Slam Dance (1987)

On those nights when Q and I simply can’t agree on what to watch, and neither of us have strong feelings one way or another, inevitably we turn to the bowl of shame. The bowl of shame is where we keep our cull* list, so when we turn to it, we’re indecisive, desperate, or both. In our younger days when we were more vital and resilient, we’d

The bowl of shame.

watch the cull list through, with no breaks for “good” movies. But perhaps we’ve been scarred by too many duds to attempt to live through such an experience again. At any rate, the bowl sits there mocking us, and some evenings we just can’t resist. The night we chose Slam Dance I recall being particularly whiny and inconsolable, for what reason, I don’t know. I thought the title seemed promising, and knowing it was written by Don Opper of Android fame made it all the more enticing.

Unfortunately, the movie is pretty exhausting straight from the get-go. C.C. Drood (Tom Hulce) is a cartoonist keeping his head just above water. He lives in what looks like a large shower, though by all accounts it is his apartment. Maybe it looks like shit because it’s just temporary: he and his wife Helen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are taking a break, and the guy needs a place to hole up for a while. That’s what happens when you get frisky with a call girl named Yolanda (Virginia Madsen).

But what happens when that call girl is found murdered? Obviously the cops and the murderers try to pin it on a doofus cartoonist, right? Of course! Drood finds himself in a web of, well, very bad things, and not even Good Cop Benjamin Smiley (Harry Dean Stanton) can seem to shake him out of it. Who’s behind this whole thing? Is it Detective Gilbert (John Doe), who seems pretty clearly hellbent on blaming Drood for the whole affair, and then some? Or what about Drood’s shady art dealer Campbell (Adam Ant); maybe he’d like to put Drood away for good so he can keep on banging his wife? Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the lesbian madam who was in love with Yolanda?

Even the cover is annoying.

Ultimately, who fucking cares? I certainly didn’t give a shit who lived, died, or lied in this movie. I did learn a few things, though: 1) I don’t like Tom Hulce. 2) I don’t like Virginia Madsen. 3) Don Opper should stick to movies about robots. 4) Harry Dean Stanton can’t save every movie he’s in. 5) Perhaps I should stay away from anything billed as an “erotic thriller.”

I can’t put my finger on exactly why this movie was so irritating. Perhaps it was simply that it thought it was way more clever than it actually was. There’s sort of this Doppelgänger thing going on, and that’s not interesting. And crooked cops aren’t really interesting. And philandering husbands aren’t interesting. And lesbian call girls are perhaps the least interesting thing of all. Maybe this movie might have been, like, subversive if it had been made in the 1950’s or something… but for 1987 it just looks like a coked-out mess. Gladly putting this one on the discard pile. Sorry, Don.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Black Horizon (2002)

The Cull* is off to a very good start indeed. By good, I mean we’re watching movies that are so bad we’re getting rid of them! There is a sense of accomplishment to it, which is really good, because otherwise watching these movies would be a complete and utter waste of time. I do have to admit, though, to wondering why in hell we ever picked up such dreck in the first place? It’s as if used-media stores pump a drug through their air ducts that causes Q and I to be attracted to some of the dumbest looking movies around. And perhaps if we’d noticed Black Horizon was produced by a guy who claims the name HUGH JANUS, we would have put it down for someone else to throw money at. But we didn’t notice… until it was too late.

I admit to being confused by this movie at the get-go: it is very obviously a movie about a failing Russian space station, but starts off with some sort of drug bust. Jeffries (Ice-T) is some sort of Fed who’s gotten himself into trouble right before the bust is about to go down. His good buddy McKendrick saves his ass, and at the end of the disastrous bust they all have a good, hearty chuckle.

Sailor in space

Once the opening credits roll, we get to the real meat of the film: McKendrick, an ex-Navy salvage diver is going to join Ed Carpenter, a pumped-up Macho man and his crew manning a shuttle to the AVNA space station. Seems systems are failing on the station, but important technology that could save the world needs to be salvaged. So of course you send a navy diver to do the job, right? Especially one that’s afraid of heights, right? Yeah, duh.

Things of course are much more complicated than anyone at NASA could have guessed. First, the space station has just been pelted with meteors – and more are on the way! Their communication system is down, so they’re unable to warn the hearty, brave Americans who are coming to save them that they’ll be in danger. Katherine, the leading scientist on the station, apparently skimped on some necessities while approving the blueprints for AVNA, and now she and her Russian crew are suffering the consequences.

