cinemuck

BY CONTRIBUTING WRITER ANDREW MARSHALL:

Let me start out by saying that I love this country. I really do. It really is a great place, in all it’s spectacular ornery, teenagery, pimply faced you’re not the boss of me glory.  We’ve got a lot to work on, sure, and we are young and we don’t always do the right thing. But I love us anyway.

So it really goes a long way when I tell you that despite my love of America, watching this movie kind of made me wish we’d been invaded by Communists “Red Dawn” style in the late seventies. At least if that had happened, this movie would have never been made. And I can tell you, if I were typing in Russian and reviewing a movie called “Comrade Vodka” I would be significantly happier than I am right now having to write about this version of Captain America.  (By the way, this bootlegged DVD came straight from the putrid collection of fellow Cinemucker Nick Ramey, so you can blame him for all the evil that follows)

What to say about this version of Captain America? According to IMDB it was produced as a pilot during the same development deal that spawned the much more successful Incredible Hulk television series. What does that have to do with us? Nothing, I just thought it was worth noting that good and evil can be spawned from the same event.

The Cinemuckers knew we were in trouble when Tim Murray recognized the film’s star, former USC football player Reb Brown, from a film he made ten years later called Space Mutiny.  Space Mutiny has gone down in history (largley thanks to MST3K) as one of the goofiest sci fi films ever to come out of South Africa (the only sci fi film to come out of South Africa? Doesn’t matter. Still the goofiest)  Brown’s performance in that film was worse than bad, it was like watching an Avacado try to do Shakespeare. Chances are he was not going to be any better here, ten years earlier in his career.

And boy. Oh boy.  Oh boy. Let me show you what I mean.

Here is Brown portraying confusion.

Here he is portraying anger.

Fear.

Sadness.

You get the point. As to the plot of the movie? Well, Brown’s character, Steve Rodgers (you can bet that The Cinemucker’s didn’t waste any chance to take advantage of lines like “Get up and fight, Mr. Rodgers!”) is the son of the original captain America. He drives around in a brown van with seagulls on it (I swear I’m not making this up) and paints pictures. Somehow he ends up in a laboratory (the DVD was damaged so mercifully we missed the first fifteen minutes) where he summarily refuses to take the same serum that turned his daddy into Cap’n Crunch. It was a riviting scene where Reb Brown looked like this a lot of the time.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the desert, a generic Evil Wealthy Industrialist is plotting to destroy the city of Phoenix, Arizona with a neutron bomb. Why? Nobody really knows. None of his oddly lumpy faced henchman (Tim Murray: Nobody in this movie has their face screwed on right!!) bothered explaining to him that the average temperature of Phoenix, Arizona in the summer is a hundred and fifteen degrees, so wiping the place off the map with neutron bomb would generally be considered an improvement.

Well, an attempt by EWI to kill Steve Rodgers (again, we don’t really know why) merely results in Stevie boy winding up in a government hospital, where in order to save his life they inject him with the serum he refused initially. Wala, instant Captain America. What follows is some kind of plot about micro film and kidnapping and whatnot, but it’s all overshadowed by the sheer dorkyness of Reb Bown trying to look like a bad ass in what might be the silliest costume this side of Puma Man. (real movie)

Magic Dance Pants

And so hi-jinks ensue. There is a slapstick battle in a slaughterhouse, about forty five minutes of characters sitting around in foyers, and what wound up being the most yawn inducing car, helicopter, and motorcycle chase I’ve ever seen. (Did I mention that Mr. Rodgers has the wimpiest motorcycle in film history?)  At the end of the day our hero is victorious and he prevents the EWI from turning Arizona from a lifeless chunk of scorched glass to a…lifeless chunk of scorched glass. Well done, Mr. Rodgers.

The best part is, this installment was but part ONE of the two disk set that NickFlix provided for the Cinemuckers. Part two airs tonight. When faced with that news, Cinemucker groupie Ben Marshall vocalized what I think we area all saying in our heads right now…”That’s #@%?&**% terrible.”

SO WHAT’S THE MUCK?

Why Should I Run? : Reb Brown. No Facial Movement. Tight Pants.

