Mortal Kombat 1995

I hit a little bit of a movie block this past week, possibly due to watching The Dark Knight Rises, also possibly due to a couple movies that I plan on watching but haven’t been in the mood for. That, and I’ve been under the weather for the past few days and haven’t been in the mood for much of anything. So I put a call out on Twitter, and the only suggestion was Mortal Kombat. I was a big fan of both the game and the movie when it first came out, but haven’t watched it again in years. I believe the last game I played was Mortal Kombat 4, and didn’t play very much of that. The movie tosses in a ton of references to the game, which isn’t always a good thing, the fight scenes were pretty well done, and while it’s a little bit more campy than I remember, it’s still a pretty fun watch. Especially if you’re a fan of the Mortal Kombat games.

I absolutely loved that the first thing that you hear, before even the production credits is the famous “Mortal Kombat” scream that leads into the iconic theme song. That song, and the music in general is one of the best things in this movie, an early entry into the techno music genre, mixing in actual game sounds like “Fight”, “Test Your Might”, and others. Jena didn’t watch the entire movie, she just came down towards the end, but even she was sucked in by the music, saying that the music was good. Not only that, but she even enjoyed the fight scenes she saw, saying that the “human had good moves, but the ninja had bad moves” referring to the fight between Liu Kang and Reptile. I didn’t think every track was a winner, but the majority of the movie is quite unique, but also quite fitting.

One thing that I thought was both the best and the worst part of the movie was all of the references to the game. Every time one of them came up, it was a big “yes!” slash “aha!” moment. I’m very familiar with the game, so I’m pretty sure I caught all of them, or at least most of them, and they all made me laugh or at least smile. The problem is that most of the time they stand out as being so incredibly shoehorned in. Like all three times they said “flawless victory”, Johnny Cage’s “friendship” finishing move with the autographed picture, Liu Kang’s flying kicks, panning up the tower, and the “get over here” line. They managed to get almost every one of the character’s signature moves into one of the fights.

Of course, aside from the music, the fights are the best part about the movie. And the whole tournament concept is the perfect excuse to string one fight after another. Even though it takes about half an hour before we get to the first real fight, once they start, they’re almost non-stop until the end of the movie, with very little exposition in-between. I think there was a little over-use of slow motion, but aside from that minor quibble, the fights were all well choreographed and exciting. They made great use of all of the different character’s signature moves aside from a couple of the more unbelievable ones, like the flying kick I mentioned earlier, Johnny Cage’s shadow kick, and most of Scorpion’s moves. There is some early CGI in this movie, and it holds up very poorly. Nearly everything that’s done with computers looks like complete and total crap, especially Reptile – a chameleon-like lizard creature. The one exception is Goro, who is done with mostly puppetry and animatronics, and looks absolutely fantastic, aside from the limited mouth movement.

The characters are all very one-dimensional, which is fitting based on the kind of game it came from. There are three humans that end up banding together for no real reason. There’s my favorite, Johnny Cage, the shallow martial arts actor who is accused of faking his fight scenes, there’s the destined one, Liu Kang (who almost 15 years later crosses over to play a part in the Street Fighter movie), who is fighting to avenge his brother, and there’s the cop, Sonya Blade, who is after the criminal Kano who killed her partner and sticks around to save the world or something. The three are helped along in the tournament by Raiden played by the Highlander himself, Christopher Lambert. He’s the god of lightning and thunder, and is mostly there to guide them to victory, and for occasional comic relief. I thought the voice he used at times was really off, like a cross between Batman and Peter Lorre, but next to Johnny Cage, he had some of the funniest moment. If you take this movie for what it is: a movie based on a fighting game, it’s a lot of fun. It’s shallow and cheesy at times, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, poking fun and cracking little jokes wherever it can. And on top of that, it’s got some kick-ass fight scenes, and a lot of them to boot.

I’m including this movie on this site for several reasons, there are all sorts of superhuman powers on display, both from the supposedly human entrants in the tournament as well as the interdimensional gods. It has clearly defined heroes and very colorful villains, especially the three ninjas Sub Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile. While it’s not based on a comic book, it’s based on a video game, and has a distinct visual style to it. And also, because I wanted to watch and review it, which is really the most important point. I had a lot of fun re-watching this movie. There’s no way to take it seriously, but there’s a lot to enjoy in it if you’re in the right mood. Worth checking out for sure. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Dick Tracy 1990

Before I get into some more classicly bad and/or cheesy superhero movies, I picked this movie for our new podcast. I won our first game and next Tuesday will be the second episode of the As You Watch Podcast. You can be involved too. If you want to watch Dick Tracy and review it on your site, I will gladly link to your reviews so we can all discuss it together. Anyway, Dick Tracy came out on the heels of Tim Burton’s Batman movie and tried to cash in on that first wave of Superhero movies, but it was fairly short lived as nothing besides Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles seemed to have any pull with audiences at the time. Dick Tracy was inspired by a classic comic strip that dates back to the 30′s. Warren Beatty pulled a lot of his influence to make this pet project, initially getting it greenlit under a moderate budget before ballooning it to almost double before he was done. The results were fairly impressive for the time, with all the bright colors and unique characters that looked like they were almost taken directly off the comic book page. But while there are still a lot of great things about the movie, it just doesn’t quite hold up as well anymore, at least in my opinion.

I have to say that the look of this movie is both the best thing about it and the worst thing about it. This really pulled the look of the comic books right off the page years before Sin City made it a cool thing to do. This looked like the comic book version of the 1920′s. The colors pop off the screen, and practically all of the unique looking villains look just like their drawn counterparts. Ok, well technically I’m making an assumption about that last part as I’ve never actually paid much attention to a single Dick Tracy comic. Unfortunately, looking at them today with little background information and many of the characters just look plain grotesque. Like Pruneface, Snake Eyes (I think that’s one of them), Big Boy, Flattop, and many others. But even some of the more minor characters that you might not expect to really need the added prosthetics, like Mumbles or Bugs. The make up at the time looked great, but I think if it were to be done again today, it could have been something that looked much more realistic and yet still true to the comic books.

The best part about this scene? They don’t actually kiss yet.

Aside from the makeup, the cast for this movie was pretty stellar. From Warren Beatty himself, to Dick Van Dyke, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and many others. I even enjoyed Madonna’s performance as Breathless Mahoney in this movie, bringing her off screen chemistry with real life beau, Beatty, onto the screen. She wasn’t given a whole lot to stretch, but this was also before her noteworthy turn in a League of Their Own. I was rather surprised at some of the risque outfits she wore considering this was merely rated PG. The other role I quite enjoyed seeing was Dustin Hoffman as Mumbles, especially his final line in the movie, which I thought was even funnier because my wife still didn’t understand what he was saying. Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy was also a good fit for the hard boiled detective role, bringing out the 20′s style of the character. It was also interesting seeing Al Pacino go so over the top, almost hinting at the caricature he would eventually become in many more recent comedies that he’s been in.