If Dane Cook and Ryan Reynolds had a brother that ate cheeseburgers and couldn’t do a Russian accent, it’d be this guy.

But perhaps worst of all, Katherine’s uncle Owen, a mega-capitalist of epic proportions, is hellbent on preventing the salvage mission’s success. Because the space station is such bullshit, if word got out about how shitty everything is his company’s stock would continue to plummet, resulting in the end of his glorious empire. Who cares that his niece is on board? They weren’t that close anyway! And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for Jeffries’ snooping around and general badassery!

Black Horizon is not a good movie. It’s not a good movie at all. The plot is very disjointed, skipping and jumping from one setting to another, and using stock footage to remind us whether we’re on earth or in space. The characters are so one-dimensional it hurts, from the badass, macho leader to the sexy, take-no-prisoners chick pilot, to the evil capitalist uncle and, of course, the drunken Russian. It’s almost like the writers took pieces from existing stories and glued them together very poorly, kind of how you’d expect a toddler to complete a jigsaw puzzle.

Ice-T wants to know why they gave him all the worst lines?

Aside from lackluster writing, the cast delivers us some very flat performances indeed. Look, I want to like Ice-T, I really do. I want him to be a great actor. But here, watching him is just excruciating. I don’t think it’s entirely his fault, he’s obviously not given much to work with, and his character is given all the worst one-liners in the film; a pretty insurmountable fate.

This is just another one of those movies that makes me shrug my shoulders and ask: why? Why bother making something this inept, this derivative, this nonchalant? After a movie like this is over, I always marvel at all the names that roll in the credits, reminding myself that it took all these people to make one giant piece of shit. Needless to say, this one won’t be going back on the shelf. Sorry, Ice-T.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Payback (1995)

It’s been a little over two years since Q and I decided it was time to cull the old movie collection. When you have 2,000+ titles and limited space, this type of slaughter is necessary. Last cull was a bit rough, though, so we’re intermingling this one with a good movie or two – just to keep our sanity. Anyway, somewhere along the line, as I’ve probably already explained in some other blog post somewhere, Q got this thing for Anthony Hickox. To be fair, he’s responsible for a few really enjoyable flicks, like Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Full Eclipse, and Warlock: The Armageddon. What these movies have in common is that they’re all horror flicks. Unfortunately Payback, today’s selection for the cull, can’t in any way be considered horror.

Oscar (Soul Man‘s C. Thomas Howell) and Mac are the best prison friends. Mac’s a little older, and Oscar watches out for him, especially when the evil prison guard Gully gets on Mac’s case. See, Gully knows that Mac has hidden a fuckton of cash somewhere, and he’s hellbent on finding it – even if it means murder! One day, Gully takes it too far, buries Mac in a pile of trash, and ends up killing him. On Mac’s deathbed, he tells Oscar that boatload of cash is his, if he promises to murder Gully once he makes it out of prison. All he needs to do is swipe that little watercolor painting he keeps in his cell, and the secret riches will be his.

But – oh, no! – Gully’s not as dumb as he looks! He’s already taken the watercolor painting! Looks like Oscar’s going to have to find the cash without the clue, and only hope that Gully won’t get there first. Of course, turns out it’ll be difficult for Gully to use his stolen clue; he’s had an unfortunate accident and now he’s blind! Well that’ll make Oscar’s revenge that much easier to exact. There’s just one thing standing in his way now – Gully’s hot wife in a two-sizes-too-small waitress uniform, Rose. Oscar worms his way into their daily life, an easy thing to do since Gully can’t actually see who he is, and ends up working Gully’s restaurant for room and board.

It takes entirely too long for Oscar and Rose to finally bang, but they do, and money is found, and lost, and there are all these very predictable twists and turns, and since no one in this movie is a good person, they’re basically all gonna get their very own, personal ‘payback.’