Why Should I See It? : It never gets old singing “Won’t you be my neighbor”

MuckOmeter: Oddly enough, I’ll give it a four. It’s terrible, for sure, but it’s terrible in such an entertaining way that it’s actually watchable if your sense of humor is twisted enough.

BY CONTRIBUTING WRITER TIM MURRAY:

Alright Cinemuckers, keep your arms and hands inside the car at all times and prepare to suffer to this little horror film gem known only as Dark Ride.  This craptastic horror film promises violence, blood, nudity, and the mentally handicapped killing young teens over a span of about two decades.  What more could your average horror film enthusiast want?  How about a coherent storyline and editing for one? Too much to ask, I know.

Anyways this flick starts off, as all good horror films do, by taking the innocent audience member on a trip through the half assed exposition.  We find ourselves watching a pair of twins wandering around a boardwalk carnival (in 1989 New Jersey…yes, NJ) in search of a thrill.  They come across a dark ride that one twin insists will be fun.  After being allowed admission by a typical carnie and his son who is playing chess all by himself, they enter the ride and are, of course, disemboweled in a timely fashion.

The ride has only begun for the viewer.

Next we sit through the opening credits only to find dozens of newspaper articles informing us of the deaths coming from the ride, the city counsel shutting the ride down, the ride reopening fourteen years later, and colleges gearing up for spring break.   Everyone still on board?

The star power consists of five characters: The Pot Head Bro, the Cheating Pretty Boy, the Film Nerd, the Slut, and the Broken Hearted Bitchy Ex Girlfriend. (brunette, i.e. Final Girl)  Oh, did I fail to mention we have a celebrity in the midst?  That’s right, our film guru is none other than Patrick Renna (better known for his role as the catcher Hamilton “Ham” Porter in The Sandlot…you remember, “you play ball like a girl!”).

You Play Ball Like a Mass Murdering Lunatic!

These five decide to take a trip to New Orleans for their spring break.  On the way they they decide to detour to an “amusement park” upon the suggestion of the great Hambino.

Well, five characters isn’t enough horror film fodder to appease the gods of gore so they pick up a bubbly blonde who looks like she got lost coming from the rodeo for hippie star children.  She joins this collection of brilliant minds on their trip to the dark ride amusement.  I almost forgot that at this point there is still clearly no labeled hero or anyone we wish to remain alive at the end of the movie.  This does not bode well for our meddling kids and their pot head Doobie-Do.

They arrive at the little slice of New Jersey hell only to find it is closed for the wee-morning hours when most people are asleep.  Never fear, The Bro is here to break and enter!  They break into the ride, which we come to find out is actually the size of a Zeppelin hangar and most of the ride is in fact not a ride but rather hidden passages and walk ways where, I guess, if you get bored of staying in the car you are allowed to just wander around the endless rooms and corridors.  After spending some time dealing with hurt feelings and ex-girlfriend’s revenge upon cheating boy, we are allowed a glimpse into the plot.  We find out that our Ham (his character name is Bill for this movie but it’s more dignifying to think of him as the catcher in The Sandlot) has a history with the ride.  He is the great uncle or third cousin twice removed of the twin girls killed at the ride in 1989.  Maybe he was their babysitter.  Hell, the movie wasn’t clear on that part so we’ll just say he sold them some Lego blocks at a yard sale.  In any case he has known about the ride and purposely wanted the dream team to assemble at this place of enjoyment and mayhem.

At some point in this masterpiece, we are allowed a two week flash back to a local mental institution where we see some good nature ripping on one of the patients, the killer at the dark ride, by a couple of male nurses with a slab of beef (because the patient is a vegetarian…duh!).  One of our male nurses is actually a Samoan who is the only character in this flick that has a conscience…which is why he has to die.  The 7 foot 6 inch patient decides he’s been slapped by beef enough and punches his fist through the Samoan and then proceeds to kill the other nurse.  Then of course we must assume that the patient escapes to his home grounds of the dark ride.

So our team of super sleuths, having to deal with flickering lights and a plot even Tolkien couldn’t follow, start dying.  We lose cheating boy first since he decided to run off after having a trick played on him in a spooky house.  Go figure.  Then our bright eyed teens freak out and split up even further.  Pot head and Hippie star child go off for some more adult oriented fun where the male audience is treated to a topless scene of hippie girl followed by a not so enjoyable off-screen b.j..  The movie giveth, the movie taketh.  Luckily for us, during the ‘climax’ of the b.j. scene, our hippie is beheaded which causes our pot head to freak out (and not because of the pot or the shrooms he’s ingested) and attempts to flee.