The plot of the movie was rather interesting to me, filled with double crosses, people working both sides, and you’re never sure what anyone’s final plans really are. The three main honchos are Dick Tracy, Big Boy Caprice, and the Blank. Although I don’t think they ever call the Blank by any name, so I was taken to calling him No Face. In next week’s As You Watch podcast, which we’ve just recently recorded, you can hear an interesting parallel to a more recent movie, but you’ll just have to listen to find out which one. During several points in the movie, one of the three has the leg up on the other two, and it keeps things turning all the way to the end.

Just look at all the colors, it’s like a gangster Christmas tree!

One of the things that might throw some people off is the inclusion of a kid to the mix, which is often reserved for sitcoms who have “jumped the shark”. I honestly thought the kid was a decent addition to the movie without being too much of an annoyance, and holds his own for the most part. He was never used for the overly schmaltzy card, though some could say that his comic relief was a little tedious. I think one of the weak points in this movie was actually Tess, Tracy’s long time girlfriend. There’s one of the biggest stereotypical scenes where she walks in right as Tracy is kissing Mahoney, I’m just glad that they did at least give it some originality in the fact that she never actually confronts him about it. She merely keeps it to herself and leaves him for unnamed reasons. She really was just never given much to do in this film. The one scene that I did like between her and Tracy was both of the times where he tried to propose to her. It was just the right amount of being flustered from the guy who never gets shaken by anything else he comes up against. I must admit that I enjoyed this movie less than I had predicted I would, but it’s still a pretty fun flick if you know what you’re getting into. And be sure to come back to hear more about it from me, as well as my castmates in the As You Watch podcast next week right here. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Super Mario Bros. 1993

When I first made my superhero movie list, this one was absent from it. I had actually seen it before, back when it first came out even though I think I waited for home video. I always remembered it as more of a sci-fi movie than a superhero movie. But then I watched a great episode of How it Should Have Ended with Super Mario. “I’m just like you, I’m a superhero. I rescue the princess. You are Superman, I am Super Mario, we are the same.” And it won me over, and I was hoping for another “so bad it’s good” superhero movie because this one has bad written all over it. They took the overall concept of Super Mario, pulled out a handful of names, and a couple designs, then threw it into a generic connected dimension sci-fi movie. Instead of making the mushroom kingdom into a bright, colorful, whimsical place, they made it dark and dystopian. It had some pretty poor action, poor comedy, and a poor plot. There were a handful of fun moments, but not much in the movie clicked with me, and it also never quite transcended into over the top bad fun, it was just lazy.

One of the first things my daughter said to me when we started watching the movie was “Where’s his beard? Luigi doesn’t have any beard!” When a five year old picks up on something like that so early, it makes you wonder why the filmmakers decided it was a good idea to change the character like that. They are actually plumbers at least, with the odd choice of “Mario” for their last names. The only reason I can tell that they do this is because, and I’m guessing here, some studio exec realized that they were called the “Mario brothers” and thought that “Mario” had to refer to their last name. And then, one of the writers felt forced to include that bit of information into the script and decided the best place for it was a weak “who’s on first” gag. Somehow, they even managed to get the look of their iconic outfits wrong. Instead of having red/green shirts with blue overalls, they are wearing blue shirts with red/green overalls. When I was watching the movie and they got to that point, I knew they looked wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, until I looked at a picture of the real characters. The argument could be made that the movie wanted to put their own spin on the designs, but when they matched everything else so closely, but got that one simple thing wrong, it didn’t look unique, it looked wrong. It may have also tried to look like some of the older Mario designs where the colors were reversed, but even then, those blue pockets looked awful.

Yeah, that looks exactly what I would think a realistic version of Yoshi would look like…

I think what sums up the general dislike of this movie was really the fact that the attempt was made to tie the movie in to the video game, and yet it missed on almost every level. There really is a ton of references to the video games in this movie, but in every instance it’s just a little bit off center. They even used the name Princess Daisy instead of Princess Peach due to the fact that she falls in love with Luigi instead of Mario. But making Goombas into tiny-headed dinosaurs instead of walking mushrooms, making Yoshi into a baby T-Rex/Raptor, using NES accessories as props, having the good king be a sentient fungus that looks like shredded strips of rubber. The list goes on and on.

One of the few things I liked about this movie was Dennis Hopper as “president” Koopa. In this version, he’s basically a human, but he was descended from T-Rex. He seems to have gone all out in this role, even going so far as to often hold his hands in front of himself similar to a T-Rex, but still natural enough that you could easily miss it if you weren’t looking for it. I also fairly liked his right hand woman played by Fiona Shaw, probably known best as Mrs. Dursley. She fawned over Koopa, but at the same time had no qualms about scheming against him. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast were awful. Daisy was barely given anything interesting to do, I really disliked John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Bob Hoskins as Mario felt like he was just along for the ride.

I guess those sparks were an important part of Super Mario bros. Obviously more than either Mario or Luigi.

The designs for the world of the movie were just as bad as everything else. It felt like it was somewhere between Mad Max and Hot Wheels. It was too shiny and toy-like to be cyberpunk, and too dirty and thrown together to be sleek sci-fi. All the vehicles were apparently supposed to run on a bumper cars-like electrical grid, which basically just meant that every car had to have a giant, distracting, spark-thrower on it somewhere, often more than one. The only thing at all that I liked about the design was that I thought the animatronic puppetry for Yoshi was actually quite impressive, even though it looked like it could have been stolen off of the Jurassic Park set. The concept around the Goombas just plain made no sense whatsoever. There’s a giant de-evolution machine, but it appears to only de-evolve their heads. And at the same time, it makes them much larger (which is obviously just to make due for the way the actors had to make it work with the false heads). It also really bugged me that when they used the de-evolution machine in reverse to make the two stupid cousins smarter, they ended up still being stupid, they just spoke using larger words.