I suspect the only reason this film somehow managed to score a 5.8 on IMDb is the dripping-hot sex scene where C. Thomas Howell’s ass gets up close and personal with the hood of a car under a barn. Didn’t you always want to see Soul Man getting busy? Oof. Why? Why? Also, I never realized how disgusting handlebar mustaches are until I saw Howell making out in this movie. Shiver. There are a lot of questionable things about this movie, but his casting in the lead ‘badass’ role tops the list for me. How’m I supposed to believe this little guy’s gonna take down Gully’s monster AND seduce his sorta-hot wife? His character also never really seems bought-in to anything, least of all revenge. Revenge should never be wishy-washy!

Of course, the plot and characters leave a lot to be desired as well. The real bad guys in this movie are as bad as the baddest baddies in an episode of Walker: Texas Ranger. We don’t know why they’re so angry, aggressive and greedy, they just are. They’ll judge a book by its cover and then punch it in the face before you can inhale. This kind of unchecked male aggression is so damn tiresome, and it seems to be everywhere. What’s the deal with that? Payback is just another of those movies about a bunch of shitty people doing shitty things that I don’t care about. When there’s no investment in character or plot development, what incentive is there to watch a film? The five minutes of C. Thomas Howell sex? I mean, I doubt it. There’s not even a lot of boobage in this. It’s got all the elements of one of those sexy crime dramas, but they’re all so half-assed, non-committal and obvious, I’m not sure why anyone even bothered to put this flick together.

So I’m happy to report that our videocassette copy of Payback will be relinquished to the discard pile, making room for something more deserving of my shelf space. Or, let’s be honest, making room for another piece of shit we’ll end up culling in another two years. What can I say, we have a sickness, and we’re not about to seek treatment any time soon.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962)

Allright folks, this is it: the last of the cull* (at least for now, seeing as how, unfortunately, there’s a seemingly endless pile where this stuff comes from). As the first signs of spring begin to emerge, it’s time to hang up the films that might not be any good and watch ones we actually care about. To end our journey into the great and usually disappointing unknown, we ended up with The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.

Let me start off by saying this: kids’ movies just aren’t my thing. So, from the get-go I was not looking forward to a movie about the famous German brothers responsible for a bazillion fairy tales. The film is framed with the real-life story of the brothers: Jacob, the serious, responsible brother just wants to finish the biography of the Duke they’ve been tasked with writing. Wilhelm, the carefree, spirited brother would much rather collect fairy tales from the local flower-peddler. The audience not only witnesses the trials and tribulations of the brothers, but also the acting out of several of the fairy tales the brothers are famous for.

Russ Tamblyn, too – but I prefer him as Twin Peaks’ Dr. Jacoby.

I guess this movie is kind of cute, and some of the special effects are impressive for the time period (a man in an invisible cloak, the cobbler’s helpful elves, etc.). And, I must admit that, even with my cold heart of stone I was touched by some of the stories here. This is something that would be fun to show a bunch of kids, if you can keep them interested for the 135-minute running time. It’s full of lessons and charm and whatnot. We’re keeping this one, but mostly because Q just loved the hell out of it. I, of course, only begrudgingly tolerated it.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Millennium (1989)

Kris Kristofferson: Dreamy Steamboat

In the interest of our sanity, this Cull* business will be coming to an end very soon. To be fair, though, a girl is pretty lucky when her housecleaning involves two Kris Kristofferson films. While Knights didn’t survive extermination, our second Kristofferson selection, Millennium, fares much better.

Kristofferson plays Bill Smith, a plane-crash investigator whose career consumes his life. While investigating a particularly troubling crash, he meets the strange and charming Louise Baltimore (Cheryl Ladd). Their first date turns into a sleepover, and the next morning Baltimore tries her

Sherman, your favorite robot, talks Louise down from the ledge.

damndest to keep Smith from attending a press conference involving the crash, but Smith is too married to his job to miss it – or is he? Immediately after saying goodbye to Baltimore, Smith turns back to the hotel room – perhaps to stay with her all day and skip out on the conference, or maybe just to say goodbye a second time – but we never know, because mere seconds after Smith leaves the room, Baltimore is gone without a trace.

Kids in the Hall’s own Scott Thompson

Confounded by Baltimore’s disappearance as much as the plane crash he’s investigating, Smith stays on in a room full of wreckage, pondering the events of the last few days. While rummaging through the wreckage, he finds a very strange piece of equipment. Examining the curiosity, he stuns himself and cannot move. As he drops to the ground, futuristic women swoop in to steal the strange device, one of them looking a whole hell of a lot like Louise Baltimore.

