot makes about as much sense as the following phrase: purple chicken on corduroy toaster.

In the year 200XX, the government has engineered super soldiers of unimaginable strength. What government? Don’t know. Uruguay, perhaps? I’m sure that the movie is implying it’s the US government, but since they can’t be bothered to say, I can’t be bothered to assume. With those super soldiers loose on an island and equipped with extra sharp sticks, the fate of the world rests in the hands of a small band of military personnel determined to stop them from somehow making their way back to the mainland and invading the closest TGI Fridays. Armed only with fully automatic assault rifles and throats that somehow never seem to go hoarse no matter how much they pointlessly scream at one another, our heroes must travel to the last beacon of hope, which is either The Armory or The Mainframe depending on who happens to be shouting at the time, in order to stand a chance. Will they make it? Will even bigger guns manage to stop three middle aged men with pointy twigs? Does any of this matter? Yes, no, and no.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Milobar: Universal Soldiers, or as I like to call it, Incoherent Shoutfest V: The Revenge of the Unintelligible Sentence.

Donkey: This has got to be my favorite Asylum film so far when it comes to the title alone. Normally when they’re choosing a title for these things, they will at least take the original title and change a word. Not this time. Instead they said, “Fuck it, just throw an ‘S’ on the end and we’re good.”

Why the hell does this thing have teeth?

Milobar: As the opening credits roll we’re treated to a glimpse of some sort of Terminator-esque robot thing.

Donkey: Why the hell do they start with this badly ripped off Terminator clone?

Milobar: I don’t understand what this has to do with the Universal Soldiers that they fight throughout the rest of the movie. The soldiers are genetically engineered super men. This is a giant robot. Make up your goddamn mind. Of course, while watching these credits we get to see a bunch of names that nobody would recognize except us, because we’ve seen a lot of these people multiple times now.

Donkey: Including Jason Gray, our favorite Asylum actor who has been in every one of these movies so far.

Milobar: We love you, Jason.

Donkey: At least this movie wasn’t produced, edited, and directed by the same person.

Milobar: That really is the mark of a great movie.

Donkey: Yeah, you know that means it’s going to be shit when it comes to The Asylum. This was, however, directed by Griff Furst, the dude who played Itchy in Transmorphers. I can’t believe that. Wait, no…I can.

Milobar: And now that the credits are done, the movie starts in a way that makes it my favorite opening of any shitty movie we’ve ever watched. It’s so goddamn ridiculous. It starts in the middle of some serious shit that they never bother to explain. They don’t give you any background information or set it up in any way. I remember watching this for the first time and saying out loud, “What the fuck? Did we just skip half way into the movie?”

Donkey: Is this a bad copy?

Milobar: That’s literally what the beginning of this movie feels like: you’ve downloaded a corrupted copy that is missing the first fifteen minutes. Not that we downloaded this movie, of course. We paid for it.

Donkey: Of course. We never download any movies and do not endorse the habit in any way. But anyways, the scene begins with a group of military personnel all standing back to back with their guns drawn in some corridor, looking like they are attempting to defend themselves from something. Suddenly some dude runs into the room and gets impaled by a spear before being yanked out of view.

Look sharp, guys, and be sure the safety's off. Those Jehovah's Witnesses will find us no matter how far underground we flee.

Milobar: By Scorpion from Mortal Kombat, apparently.

Donkey: Undaunted by seeing someone slaughtered in front of them, the group continues talking and we discover that they need to locate The Professor and get to The Armory.

Milobar: Keep in mind, someone just mentioned The Armory is only “three clicks away”, so they should be able to get there pretty damn fast if they just run.

Donkey: This group is led by the man who played Valentine in Alien Vs Hunter, this time playing The Major. Sans mustache, unfortunately.

Milobar: Well in Alien Vs Hunter, he was playing the member of a militia, whereas he is now a soldier. Everyone knows that’s the difference between army and militia.

Donkey: Yes, mustachio vs lack of mustachio. Now that they’ve decided to move out, we see our group of military personnel wandering through tunnels. And speaking of Alien Vs Hunter, this is a great fucking start for this film having just watched that one. Just what we need is more goddamn tunnels.

Milobar: This is what The Asylum does best. And if I’m not mistaken, they emerge from the tunnels out of a culvert again.

Donkey: God, I hope so.

Milobar: I’m surprised they haven’t made a movie called Tunnels And Culverts.

Donkey: As they keep going and going, because again The Asylum can’t show people travel in any fucking hurry, we see them crawling through more tunnels.

Milobar: And as they move, they’re listening to dudes screaming in the distance as they die.

Donkey: Who is dying, how, and why? We have no fucking idea. And finally they emerge out into the world. It’s more like a drainage pipe that they’re crawling out of than a full blown culvert, but regardless, it’s still retarded.

Whew! Sorry guys, I forgot that I had mom's famous 'rancid beef and blue cheese stew' last night...guess I shouldn't have been at the front of the line...