This movie couldn’t hold the interest of my five year old, and it made my wife, who is a big fan of Mario, actually quite mad. The action was boring or laughable, the comedy wasn’t funny, the drama wasn’t dramatic, the designs were a dismal failure. I went into this movie knowing it was a bad one, but thought I’d have some fun with it anyway. But near the end, I was just waiting for it to be over. I’ve got a couple more bad movies from the rental store and then I have got to start watching some better stuff, maybe Hellboy. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Barb Wire 1996

Ok, so first off I should probably mention that it’s taken me about three days to write this review. It’s not that it’s a terribly complex movie, or that I’ve wanted to go on and on and on about it. It’s just that for about two days, I’ve been sitting with this post open on its own tab, and I’ve been finding any and every online reason to distract myself from writing it. I do have to admit that it’s been very refreshing to essentially take a break from blogging. I went from being quite disappointed that my traffic wasn’t increasing at the same rate it had been for a handful of months, and that it was way lower than several other sites that had started around the same time, and that posting daily was way more taxing than I realized and after a few days, I realized it wasn’t having a huge effect on traffic. I’m obviously getting less traffic than I was when I was posting daily, but it’s not a huge drop. And if I really cared that much about traffic, I would simply review more popular movies. But taking this break has helped me focus on what this site has really become for me, a way to seek out and share my thoughts on a little niche genre that I enjoy, a way to find the undiscovered little gems that others may get a kick out of. But before I go way off topic (too late), let’s get back to the movie at hand. Before I started looking into it, all I knew about Barb Wire was that it was Pamela Anderson’s attempt at acting, an adaptation of some comic book, and Pam Anderson showed off quite a bit of her body in it. After I started looking into it, one of the first things anyone mentioned about it was that it was essentially a remake of Casablanca. Now Casablanca is one of the few black and white classic movies that I’m a big fan of. I’ve seen it three or four times (which is a lot for me, I rarely re-watch movies unless it’s a favorite), so I was curious how many similarities I would be able to catch, which did kind of make it more interesting to watch, if only a little.

But before I get to the Casablanca connections, I should mention that I watched the unrated edition. And honestly, I think I would have rather watched the theatrical cut. I’m not sure what all the differences are, but I’m pretty sure the extended striptease at the beginning was added, and it was also something I could do without. Now don’t get me wrong, Pamela Anderson at that time was an attractive woman, but whoever filmed that scene created the most boring striptease sequence I have ever seen in my life. It felt like at least five minutes of Pamela Anderson gyrating in a rubber dress while being sprayed by water. Occasionally, her breasts would pop out of her dress. The shots were random and jarring, cutting several different angles and stages of undress. One moment her dress was mostly zipped up, one moment it was zipped down, there were even a couple brief cuts where she was completely naked, though still covering herself up. It was dimly lit, and a bad cover of Word Up played in the background. After about the first minute, I was ready for it to be over, and yet it wasn’t even halfway done yet. Throughout the rest of the movie, there were a couple other brief moments of nudity, but they were mostly kept brief and in the background. If nudity is a selling point of a movie, which in this case I believe it was, then it should be handled better than showing it and trying to hide it at the same time.

How could anyone manage to screw up Pamela Anderson in a revealing dress being sprayed with water?!

Aside from the nudity, the movie is set in a dystopian future society during the second Civil War, and Canada is the nation of choice for those who want to get away from it all. Pamela Anderson’s character, Barb Wire, owns a bar that for some reason can’t make ends meet. I would have thought a bar would be one place that would thrive under those conditions, unless Barb is just a horrible manager. I could be wrong, but I thought Rick was doing pretty well for himself with his Cafe American. So besides being a bar manager, she’s also a bounty hunter on the side, using her feminine assets to pose as a stripper and a prostitute to get close to her bounties. I thought way too much time was spent on the two “undercover” portions of the job rather than the more action filled bounty hunting portions. The action itself was done fairly well, although any time Barb says a line, it’s either a cheesy one-liner, or “Don’t call me babe!” followed by a kill shot.

Once the bounty hunting segments are out of the way, the movie is able to get back to the heart of Casablanca’s story, following the gender-reversed figure-important-to-the-revolution and her bodyguard/Barb’s ex-love interest and their quest for the “letters of transit” in the form of retinal scan fooling contact lenses. It was hard to tell if the connections to Casablanca were supposed to be an homage or a parody. Most of the action movie plot took the love story and fugitive status seriously, and yet they turned Sydney Greenstreet’s character into a black man so fat that he’s carried around in the bucket of a bulldozer and goes by the name “big fatso”. They also neglect to feature one of Casablanca’s most famous and moving scenes where the Nazis and the locals have a singing battle with their national anthems. On a random sidenote, I just had a vision that if the movie were remade today that scene would end up being a Glee style mashup. And at the end of the movie, the last line becomes much more of a joke.

I have no words.

I actually did enjoy myself quite a bit while watching this movie. I obviously didn’t enjoy myself because it was a good movie, I didn’t enjoy it because of the nudity, and I sure as hell didn’t enjoy it for the plot. It was bad, but it was just over the top enough to be hilarious more often than not. And when I wasn’t laughing at the badly delivered, cheesy one-liners, I was laughing at the pointless bits of randomness, like when the bald waiter tossed off his wig that he put on only moments before for no apparent reason. It was awful, but it was occasionally awfully good fun, just don’t call me babe. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Batman Returns 1992

This is a movie that like Batman, I hadn’t seen in years and years. But whether it was because I had gotten acclimated to Tim Burton’s style by watching Batman shortly before it, or because it was just a closer fit to my own personal tastes, but I enjoyed Batman Returns a whole lot more than Batman. I think one of the biggest complaints about the movie is that it felt more like “Penguin and Catwoman” rather than “Batman”. And while I agree with the idea, I disagree that it is a complaint. I said in my review of Batman that the rogues gallery is more interesting that Batman himself and that holds just as true here. This movie also plays on the Batman/Catwoman romance in a great way. As much as I enjoyed Anne Hathaway in the Dark Knight Rises, I thought Pfeiffer and Keaton had much better chemistry.

One role that I had somewhat forgotten about in this movie is Christopher Walken as Max Shrek, sorry Shreck. He’s a villainous businessman with a clean public face. It doesn’t surprise me that it was actually planned for his character to be Harvey Dent as they share many similar traits, minus the coin. Walken is actually quite good in this role, with most of his mannerisms that have since become almost a caricature kept to a minimum. In fact, pretty much the entire cast of this movie is pretty spot-on.

Catwoman in this movie has a backstory somewhat changed with the norm. Instead of being a notorious cat burglar, she’s a mousy secretary slash almost-crazy cat lady who has a knack for survival. Unlike the Halle Berry movie that takes the concept to an absurd level, this movie leaves the mysticism to the viewer’s imagination. How I see it is that she managed to survive a fall from a building, and then she created the whole Catwoman persona and decided that she had nine lives. There are no magic cats in this movie, instead there’s a much darker connotation that the stray cats think she is dead and are actually starting to eat her. About the only thing I don’t like about how Catwoman is handled is that it reminds me how many ideas the awful Catwoman movie takes from this one.

Penguin’s view of Gotham at Christmas.