Meanwhile more people die.  The slut is thrown and killed, a good natured cop is sliced in half, and just all around chaos.  It almost appears the director forgot all about the actual story and just started shooting things that looked scary or tense.  It is also at this point you start wondering where sandlot Ham ran off or if the Beast got him.  Coming down to the finish, vengeful ex-girlfriend makes it to the van they rode in on and drives off leaving the pot head to his fate…until she gets a text from him asking for help.  She turns around and, luckily for the pot head, smashes right through the wall which impales the killer on some spikes.   But we are not done yet.

Ham comes out and views the scene.  Realizing that only pot head is left (oh and the ex-girlfriend with a slight concussion in the van), he unleashes a final attempt at a twist in the plot by explaining that the killer was his older brother and he was the chess playing kid at the ride in the exposition.  So what does any good brother do but carry on in the family business and stabs the pot head to death.  Ham then views his older brother still impaled and thanks ex-girlfriend for helping.  She runs outside, falls down crying and we fade to black.

All in all, this was a film that needed to be destroyed.  It leaves the viewer confused, angry, and wanting to speak to this movie’s manager about the dissatisfaction of everything.  I imagine the idea for this movie went something like this:

Writer:  Hey! Ever been to one of those dark rides

Director:  yeah?

Writer:  wouldn’t that make a great place for a horror film!?

Director: yeah! How would the story go?

Writer:  Um…well, it’s dark.  And people are being killed! Whoa! Scary!

Director:  whoa! This needs to happen.  Can you have this written in 20 minutes?

Writer:  Is New Jersey an adjective? Of course I can.  Oh you should call your three year old nephew to help edit the film!

Director:  Great idea!

SO WHAT’S THE MUCK?

Why Should I Stay Away?: Typical low budget horror fare, completely predictable in every way, with gore that is gross but not in any way scary.

Why Should I See It?: A Plethora of Sandlot jokes to be made.

The MuckOmeter: A solid six. It goes by faster than most movies of this kind.

BY CONTRIBUTING WRITER ANDREW MARSHALL

You have to give the guys at Asylum studios (Of Giant Shark Vs. Mega Octopus fame)  some credit. For sheer balls-yness, nothing beats pounding out a cheap sci fi script, casting it with no names and has beens, shooting the feature in three days, editing it blindfolded,  slapping some stock music on it, then shipping it out to blockbuster with names that are not quite, but similar to mainstream popular movies.  (Recent examples include Transmorphers and Transmorphers II, Fall of Man. Sound familiar, Micheal Bay? I’ve seen both, by the way)

The hope is that enough of mainstream America will accidentally rent the wrong movie and then watch it anyway. It must work because those dudes crank out a movie every three months or so. They basically take everything that is good and uplifting and decent about cinema and boil it down to a cheap straight to DVD money making scheme.  Well done, chaps. (Their other audience is of course me and my fellow Cinemucks)

And so it is that my article today is about a little film called “The Terminators”.  If you are James Cameron you might want to stop now. Just go back to playing in the vast buckets of money, James. You aren’t gonna want to read this.

So. The Terminators. Where to begin? Lets just get this out of the way right now…Are there robots in this movie that look like people, talk like people, breathe like people, but in fact are not people? Do these robots kill people? Yes. Does this film bear any other resemblance to James Cameron’s groundbreaking sci fi classic of the (mostly) same name? No. None at all.

The Terminators gets rolling deep in the smoky bowels of a badly CG’d spaceship that was more or less directly stolen from Kubrick. Wait. Did I just say smoky? Yes, there is green and yellow fog blowing all over this spaceship. Somehow I’m not thinking it’s good to be having BBQs in an oxygen rich environment, folks.

A puny human calls for help in a cloud of mysterious smoke.

Anywho. This spaceship is the control unit for all of the TR5 robots that are (we’re told) in every household in America. We’re treated to some pointless dialogue explaining this fact before a heavily muscled, slightly Germanic looking fellow waltzes in and starts snapping necks. Then he sits down and types away at a computer. Well. That was at least kind of exciting. Maybe a little…too…exciting for the editors at Asylum. We can’t have our audience actually enjoying the film, can we boys?