The Face of the Future

What follows is a delightful and charming science fiction story involving robots, time-travel, a few Cronenberg alums and a cameo by Canada’s own Scott Thompson. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, because what I liked most about this film is how it  was revealed: slowly and from different points of view. I can’t help but compare this to Trancers, another adorable time-travel flick with a tough-but-lovable male lead. The two might make the perfect double-feature.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Solar Crisis (1990)

I used to think I had a pretty good tolerance for total crap, but the cull* is really wearing my patience thin. The case is extra poor for Solar Crisis, seeing as how its director didn’t want his name associated with it, and instead credited it to Alan Smithee. Charlton Heston and Corin Nemec (yeah, Parker Lewis, remember him?) didn’t even come close to making this movie worth watching.

Solar Crisis is another science-fiction film set in a hot, hot future. American corporations have control over virtually everything (a lot like one of our other cull flicks, Crash and Burn, but unfortunately nowhere near as acceptable), and one particular corporate giant, IXL, does not care to heed the warnings of virtually every scientist on the planet when they say a solar flare will be huge enough to hit the earth and destroy all life on it within the next two days.

Heston

Instead of supporting the entire earth’s mission to steer a large anti-matter bomb into the sun in hopes of redirecting the solar flare away from earth, the CEO of IXL has sent one of his finest jerkfaces to thwart the mission.

This crappy movie is all over the place. There are so many threads, I feel like the people who wrote this would have been better off with a mini-series instead of a feature-length film. The hammy acting is pretty unbearable, and if I had to sit through one more scene with a floating image of the sun I probably would have just left the room. I’ve seen

Palance

worse throughout this cull, but I’ve also seen much better. This is another unremarkable movie I wouldn’t recommend anyone wasting their time on. The only good thing about this movie is Jack Palance, who plays a crazy-old desert dweller and is just a joy to watch amidst the rest of the boring crap going on here.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Death Machine (1994)

The cull* strikes again, and the great year of 1994 has brought to the table Death Machine. Let’s just say, before this movie, I liked Brad Dourif.

Some of the movies I watch, I watch with very, very low expectations. And some of the time, I am very pleasantly surprised to find they are self-aware, smart films with a sense of humor (I’m thinking Syngenor, here). Most of the time, however, the crap expectation is fulfilled, and I find myself struggling to finish a shit film. This is exactly the case with Death Machine.

Giant company makes unstoppable soldiers. Unstoppable soldiers easily go haywire. New boss of company does not know the secrets of the death machines. Brilliant scientist/hacker (Dourif) has crush on new boss of company and kills people to get closer to her and the power they could wield together. Humanist Alliance hackers want to blow the whole thing to shit.

Actually, the plot doesn’t sound all that bad, right? But it is just boring, boring, boring. Brad Dourif’s take on hackers is laughable and exhausting, but I know it’s not entirely his fault: at least the costume designer is partly to blame as well.

Who knew Dourif did such a great Tommy Wiseau? (Thanks, Q.)

This is another one of those movies that I don’t think anyone should ever have to waste their time on ever. The jokes fall flat and the attempts at “suspense” are laughable. I suppose the Venus-fly-trap robots look kind of allright, but that’s hardly enough to keep me fueled for 99 minutes. Ugh. So excited to throw this in the out pile.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Contaminated Man (2000)

Next up on our spring-cleaning cull* chopping block is Contaminated Man, a completely unremarkable dramatic thrillerish thing starring William Hurt and Peter Weller.

The story revolves around David Whitman (Hurt), a hazmat guy who, unfortunately for his wife and daughter, took his work home with him one day. His exposure to a certain pesticide killed both of them, and years later in Budapest he’s confronted with the spread of the illness once again. A chemical corporation was trimming some fat, and unfortunately that means Joseph Müller (Weller) loses his job of 20+ years as a security guard. This is not good news for a man whose wife just left him and took his kid with her. Needless to say, Müller is desperate – his alimony payments were his only guarantee at child visitation.

Müller heads to work to plead for his job back. He gets the brush off, and so follows a bunch of hazmat-suited men into a private room where a whole bunch of crap explodes and he is exposed to the pesticide. He is the only man to escape the carnage, and is now the so-called Contaminated Man. Whitman is on the task of cleaning up the mess and looking for Müller, who is on the way to finding his wife and kid, but a bunch of terrorist experts stand in his way. Can Whitman find Müller and give him the antidote before the terrorist experts blow everything out of proportion?