The Penguin is the one weak point in this movie. Instead of being a highly reformed gentleman who looks like a penguin that I’m familiar with in the animated series, he’s a sewer dwelling monster who’s forced into the gentlemanly role as he tries to run for mayor. He also has ties to the circus which I thought made him too close to the Joker who was just in the last movie. Not only that, but he also has an army of penguins stolen from the zoo, I guess, that he has somehow developed a mind control system for with no explanation of how he managed to develop such complicated technology when he’s spent his entire life in the sewers/in the circus. That and the other scene where his minions hack into the Batmobile. The penguins seem to only be there to create an absurd scene where they are all sent out with missiles attached to their backs. The entire story arc of the Penguin in this movie reminds me of an episode of the animated series where he becomes accepted in high society with an elitist girlfriend, but it’s actually just a joke to everyone else besides the girl who genuinely comes to care for him. That episode showed the Penguin as a much more tragic and three dimensional character than this movie does, where he is simply out for revenge for his life and is basically a monster in a penguin suit.

Batman himself tends to take more of a backseat to the villains in this movie, and spends more of his time either in the batcave or fighting/flirting with Selina Kyle. I did like the fact that both him and Selina realized each others secret identities rather than having it revealed to each other. He really just isn’t given that much to do other than distrust the Penguin from the beginning. He defeats the Penguin’s mayoral campaign via a recording, in a way that has been done time and time again, I doubt this was the first time and it certainly wasn’t the last. And at the end, while he does reprogram the penguins (and I can’t believe I just typed that sentence), he mostly ends up just being in the middle while a bunch of stuff happens around him. His best scenes in this movie are with Catwoman, both the ones in costume and as Bruce Wayne.

I think this movie was a step in the right direction coming off of his first Batman movie, and I think if he had been given a third shot at it, Tim Burton could have delivered something quite spectacular. This movie goes much darker than he did with the Joker, and while there is still some silly humor, it’s turned down quite a bit. The romantic subplot with Catwoman was much stronger than the one with Vicky Vale in the first movie, and I would have really loved to have seen what would have happened if they had gone with the original plan of Harvey Dent instead of the Penguin and had Tim Burton’s Two-Face in a third movie. But as it is, with Tim Burton going back to his roots with Frankenweenie and another reboot of Batman in the near future, there’s always a chance that we may see another Tim Burton Batman, and honestly I’d like to see that. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

*Poster art by Tom Whalen

The Mask 1994

For a while, I was trying to figure out what I should watch next. I was thinking about watching some superhero movies with some relation to the holidays, but the only ones I could think of were Batman Returns which I already watched, and Elf Man which looks horrible. So, I just picked a random movie from my collection I hadn’t gotten around to yet: The Mask. I was never a huge fan of Jim Carrey’s old comedies even though I did watch them, and the catch phrases made their rounds at my school. This movie also has the distinction of being the debut of Cameron Diaz. It’s based on a Dark Horse comic, and it’s typically thought of as more of a zany comedy rather than a superhero movie, but it works for me.

One thing I had forgotten about this film is how dark it gets in places. There are a couple instances of blood and death with the mobsters, like the tech guy who gets shot during the bank heist and dies while trying to have his last cigarette, as well as the golf scene where the mob boss is showing the wannabe mob boss Dorian who’s really in charge by having his goons stick a golf tee in his mouth while he hits a golf ball off of it. There’s even a brief moment where the Mask is making baloon animals for some thugs trying to mug him and accidentally pulls out a condom instead. For such a cartoon inspired, and remembered in my head as a young skewing film, it was a little surprising to notice those moments, especially after the horrid memories of the sequel which can only be enjoyed by brains that haven’t fully formed.

The story of the movie is simple enough, boring bank drone Stanley Ipkis finds a mask that happens to contain the spirit of the Norse god Loki, who is more known for his mischief in this movie rather than his menace as seen in Thor or the Avengers. While wearing the mask, he becomes a superhero, able to create or do practically anything in his imagination, and luckily his imagination is filled with classic Tex Avery cartoons filled with sight gags and cartoon violence. But instead of using his powers to become a superhero, as he posits during an early scene, he instead uses his newfound powers for personal gain, using them for revenge against those who he felt has taken advantage of him in his mundane life as well as robbing a bank to get money to impress the beautiful singer Tina at the Coco Bongo club he was never able to get into as Stanley.

Throughout the movie, there are a few things that I thought didn’t make too much sense. Like if he was able to create and do pretty much anything as the Mask, why would he need money that he didn’t even appear to use except to create a distraction to get into the club, which he could have gotten into any number of ways? I also thought it was a stretch that the put upon police detective Callahan would immediately place the blame on Stanley Ipkis with nothing to go on except a piece of pajama fabric at the club and some quirky behavior at his apartment. There was also quite a bit of build up to when Dorian gets the mask, implying that he would be extremely powerful and/or dangerous with the mask, but it never really pays off. He only barely uses it to take his revenge on the mob boss even while some of his own gang lose their lives in the process.

Aside from those few qualms, this is a fun movie, especially if you’re a fan of classic Looney Tunes. As The Mask, Carrey feels often times like an early Bugs Bunny, or more likely an early Daffy Duck or Screwy Squirrel. He’s got the insane attitude and switches into many different characters with ease. There’s even the classic moment used often in Looney Tunes where he goes through an over the top dramatic moment, then is handed an Oscar equivalent while silhouettes of the audience applaud for him. There’s also plenty of other recognizable sight gags that I quite enjoyed. This movie really is Carrey at his comedic best, using his exaggerated facial gestures and manic sensibilities in a situation that makes it feel fun rather than stupid. He’s also so put upon as Stanley that the audience can easily allow him a little leeway towards his more selfish goals early on. As well as the fact that he suffers the consequences of those actions, albeit only briefly.

The movie does get a little unbelievable when he finally makes the turn where Stanley wants to help others rather than just himself, even in terms of a world where this magical mask exists. Even Dorian as the villain seemed a little out of place. He’s got his own little gang, and he’s set up to be somewhat of a mob middleman who wants to be the boss himself. But he never really seems to have any goals or motivations outside of that. There are references to him running his own deals behind the mob’s back in the club, but in the end he feels the need to blow up the club with no real explanation. There doesn’t appear to be any personal gain in it for himself, and there’s no one specific within the club that he’s getting rid of outside of Tina.