Cut to a room somewhere on earth. Four people of varying levels of attractiveness stand around and mumble at each other about what to do about the renegade TR robots. They literally stand there. No one shouts. No one moves. No one types at a computer. They just stand and mumble. One lady nervously plays with her fingers, but it isn’t because she’s actually emoting, it’s because she’s a bad actress and she has no idea what to do with her hands.

*mumble mumble mumble*

Nice blocking, Mr. Director.

Meanwhile outside, ships are landing, things are smashing into cities, and in this room, these clowns stand around with their feet super glued to the floor. They are still doing that when they are killed by robots a few minutes later.

At this point my fellow cinemucks and I were remarking that it was fifteen, twenty minutes into the film and we still didn’t have an established hero. Right about that time we are treated to this lovely couple.

I Spell Hero T-A-N-K-T-O-P

Oh baby. Nothing says hero in a bad movie like a pony tail and a black tank top. Much to our surprise (and trust me, it was the one shocking moment in the entire film) this dude is shot to death by robots about three seconds later. It actually ends up being his wife Chloe who is the hero of the film. Mind you, that isn’t Chloe hanging on his arm. Oh, the drama.

From here on out the movie is about your typical bunch of Asylum survivors  (The Jerk, The Woman of Varied Affections, The Small Town Sheriff, The Ethnic Girl, The Final Girl, The Loner, and other filler) trying to…well…

…well honestly I’m not sure they or us or the writers or the director or the crafts and services people knew what they were actually trying to do. The Loner has a spaceship and somehow he knows that if they can make it up to the mother ship they can “switch the robots off.” (remember that phrasing for later)

First they have to find fuel. Some people die. Then they have to get the fuel back to the spaceship. More people die. People shout things at each other, some of my favorites being “Try to stay alive!” and “Put that cigarette out! They can sense the heat from three hundred yards away!”  (But wait Mr. Screenwriter. What about the heat from a human body? Ahhh, screw it, we’ll fix it in the edit)

Along the way The Loner (from Seventh Heaven or Party of Five or something like that)  runs over a robot in a truck and makes the best face I’ve ever seen anybody make after running over a robot while driving a truck full of spaceship fuel. Period.

He's Method.

Julliard training at work, no doubt.

So everybody gets on the ship and flies into space, but not before Small Town Sheriff is shot and it’s reveled that…GASP…he’s a robot! The ensuing conversation (should we kill him?) really serves to underscore this film’s delicate themes of “what makes a person human” and “do robots have a soul?”.  Oh wait. That was Blade Runner. This movie’s theme was “how many times can we use one actor to portray eighty different robots?”.

So they get into the smoky ship, and after pretty much everybody but Final Girl dies, she defetes the robots. How? Remember how Loner said they should just turn them off?

Oh. Well. Um. That seemed obvious.

There it is. The TR5 Main Control Box, with On and Off switch very clearly labeled. Pity no one thought of that before.

SO WHAT’S THE MUCK?

Why Should I Stay Away?: The standard pool of Asylum film actors and absolutely terrible script.

Why Should I Watch It?:  See above. Also the on/off switch conclusion is pretty funny, not to mention the robot running over expression.

How Much Will It Hurt Me?: A lot. I’ll give it a seven and a half on the MuckOmeter, as it has absolutely no nostalgic value, no Giant Octopi or Mega Sharks, and the concept will just make you wish you were watching Terminator 2.

–Andrew

BY CONTRIBUTING WRITER CHRIS WILEY

I was debating a couple of bad movies to watch with some of my fellow cinemuck sadists, and stumbled across a gem. I usually base my bad movie selection off some starting bits of criteria.

1) There must be some creature with an open mouth

2) A terrible pun must be featured on the front picture

3) It must star someone that you go “Oh, now I have to see this!”

For me, the combination of a buck-toothed manically grinning Gingerdead Man starring Gary Busey needed no second thought.

Really, the film is a PSA to remind the world to keep a safe distance from Gary Busey.