Milobar: And now we’re treated to the other thing the The Asylum does best: very poorly edited audio.

Donkey: Immediately our team begins arguing about nothing. Even better: the mic for the scene is clearly taped to someone’s tonsils, creating that extra awesome effect where you can barely make out what they’re saying because it sounds like the speakers on my TV are about to explode, even though the volume is way down.

Milobar: Actually, they weren’t quite arguing about nothing. They were arguing about who caused the earthquake.

Donkey: What fucking earthquake? They didn’t show any earthquake, or even say that one was occurring up to this point. But as this ridiculous conversation is going on, the camera switches over to what is apparently the Heads Up Display of one of the Universal Soldiers, which is obviously something that someone threw together the night before this movie was due for their community college correspondence drama seminar. This ‘display’ looks like someone is scrolling through their iTunes playlist. That’s the best they could fucking do?

The Universal Soldiers must have a genetically enhanced sense of irony, as the only song that they listen to while committing murder is the Bee Gee's classic Stayin' Alive on repeat.

Milobar: It looks like the software that they probably used to edit this shitty movie together with.

Donkey: I prefer to think that they are trying to show us that the Universal Soldiers are picking out the soundtrack that they’re going to kill these people to.

Milobar: I prefer to think The Universal Soldiers aren’t actually genetically modified soldiers. They’re genetically modified DJs.

Donkey: This dialogue is amazing. A random soldier, whom we might as well go ahead and call First Victim, says that he thought he saw something. Another guy in the group, a young loud and cocky soldier that we’ll just refer to as Shouty McSmallballs, tells him to be more specific. So First Victim says, “I thought I FUCKING saw something.” Wow, that is more specific. I totally know what you mean now.

Milobar: As they attempt to determine their location, First Victim says that he recognizes that tree formation. What? Fuck off. Are you kidding me? “We’re in the middle of nowhere, but I’m pretty sure I recognize those trees over there. Yep, that’s definitely where I buried all the hookers.”

Donkey: As they’re babbling out that bullshit, it switches back to the Heads Up Display of the Universal Soldiers and once again, just like in Alien Vs Hunter, the shot makes it look like the super soldier is standing about four feet in front of them. But it’s been thirty seconds, so it’s time for our heroes to start arguing amongst themselves again.

Milobar: Yes! It’s time for our favorite Asylum actor, known lovingly as Champagne Assault Rifle Man, to yell at the dumbass Blonde Army Chick. Seriously, ninety five percent of the dialogue in this movie is people yelling at one another.

Donkey: Not only that, but it’s yelling that doesn’t even make any sense. It might if they bothered to explain anything at all. But they don’t, so it’s just garbled bullshit. And now First Victim, who recognized the trees, wanders off on his own to fulfill his destiny, appropriately into said trees. Boy, I bet nothing bad will happen to this asshole! And the audio odyssey continues at this point, as it now sounds like the dude they had holding the boom mic was standing in a raging river.

Milobar: Suddenly one of the Universal Soldiers sneaks into the scene, hobbling around in the background like a hunchback, and he impales First Victim against a tree.

Donkey: After running up to check out this unpredictable turn of events, our group of heroes begin arguing about what to do with First Victim. Those with half a brain conclude that he’s stapled to the tree through the chest and won’t survive, while others are shouting about taking him to the infirmary. Suddenly the Special Agent Douche of the group pulls out a gun and ends the argument by shooting the dude doing his best impression of a prawn skewer in the head, killing him. And of course, this causes the forty seventh argument of the film. After acting like they’re going to kill him, the others threaten that Secret Agent Douche will answer for that once they’re off the island. What island? What island are they supposed to be on?

Milobar: Universal Soldiers Island. It’s the latest ride at Universal Studios.

Donkey: Suddenly the geek of the group, whom we can cleverly refer to as The Geek, tells them all that they need to come see this.

Milobar: They all run over and see a red marking on a tree.

Donkey: They stand around and stare at this goddamn marking like it’s the second coming of Ted Knight. Relax. It’s a goddamn triangle with a dot in it.

Milobar: “What does it mean?” Nothing.

Donkey: One of the three women, henceforth referred to as Medical Chick, says no, it’s means that they’re learning to write. This is language. How the fuck do you know that? This might just be a marking that one of them made for themselves so that they know that they’ve been there before.

Milobar: A moment later they seem to agree and conclude that this is some kind of mapping symbol.

Donkey: One of them asks if this is marking where they’ve been or where they’re going, and someone else says, “neither”. What? Then what the fuck is it?

Milobar: Where you are right now? Or if it’s not where you’ve been and not where you’re going, is it every other possible location?

Guess who was voted "most likely to shoot his squadmates in the face"?