There’s also the whole love story subplot, because all Stanley is really looking for is someone to love, right? He’s got his choice of two women, the hot lounge singer Tina, played well by Diaz though it’s not exactly a difficult role, and the advice column writer who’s dying for a break to get into real reporting for the pay increase. Tina typically falls for the Mask, but also sees something in Stanley himself. Now that I think about it, there are a lot of different things going on in this movie, but it never really feels bogged down by any of them. They all weave together in a way that makes sense, and with plenty of laughs. I was unfortunately never too fond of the beleaguered detective Callahan and his dimwitted sidekick. They got a couple laughs out of me, but they didn’t feel funny enough to just be comic relief, and they were too silly to be taken seriously. But overall, it’s still a great movie and one of Carrey’s better 90′s comedies. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Almost Super: The Matrix 1999

This was a bit of a tough decision on whether or not to tag this movie with my “Almost Super” tag. This is very much like a superhero origin story, Neo has superhuman abilities, even an alter ego, and the visuals are very influenced by comic books in some places. But in the end, the philosophical elements and especially the sci-fi setting to it put this in the realm of a not-quite superhero. I saw this in theaters when it first came out, as well as the two sequels which I don’t think are as bad as everyone makes them out to seem, even though I won’t be continuing on to watch them just now. The movie was one of the biggest surprises to come out that year, it had a great marketing campaign with the question “What is the Matrix?” and it’s pretty much a cultural milestone, noted by the hundreds of bullet time Trinity jump kick parodies over the years. But even with the parodies doing their best to tarnish several of the scenes, the movie still holds up as one of the best movies out there.

Taken strictly as an origin story, it’s actually a fairly interesting one. Neo is the reluctant hero spending most of the movie just learning about what the Matrix actually is, while everyone around him keeps telling him that he’s the savior of the world, and it’s not until he believes he isn’t that he begins to become the hero he’s destined to be. Not only that, but he’s recruited by a group of people that already essentially have superpowers, at least while inside the Matrix. And the movie ends at the perfect moment, after he finally comes into his potential and shows the programs what he’s made of.

The visuals of this movie were something like a cross between an action movie, a comic book, and an anime. There were several different unique angles and perspectives that would make for great comic book panels, but the best thing that this movie has going for it, and still holds up the most are the amazing fight sequences. From the opening scene with Trinity to the fight between Neo and Morpheus, all the way to the subway fight between Neo and Agent Smith. It was made when wirework in action scenes wasn’t all that common in typical Hollywood movies and it still has a quality that is unlike almost anything else out there, though you can see how it’s been an influence in other filmmakers such as Zack Snyder.

Tell me that doesn’t belong on the page of a comic book.

There are a couple things that don’t hold up quite as well watching this movie now as opposed to when it came out. While the machines tout that the Matrix is intended to be at the height of human civilization before they relied too heavily on machines. On second thought, maybe they did pick the perfect time period, have you ever seen how someone reacts when they lose/break their smartphone? I also think that it’s rather unbelievable that the machines can’t figure out simple magnetic shielding to protect themselves against EMPs. But aside from those minor issues the movie totally holds up almost 15 years later.

Aside from just being a generic sci-fi action movie, there are a lot of interesting elements thrown in throughout the movie. Even though I have to admit that Alice in Wonderland is one of the easiest and most popular references to use, it’s still one of my favorites and I enjoy hearing about the White Rabbit and the looking glass references. There’s also the familiar Christian references of Neo being the savior of the world, betrayed by one of his friends, and resurrected.

The characters are all very interesting in their own right, from the leader and believer till the end Morpheus, to the amazing scene stealing Oracle. In a movie like this, the last type of person you would expect to see as someone revered by the other badass characters is a kindly, black, grandmotherly chain smoker baking cookies. The questions the movie asks about what is real, what is a dream, and what the difference is may be rather shallow, but it’s taken so seriously that it’s hard not to get caught up in the philosophy of it. At least while inbetween scenes of kung fu and guns. It’s still a classic sci-fi movie and one of my favorites. Not only that, but it scan still be thought of as a great movie even though the two sequels are looked at as so inferior and yet so connected to the first that it’s hard to separate them. But as its own movie, it’s one of my favorites. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Batman Forever 1995

It’s been a while since I’ve seen this movie, though I remember loving it when it first came out. I was 15 at the time and remember going to Six Flags that summer and getting that question mark logo you see in the poster below on a t-shirt that I wore quite often for probably a year or more afterwards. I also find it somewhat interesting that there are actually several inside jokes that I don’t think I ever got when I was younger because I wasn’t that knowledgeable about the Batman universe outside of the movies or the animated series. There’s a brief reference to Nightwing, and at the end the psychologist’s name is Burton. After the very dark and gothic version of Gotham from Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher took over the reigns and lightened it up both in terms of his garish neon lighting as well as his pun-filled humor. None of this really sat well with me and it only portends things to come in the next movie Batman and Robin. It was filled with too many jokes and silliness that it barely felt like a Batman movie. While there are still some decent action sequences and other moments here and there, it’s a far cry from the quality seen in the Burton movies previously.

The movie starts off in one of the worst ways possible, instead of an establishing shot flying through the Batman logo, there’s a glory shot of the new batsuit including a crotch close-up. And that is immediately followed up with a lame joke about getting drive-thru. Things don’t get any better when introducing Two Face played by Tommy Lee Jones who seems to have been told that Two Face should act more like the Joker than Two Face. He spends most of his time on screen laughing or using his split personality as a joke, like having two cigarettes in his mouth, one of them being a cigarillo. Or drinking from two champagne glasses, one of them darkly colored. And yet the thing that Two Face is actually known for, his coin, is barely used in the movie. It’s seen only four times in the movie, and only once does it really play a part in him making a decision, and even then he gets it wrong. Where traditionally Two Face would make a decision based on a single flip of the coin, in this movie Jones is seen flipping his coin several times until he gets the “correct” flip.

The many faces of Chase Meridian.

The romantic interest in this movie is also pretty poor. Enter Nicole Kidman as Chase Meridian, expert in abnormal psychology and master of only one facial expression – wide eyed wonder. There is barely any chemistry between her and Val Kilmer as either Batman or Bruce Wayne. While they trade romantic banter, it feels awfully bored and passionless. Kidman wasn’t quite the smoldering temptress, instead she was more of a lovestruck puppy dog. One of the praises I tend to hear about this movie is that Val Kilmer was one of the best actors to play Bruce Wayne, and to that end I do somewhat agree. There are several moments where he is somewhat trapped inside his Bruce Wayne persona and there’s always the urge to reveal his identity for the greater good, or just some poon tang. But he does handle himself rather well while inside his business suit.

Robin on the other hand is a completely different story. While I did like the nods to the character, both in having his family’s trapeze outfits mimic the traditional Robin costume as well as having him reference the name Nightwing. But the problems I had started when Bruce so easily “adopted” him, which consisted of just bringing him home right after his family had died. It didn’t make sense that he would go with Bruce instead of staying with the rest of his circus family, since nearly everything I’ve heard about travelling circuses is that they are all very close just like family. Instead, the circus just up and leaves him with some millionaire stranger. Not only that, but there’s a couple comments made about social services which is laughable because Chris O’Donnell looks closer to 30 than he does to pre-18. He’s also completely pre-occupied with killing Two Face who was responsible for his family’s death. Of course we know this because he says it no less than a dozen times through the course of the movie. He also has the most ridiculous method of gaining entrance to the batcave by going through this crazy acrobatics routine to sneak through a door that by all accounts Alfred should have shut behind him instead of allowing it close by itself.