“I VANT MY FAMILY!”

At first, I thought this movie was made after 9/11. Interestingly, it is not; it comes out just shy of a year beforehand. Either way, this sure looks like a government conspiracy flick: the terrorist team take the story of a regular, desperate guy who just wants to see his family and turn it into a potential terrorist issue. Their overreaction makes the resulting events 10 times worse than they would have been if they’d have just let Whitman do his job. That aspect of the movie is interesting, but other than that this doesn’t really have much going for it. It felt like a made-for-cable movie, and I wondered most of the time how they got Weller and Hurt to star in the damn thing. We will not be keeping this one.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

Knights (1993)

Henriksen as Job, the vampire robot.

Say what? Another post-apocalyptic science fiction movie finds is way on our cull* list? Shocking, I know, but what can I say; the apocalypse lends itself to very bad writing indeed.

This time we follow Nea (kickboxing champion Kathy Long), a tomboy badass whose family was eaten by vampiric cyborgs (actually robots, but who’s counting?). as she travels through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Along the hard, dusty road she meets Gabriel (Kris Kristofferson), a good cyborg made by “the creator” to destroy all the other evil cyborgs, who have decided to launch a full-scale war to get the blood of 10,000 humans and rule the earth.

The troop of evil cyborgs is led by Job (Lance Henrisken), a

Kathy Long as Nea, a fast learner of cyborg-killing indeed.

perpetually drooling machine-armed mad-bot with power on his mind. Nea and Gabriel must traverse a great swath of the post-apocalyptic American Southwest in hopes of beating Job and his evil cyborg clan (all named after biblical characters, see) to Taos, the only area populated enough in this barren wasteland to provide the blood they need to take control.

So, yeah, this movie is totally ridiculous, but who wouldn’t want to watch robots played by Kristofferson and Henriksen go at it? Also, kickboxing chicks are cool, right? At first, I thought this movie was going to be a huge piece of shit. In the end, it ended up being a tiny turd. I am sort of ashamed to admit that I kind of liked it. I am a little sad to see the videocassette get thrown to the wolves in the freecycle pile!

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.

 

976-EVIL (1988)

Hoax and Mama, a normal evening at home.

When I first found out Q had a copy of 976-EVIL, my reaction was something along the lines of “ugh, get rid of that thing!” Naturally, it was ripe for the cull.*

Turns out my initial feelings for the film did not change much after a second look. The story’s about a punk named Spike whose Aunt Lucy and cousin Hoax are real god-fearin’ folks. Spike’s own mama left this earth a while ago, and he’s been under Aunt Lucy’s tender loving care ever since. Spike doesn’t give a crap about anything but poker, drugs and sex, and his cousin Hoax is envious.

Spike is the type that’s always wanting more, so when he sees an ad for a telephone number that will deliver your “horrorscope” he of course can’t help himself, and fatefully dials 976-EVIL. At first, the voice on the other end of the phone gives Spike courage to do things he wouldn’t have

A typical day in the life of Hoax: looking up at a bunch of punks.

done before, like steal all his inheritance from his loving Aunt. While doing so, he drops the ad in Hoax’s kitchen. Hoax, wanting to be just like his cool cousin, calls the number and starts doing bad things, like taking revenge on the punks who dunk his head in the toilet and disrespecting his mama. Mama’s often wrong about things, but this time she’s right when she says Hoax has bought a one-way ticket to Hell.

Bah. The tone in this movie is just wrong. But what would one expect from a movie directed by Robert Englund? While this movie has a lot in common with Trick or Treat, there are some pretty significant differences that make Trick or Treat the better movie; namely the main character’s nature. In Trick or Treat, young Eddie at least learns the errors of his ways and tries to end the carnage he began. Here, Hoax just rolls with it, all the way to the bloody end, and I am NOT rooting for him. The truly unfortunate thing is that

Mama’s House

976-EVIL looks really damn good. I just wish it had better things to say.

*Q and I have decided it’s time for a great cull; an early spring cleaning. We have a large number of movies we have not yet seen. Are these movies any good? This is the question we are out to answer. If it’s no good, out it goes.