Donkey: Moments later our group marches off and we see why we refer to our favorite Asylum actor as Champagne Assault Rifle Man. As they’re all marching along, he’s carrying his rifle pointed in the air, and with one hand only carrying it with two fingers, like he’s holding champagne at a goddamn fancy dinner party. That’s insane. There’s no less effective way to carry that goddamn rifle. If they were attacked suddenly, not only would he fire straight into the air, but since he’s barely holding onto that thing, it would probably go flying out of his hands.

Milobar: There’s a higher chance that he’d shoot the people behind him than the enemy in front of him.

Donkey: Our team of heroes is continuing their journey to find The Professor, I think. And as they start yelling at each other some more, once again a Universal Soldier darts by in the background. I love the Universal Soldiers in this movie. They look like middle-aged, somewhat over-weight men in black skin-tight suits with painted pads strapped to them.

Milobar: With their skin painted gray. They look basically like Tobias Funke, except instead of blue body paint, it’s gray.

Donkey: Such vicious killing machines. As they’re arguing once again about where they should go, it’s urged again that they should be going to The Armory. Special Agent Douche then asks why they would go there, since these things are “bred to swallow bullets”. Nobody says anything for a good twenty seconds, until finally Shouty McSmallballs asks if anyone has a better idea. When no one says anything, they just say okay, and move on.

Milobar: Yeah, I’ve got a better idea. ANYTHING ELSE.

Donkey: And as they’re all standing there, still arguing for no reason, The Professor comes running towards them on a road, yelling and screaming like an idiot.

Milobar: He comes running up, drunk on Jagermeister, and our heroes all try to motion for him to shut the hell up. Suddenly Champagne Assault Rifle Man lifts up his rifle and declares that he’s got a clean shot and he’s going to take it.

Donkey: He’s just going to fucking kill him?! Is Champagne Assault Rifle Man in a persistent state of roid rage? Once he finally arrives, we can clearly see this guy is a professor, though. He’s wearing a brown corduroy jacket.

Milobar: I don’t understand why they’re referring to this guy as The Professor. He’s working for the military, developing super soldiers. Technically you’re only a professor if you’re teaching at a University. So I would think the more appropriate term in this case would be Doctor.

Donkey: Or Captain Science. Or The Brown-Jacketed Master of the Universe.

Milobar: Or High Commander Virginity.

Donkey: This conversation with The Professor expands on the current situation, telling us that the government, and Lord knows what government, has created these ultimate killing machines that are loose and trying to kill them all. Why are they loose? Why are they trying to kill them?

Milobar: If they’re the perfect killing machines, why are these people still alive? Why haven’t the Universal Soldiers just killed all of them? Instead they do the same thing that the alien did in Alien Vs Hunter. They just run around in the background chilling out.

Donkey: Our heroes then begin to push The Professor to give them “the code”. The code for what, I have no idea. Instead The Professor just babbles on about how they’re all going to die. And then he goes on to reaffirm how ridiculous the opening credits of this movie really are. He talks about how they made these super soldiers out of “men, men who had served their country”. So again, what was with the goddamn random robot? It wasn’t a Universal Soldier, so if you have the “perfect killing machines”, why would you bother to build a giant robot too?

Milobar: Robot powered Dutch Rudders?

Donkey: After a lot of babbling, The Professor gets stabbed in the head and dragged up into the air. I’m sure we’re supposed to think that was the result of a Universal Soldier attacking again, but I’m going to blame it on illegal immigrants instead. They always steal our best genetically enhanced arbitrary killing jobs!

Milobar: What was that? There were no trees around them, or anything above them for something to pull him up to. They were standing out in the goddamn open.

Donkey: What I love is the the moment he’s dragged into the air, they all start blasting away with their guns in his direction. A few seconds later, he’d dropped to the ground, quite dead, and they all look somewhat surprised by this. You know, assholes, if the stabbing and lifting didn’t kill him, perhaps the hundred bullets you sent in his direction might have. Our heroes all turn and see a forty five year old man being pulled along on a wire as he flails ridiculously in an attempt to make it look like he’s swiftly climbing a tree in the distance.

Milobar: That team of three stout men yanking on a rope are doing good work! Then the Universal Soldier starts soaring towards them like a goddamn flying squirrel.

Donkey: And then runs off like a gorilla. At this point The Geek sees fit to point out that the Universal Soldiers have the have the ability to regenerate and heal their wounds. Really? How did they manage to engineer that?

Milobar: Keep in mind that he didn’t say they have the ability to do either of those things QUICKLY. Technically, all humans have the ability to regenerate and heal their wounds. Otherwise a paper cut on your finger would be a death sentence.

Donkey: And now we come to one of the greatest sequences of the movie. As they’re walking along, just moments after and one can assume only about fifty feet away from where The Professor was killed, Blonde Army Chick gets snagged by a snare and pulled into the air, where she hangs upside down by her foot.

Milobar: The Major quickly cuts her down so that, of course, she won’t be hanging upside down and vulnerable, because obviously if the Universal Soldiers have set a trap, they’re going to come around looking for what they’ve caught in it.