A perfect example of the color palette, all neon and fire.

Finally the Riddler is played by the genius casting of Jim Carrey. I seem to remember at the time that this was perfect casting, he had come to nearly the height of his comic success at the time, but looking back on it, it felt more like Jim Carrey with some riddles thrown in rather than the actual character of the Riddler. Even before he becomes the Riddler, Edward Nygma is even very Jim Carrey-esque with weird mannerisms and facial expressions more befitting someone that should already be in Arkham Asylum rather than someone working in a scientific capacity. And to top it all off, his grand scheme of becoming a genius doesn’t really seem to have any real effect on him other than getting him momentarily high. All in all, it was not the type of Batman that I’m used to seeing, and not really the type of Batman that I’m interested in seeing. Even though there’s also a moment that seems straight out of the Adam West Batman where he solves the Riddler’s final riddle almost immediately, but at the same time this had too many moments in it where it was trying to take itself seriously that I couldn’t really regard it with the same enjoyable camp as I did with the Adam West Batman. It was silly, it was colorful, it had a little bit of action, a lot of puns, and I know it gets worse from here. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Batman & Robin 1997

I decided to watch this as part of the ipc’s Shitfest 2013 so keep an eye out for a slightly different version of this review over there. When Batman & Robin first came out it was pretty anticipated. While Arnold Shwarzenegger wasn’t the most obvious choice for Mr. Freeze, he did at least look the part in the trailers, somewhat. I wish I could remember what my initial reaction to the movie was, but if I had to guess I would say that I enjoyed it but also noticed a few things that weren’t quite right with the movie. The puns that crept into the last movie have steamrolled into this one full force. The action became more cartoonish, and the neon visuals were bigger and more colorful. This movie seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and when all was said and done, it almost no longer resembled Batman outside of the costumes.

From the start of this movie, the casting choices were some of the biggest question marks. Batman went from a still fairly young looking Val Kilmer to a much older looking George Clooney while Robin was still played by Chris O’Donnell. And I have to say that George Clooney is by far the worst Batman or Bruce Wayne in the entire Batman movie series. The entire movie, he never once felt like he was playing Batman, he felt like he was playing George Clooney. At the core of Batman is the fact that he is really a tragic figure, a dark hero, and yet Clooney can never seem to quite get rid of a slight smirk in the way he delivers his lines. Whether he’s arguing or in a more dramatic moment, there’s always the hint of a sly smile on his face like he’s about to make some quippy remark. Arnold Shwarzenegger was also a poor casting choice, taking on the “dramatic” role of Mr. Freeze after his origin story had been redone so masterfully in the animated series. But instead of giving him the pathos that he deserved, he was a musclebound pun delivery device bent on stealing diamonds to power his freezing devices, spending his lair in an ice cream factory and forcing his minions to sing the Freeze Miser song from Year Without a Santa Clause. And finally Alicia Silverstone as Barbara Gordon, sorry just plain Barbara. I don’t think they ever mention her last name since they made her Alfred’s niece instead of Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. She didn’t get much screen time, but she also never gave much screen presence. Whether she was using her computer genius skills, her competitive motorcycle racing skills, or her advanced martial arts skills, she always acted like a pouty teenage girl.

Since I did mention Alfred I do want to point out the one thing this movie almost got right. Michael Gough has been the one constant through this four movie Batman run as Bruce Wayne’s butler and surrogate father even though he’s never been given a whole lot to do. This movie finally throws him a bone and Gough handles it nicely. All the scenes with Alfred in this movie have the right amount of drama, none of the puns, and are great to watch. It’s too bad that it had to be placed in this movie where everything else is a complete joke which makes these more serious scenes feel out of place. I also choose to blindly ignore the completely ridiculous moment where Alfred appears in the Batcomputer Max Headroom-like and reveals that he had already made his teenage niece a form-fitting rubber Batsuit. I really don’t want to know where the filmmakers thought that he managed to get her measurements from.

As for the villains, as with many later sequels, there are more than just the one villain. Aside from Mr. Freeze, there is also Poison Ivy and her henchman Bane. This version of Bane is a far cry from the Bane of the Dark Knight Rises. Here he’s basically a roided out zombie. He only speaks in one word sentences and follows the commands of Poison Ivy unquestioningly, even though there’s no real explanation as to why he would take orders from her, she never even has a moment where she uses her pheremone dust on him. I suppose it could be explained by the fact that he was initially created to be sold to other countries to create super soldiers so I suppose it would be an added benefit if they were highly suggestible. Though as it’s presented I would almost think that to defeat him, you could just tell him that you’re the one giving him the orders now. And Poison Ivy herself is also an odd concept. She gets tossed into a pile of various chemicals and survives along with the ability to control plants. But that part of her concept is never really used throughout the movie. Instead they give her poisoned lips as her only real ability. While she does populate her lair with massive amounts of plants, she’s never really seen controlling them. As a scientist studying plants it’s more likely that she developed formulas to create quicker growing plants. That’s also made more likely since she meets her demise at the hands of one of her beloved plants. She also has her pheremone dust that drives people wild, yet it’s never shown as coming off of her body, she either uses a powder puff, or it comes from a leaf decoration on the palm of her hand. And if that leaf is supposed to be a real leaf growing from her hand, it totally looks more like a fabric leaf that’s part of her outfit.

Name that butt!

Poison Ivy is the cause of the major conflict between Batman and Robin in this movie, and nearly all they do once she shows up is argue with each other in a real sibling rivalry sort of way. It never feels serious, instead it feels much more childish, like everything else in this movie. I believe this movie was also noted for its big budget effects and set designs, but in every scene where something is frozen, it always looks like rubbery plastic rather than solid ice. Especially during all the moments where the “ice” can be seen wiggling around like a piece of rubber. This movie is just hands down a mess from start to finish. From the repeat of the opening butt and crotch close-ups, only double this time, to the final image of them running to the camera for no reason it’s a completely childish, pun-filled disaster of a movie. It’s like they wanted to go back to the Adam West days of Batman, except they keep trying to deny the fact that it’s actually a comedy, so there’s all the perceived humor, and yet none of the fun. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Rocketeer 1991

I know I watched this movie ages ago when I was younger, but rewatching it today I realized that the only thing I remembered from my first watch of this movie was that the guy had a rocketpack and it took place in the 30′s. When watching it again, I was really impressed with the style and the feeling of the movie. I also recognized so many different actors in this movie that I didn’t realize were in here. Mainly it was Alan Alda who I’ve been seeing in a lot of great roles recently. I did think there were some overly ridiculous plot points towards the end of the movie, but overall I quite enjoyed it. It’s been something pretty different than a lot of the movies that I’ve been watching lately for this site. It does slightly make me want to re-watch Captain America which was done by the same director, Joe Johnston. I don’t think it quite lives up to the quality of Captain America, but it still has quite a few charms to it.