The plot (I’m being generous with that word) is as follows:

Gary Busey steps into a diner on a normal day with two people already dead and kills everyone else after blaming his mom for driving him to finish everything he starts. Apparently, he ends up not finishing off one Latino girl despite killing her entire family. Well, Busey is electrocuted/poisoned/beat-in-the-head in a Texas jail, which is the usual sentence for a mentally unbalanced person; though I fail to believe a Texan court would have him put to death just for killing people. But he didn’t finish what he started leaving his soul (have to double check Wikipedia to make sure he still has one) in a tortured state…

Then, we cut to the most unsanitary baked goods store in the world where Latino girl is employed. Random tubs of dough are open and being eaten by hand to help with Latino girl’s depression. There is a last minute midnight delivery of a gingerbread seasoning that no one questions despite there being no manifest presented at its delivery and it being delivered by an elderly cackling woman. How does a Mom and Pop organization keep open with such terrible management? So, anyway, Latino chick and a dorky fellow nightworker with a fetish for professional wrestling talk about the death of Gary Busey. And faster than you can say “Oops, I sliced my arm open into a vat of cookie dough,” dorky boy bleeds all in the new gingerbread seasoning which will turn out through a flashback/voiceover to be made with Gary Busey’s ashes. And since we already established the failing level of health standards, no one even thinks about throwing out the bloody gingerbread dough. Long story short, Gary Busey is brought back to life as a gingerbread man by a half-baked (HA!) resurrection process. This is where the movie made one of its greatest mistakes. They took a frightening, creepy monster (Gary Busey) and made it less terrifying, because – face it – anything that makes Gary Busey less Busey-like decreases the creepy factor.

At this point in the story, we have been introduced to a fellow Latino worker, a drunken grandma, a Texas baked goods tycoon running the drunken grandma out of business, the stuck-up elitist daughter, and her bad-boy boyfriend. The Gingerdead Gary manages to trap them all by doing nothing. Every single character is given multiple chances to leave the store when bad stuff starts happening. But Latino girl says, “Oh no, we’re trapped!” and no one dares to disagree with an attractive woman. Gary manages to slice off Grandma’s lady finger (for once that is the movie’s joke and not mine) and freeze/frost second latino girl. Unfortunately, the upper crust of Texas isn’t let off so easily. Texan is run over by his own car and stuck-up girl gets a knife through her head as the tail end of a simple Rube Goldberg device. Busey is allotted lots of time to set up this device as Latino and Bad-boy fall in love despite their different backgrounds. Don’t ask how a 12” well baked piece of bread manages to manipulate and lift objects ten times his size. I mean, every time I had a gingerbread man it was baked so thoroughly it was basically a brick incapable of any point of articulation.

Moving on from my physics tangent, Bad-boy breaks out a gun which Gary manages to disarm and starts shooting. Suddenly, Dorky boy shows up in a $1 wrestling outfit and manages to pin a man an eighth of his size…imagine that! He then consumes Gary Busey. But everyone knows that Gary Busey is a reverse vampire and that if you eat him…you become him. So they bake dorky boy alive. And everyone who matters lives happily ever after.

This film is a delicious piece of cinema with a tale of forbidden love conquering racial barriers and a psychological thriller that challenges the mother-son relationship. If it was a piece of candy it would be a brown M&M where the chocolate center was “West Side Story” dipped in the outer shell of “Pyscho”…and then dipped again into a steaming bag of dog doo.

The scariest bits of this horror film were imagining that I might have eaten a piece of bread made in the same kitchen conditions presented in the film, and the idea that even in death Gary Busey creeps on…

And now I have to go make sure my Busey Security System is still in place.

Until the next time…

As I walked into the movie store last night, I was not in good shape. It had not been a good day, nay, a good week, and I needed the kind of joy that only a truly terrible movie can bring.

I was looking for a movie called “Dracula 3000″ (doesn’t that sound deliciously bad?)  but Blockbuster has come up with a whole new system of organizing their movies where by they just stack them up in piles more or less alphabetically.  Sometimes. Needless to say Dracula 3000 was not to be found, but sitting right in the middle of the D “pile” was the film “Elektra” , the completely unnecessary spin off to Ben Affleck’s mind numbingly bad action vehicle Daredevil.

I’d heard Elektra  was bad. Indeed, I’d heard it was verging on terrible.