The Rocketeer is set in the late 1930′s right before World War II and the hero of the film is Cliff Secord who’s got a lot of talent, but not quite so much money to go with it. He was played by unknown at the time Billy Campbell. He’s basically a brave over brains kind of guy that always does the right thing no matter the danger. Unfortunately, I never really felt like he had a very interesting personality. He was too much of a boy scout with doe eyes for his gal. And while he did make the occasional wrong turn here or there, it was usually just a moment of slapstick before getting immediately back on track. On top of that, he had his flight jacket which he wore constantly. There’s even a point where he puts on a waiter’s jacket as a disguise, and he puts it on over his flight jacket. I can understand that he’s wearing it every time he flies, but the only time he isn’t wearing it is during a brief date with his gal Jenny early in the movie. And while the outfit and rocketpack both look pretty snazzy, he barely gets to do anything super heroic while being the Rocketeer aside from his first mid-air rescue. Everything else he does as the Rocketeer is just fly around so he can do his fighting or chasing or whatnot firmly on the ground.

Jenny Blake is really a pretty great character in comparison. She’s a strong, independent woman working in Hollywood as an extra, but she doesn’t put up with any of CLiff’s nonsense. She walks out on him when she learns that he was trying to protect her from hearing about his plane crash, she also almost holds her own against the main villain of the movie after she has been captured. She outsmarts him, overpowers him, and even finds his secret plan. Pretty good for a supposed damsel in distress. It also doesn’t hurt that she’s played by Jennifer Connelly. Of course, aside from how much I enjoyed her onscreen, I also never really felt that much chemistry between the two. It doesn’t help that it starts off almost immediately as being antagonistic and in trouble, even though one of the most important things to Cliff is his picture of her that he keeps in his plane. Half of the movie is spent with her being annoyed by him and trying to get together with big time movie star Neville Sinclair played by Timothy Dalton. And that whole relationship is based on him using her to try and get the rocket, which immediately nullifies any possible chemistry between them either. Even when Jenny and Cliff get together in the end, it feels more like that’s what’s expected of them rather than they are genuinely right for each other.

The villains in this movie don’t fare too well either. The main villain at the head of all the other villains is Neville Sinclair. He’s a hot shot actor who *spoiler* turns out to be a German spy, although once it’s revealed that he is a spy he dons a poor German accent that comes and goes at random times throughout the rest of the movie. I thought the whole Nazi angle was a little too far fetched, or at least not well plotted enough. It kind of comes out of nowhere in the third act and from then on takes over the rest of the movie. I also really disliked the very rubber looking makeup of the giant tough guy thug. It also felt like there were way too many villains. There were the gangsters who were being paid to work for Sinclair, there was the giant rubberfaced thug who was Sinclair’s right hand man, there was Sinclair himself, and there was also the random German soldiers, the German guy on the Zeppelin, and even the FBI agents were kind of villains in the sense that they were very antagonistic towards Cliff.

I’ve gone on quite a bit about several of the things that I didn’t like about this movie, but there was still plenty here to enjoy. The movie has a great style to it, from the look of the Rocketeer to the look of everything else around him. Throughout the first part of the movie there’s a real sense of wonder about flying in general as well as technology. The music is a great part of the movie, helping with that sense of wonder and amazement. There’s some fun bits of comedy as well, usually the great little one liners delivered by Alan Arkin as PB, Cliff’s genius tech guy and somewhat of a Doc Brown analogue only less crazy. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s a fun little trip to the retro pulp stories of the 30′s. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Toxic Crusaders: The Movie 1991

Just when I thought I was done with the Toxic Avenger I noticed that they had collected some of the cartoon episodes and made it movie length. Not only that, but it’s currently available to watch on YouTube on Troma’s official YouTube channel, though for some reason the four live action Toxie movies aren’t available anymore. It’s a weird concept to turn a campy movie with so much sex and violence into a children’s cartoon. Something similar had been done before with Rambo having been made into a cartoon, but this at least has a superhero angle going for it. The animation is typical low quality like many of the mass produced cartoon properties of the 80′s and early 90′s. The writing is very formulaic, the voice acting is generally below average, but it’s sprinkled with moments of humor that hit me in just the right way, and the formulas fell right along with many of the cheesy cartoons I grew up with and I didn’t hate watching it by a longshot.

The concept sticks pretty close to the second and third movies, which was right around when this was made. Melvin has essentially the same origin, although the thuggish Bozo is renamed to Bonehead and is later thrown into a barrel of “acid rain”, becomes slightly disfigured, and is recruited by the show’s evil villain. That evil villain is Dr. Killemoff who is a cartoon-i-fied version of the head of Apocalypse Inc from the 2nd and 3rd movies. Instead of being the devil himself, Dr. Killemoff is a cockroach alien from the planet Smogulon, and the reason he’s polluting the Earth is to make the atmosphere similar to Smogulon’s so his race can take over the planet. This is honestly a lot more logical than the live action movies, even though it’s diluted a bit when other Smogulonites visit Earth with no apparent ill-effects. Killemoff also has a mutant/cyborg henchman named Psycho who was my favorite character of the bunch. He’s basically psychic and has the running joke where for every scheme that Killemoff comes up with, he suggests an improbable way for the scheme to be foiled which is exactly what happens later in the episode. It’s a great gag because of how easily dismissed it is by Killemoff, and even though he gets more and more annoyed when at the “told you so” moments, he never goes the extra step actually listen to what he has to say and better prepare for it.

Hideously deformed creatures of superhuman size and strength.

The heroes themselves were nothing special. Toxie of course is pretty much the same, with his superhuman size and strength only his Tromatons don’t compel him to kill evil people, it merely detects evil, and his mop is now alive too. There’s also Nozone who has a giant nose with requisite super sneezing power and a voice that sounds like a congested Goofy, Major Disaster who can control plants but doesn’t really do much, Headbanger who is the overly Jewish sounding scientist who used to work for Killemoff atom smashed onto the body of a dimwitted surfer dude, and Junkyard who was a dog that got combined with a bum. I think Junkyard is actually a fairly dark origin if you over-think it because it’s the dog that is the dominant personality who gains the intelligence of the bum, but his personality seems to have just died. And of course, there’s also Yvonne who is essentially Sarah from the two previous movies only nearsighted instead of blind and an annoyingly high pitched voice. They also carried over her accordion playing.