So I rented it of course.

At this point it might be beneficial to have a few words on…shudder…Daredevil. In this particular gem of Ben Affleck’s career, Jen Garner plays Benny Boy’s acrobatic girlfriend who apparently is also some…kind…of martial artist? And then she is killed by Micheal Clarke Duncan or Collin Ferril throws a knife at her or something. I dimly recall something about a see saw.  To be honest I’ve spent a great deal of time successfully blocking the memory of Daredevil out of my mind, so the exact nature of JG’s character in the original film will remain lost in the foggy shrouds of bad cinema. (unless you go rent the movie, which I don’t recommend)

Luckily for you and me, that has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in Elektra.

What does happen in this movie? Well to be honest I’m not really sure. A Sarah Palin speechwriter could have written this script and it would make more sense.

But here’s what I could make out.

After dying in Daredevil, JG was brought back to life by a blind warrior named Stick, Terrance Stamp doing a turn as some kind of weird Master Splinter/David Carradine kind of guy.  Apparently he practices a kind of martial arts that “gives one the ability to see the future and, in some instances, bring people back from the dead.”  As to how these things correspond to each other, why Stick would bring JG back from the dead, or why he then chose to train her in this art, we are never told.

Apparently the filmmakers didn’t really find it important.  My own theory is that Stick was probably mesmerized by the sight of Jennifer Garners abs, which actually out act everyone else in the movie.

So after receiving her training, Elektra beebops out into the world and takes a job as a freelance assassin. She gets a contract and is sent somewhere. (the movie never tells us where but it looks suspiciously like British Columbia to me) She rents a house and waits on further instructions. She has some flashbacks that further confuse anyone still paying attention.

At this point I got a little worried and clicked the “info” button on the DVD player to see how far we were into the movie.  I was assuming at least an hour.

Fifteen minutes.

Not a good sign.

So the next thing you know, E befriends that European guy from ER and his daughter, who are apparently the only other people living in Canada. She gets invited over for Christmas dinner. Things are nice.

Then she gets the call and realizes that…dum dum dum….THEY ARE HER TARGET! Oh the pure Shakespearean Drama of it all! Needless to say she refuses, and the shadowy conference room of Evil Japanese Men (have I mentioned them yet??) send out a flock of Ninjas (gaggle of ninjas? Brace of Ninjas?)  to kill the good doctor and his whelp. E kills them all easily, primarily because the ninjas seem to be using nerf guns.

And this is where things start to get hazy.

Wait you say. Wait. Start?

Yes. Start. All confusion prior to this moment is but the tip of the gigantic confusion ice burg that my brain smashed into at full speed ahead, captain. I strongly suspect that the editor of this movie dropped the script on the floor, spilled coffee on it, got the pages out of order, used some as a Kleenex, and then proceeded to cut the film.

Elektra and the other two go to a farmhouse that is owned by a guy who starred in a few Stargate SG1 episodes. Why? Who is he in relationship to everyone else? We don’t know. The conference room of Evil Japanese Men send out more assassins. They all have not very effective mutant powers. Oh yeah and they turn into green fog when Elektra kills them. There is a chase through a forest. Turns out the girl has powers as well? Something about a treasure? Stick trains her for five minutes? Elektra kisses the doctor? Wait where did Stick come from?

At this moment in the viewing experience entire sections of my brain had more or less shut down.  At some point everyone ends up fighting in the foyer of a huge mansion with whirling ninjas and sheets and swords all ripped straight out of Chinese Historical Martial Arts cinema. The bad guys die. The good guys…win? Everybody lives happily ever after.

Doubtless someone was hoping to make a sequel out of this sick puppy, but luckily for us all it tanked hard in the box office so there shan’t be another. (just when my faith in the general movie going populace is restored, Micheal Bay goes and makes another film.  Shame on you all.)

Big budget films that come out terrible make me infinitely sadder than pieces of crap that at least KNOW they are pieces of crap.  Had Elektra even made one iota of sense, it might have been at least palpable.  But as it stands, dear reader, I took this bullet (or ninja dart, if you will)  for you.

And will continue to do so in the future. Keep coming back for more movies, or ad CINEMUCK to your blog readers or feeds.  Updates Weekly!

–Andrew