The one thing this show has going for it is the humor. In between moments of childish slapstick, dumb villains, or even dumb heroes, there are some funny bits thrown in. Some of my favorites are when they fall into meta humor and break the fourth wall, such as referring to how many viewers they have, even though I imagine 7 million viewers was an extremely high estimate. I also got a little kick out of the fact that every time they referred to themselves they quoted the exact line “hideously deformed creature of superhuman size and strength” which is a bit of a mouthful and also used the same way in the movie sequels. I already mentioned how much I enjoyed Psycho and how he always takes the air out of Killemoff’s grand scheme. The animation may be cheap, the voice acting may be average, the stories may be cliche, but I had some fun watching it, and you can even watch this one with your kids around. The live action ones? Not so much. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Almost Super: Demolition Man 1993

I realized that it’s been quite a while since I’ve written one of these “Almost Super” reviews. And this past weekend I watched Demolition Man which had me thinking through most of the movie that it feels like it could easily be the prequel to Judge Dredd. It’s got Rob Schneider in it, and though it may be set in a utopian future rather than a dystopian future it has a similar feel to it. Well, a similar feel to the trailers that I’ve seen for Judge Dredd since I haven’t technically watched that one just yet. It also happened to be the Movie Of The Month over at the Lamb so I thought it would be a perfect movie to use my tag for movies that aren’t quite a superhero movie, but share a lot of the same qualities with them. Anyway, for the actual movie itself, Demolition Man was a fun little 90′s cheesy action movie with both Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes hamming it up with as many action one-liners as they can fit into their dialogue. It had a lot of really odd future ideas in it, but it was a fun ride while it lasted.

The premise of the movie is that in the near future, criminals are frozen instead of jailed and while they are frozen they are also mentally rehabilitated because science! Stallone is a cop whose known for going too far and gets jailed for killing 30 innocents in a giant explosion while he is trying to capture Snipes who is a mentally unstable, violent criminal. They both end up being cryo-jailed and 30-some years in the future, Snipes is thawed for his parole hearing and escapes. It turns out that it only takes 30-some years to create a perfect, violence-free society and the police no longer know how to deal with someone this violent so they thaw out Stallone to help them catch Snipes. There’s also plenty of overtones of Big Brother and the societal inequities and a mystery plot that’s not really set up as much of a mystery as you know pretty early on that the supposed savior of society is the one who actually set Snipes loose in the first place.

Some of the most fun of this movie are all the little details of this future society, they are sprinkled throughout the movie and often used as a punchline like the fact that there was a “franchise war” and the winner was Taco Bell so there is now only one single restaurant franchise in the entire country, though there still seems to be different variations of Taco Bell as the one shown was a more high class joint, which you could tell because the portions were ridiculously tiny. Swearing is also disallowed in the future, and any time you do swear a nearby terminal sounds an alarm and gives you a ticket. Toilet paper is replaced with “three seashells” which they never explain, and the swapping of bodily fluids is also disallowed to prevent the spread of disease. They are used as throwaway jokes, but in a better movie could actually be thought of as a satire of the amount of control the government has, aside from the three seashells anyway.

I don’t usually post GIFs here, but this one was too fun to pass up.

One surprising joy of this movie was to see Sandra Bullock and the other cops from the future playing it so completely naive and unaware of the past that’s just before their time. Bullock is absolutely adorable as Stallone’s partner, and by the way, I apologize for not using their character names, but the names aren’t that memorable and they are much more recognizable as actors than as their characters. I love both the fact that she is a supposed fangirl of 90′s culture and yet constantly gets common phrases wrong, like “take this job and shovel it” or “there’s a new shepherd in town”. Anyway, aside from Bullock, Benjamin Bratt is also great as a complete and total nerd police officer, there’s also the minor role from Rob Schneider which the best part is when the two of them share the nerdiest future high-five in the police station. Glenn Shadix is also a bit of fun as the bureaucratic villain’s assistant, probably best known for his role as the overweight art toadie in Beetlejuice. There’s also a small role for a young Denis Leary as the leader of the underground… whatever they are. They aren’t exactly resistance even though there are a couple minor attacks, they’re more like the dregs of society.

Now that I think of it, those underground dregs comprise another layer of the underlying social commentary in this silly action movie. The whole reason why Snipes was thawed out and released as a psycho killer in the first place was to kill this underground leader and the overall goal is to seal up and/or destroy these dregs of society. They are thought of as worthless humans not deserving to live which is a very common theme in these sci-fi future societies, also echoed in the recent Elysium. This society is full of people scrounging for food and medical supplies, living off of rat burgers. Which is a great little moment when Stallone finds out that the burger is actually made of rats and instead of spitting it out in disgust, he continues to eat it, commenting that it’s a great rat burger. The action is a lot of over the top fun, even when a lot of it consists of Snipes completely dominating a bunch of police officers who no longer know how to fight, and the jokes are cheesy 90′s fun, they are an absolute delight any time Stallone and Snipes are facing off with each other, trying to one-up the other’s one-liner. And to top everything off, it’s actually a pretty fully realized future, with fully explained concepts even though they are extremely unlikely. It’s a fun movie and I’m glad I got the chance to watch it. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Judge Dredd 1995

I’ve been wanting to watch this movie for a while, ever since I watched the Judge Minty short even though I know it’s a far cry from the more serious tone of both the short and the recent Dredd movie with Karl Urban. What really made me want to watch it was watching Demolition Man which also starred Sylvester Stallone and had Rob Schneider in a small role, so I wanted to watch this movie with the small thought in mind that this is a future that takes place after Demolition Man, and in a lot of ways there are some similarities, but this is a very different movie than Demolition Man. I also went into this thinking that it was going to be a very bad schlockfest with Schneider hamming it up and Stallone giving a bad performance, and yet it’s not that nearly as much as I expected it to be. It’s actually a relatively good movie, but it has a poor script that doesn’t make good use of the characters, and it’s also notable for breaking one of the only things that I know about Judge Dredd the comic character: he never takes off his helmet, and yet Stallone takes his helmet off a mere 15 minutes into the movie and doesn’t put it back on again until the very end.

One thing that surprised me the most about this movie was Stallone’s performance. Yes, there are several moments with him doing his cheesy one liners in his very Stallone drawling yell, but for the most part he actually does a very stoic performance fitting what I’ve heard about Dredd’s character. While he does open up with the iconic “I am the law!” and has an annoying pseudo-catchphrase that doesn’t work for me at all “I knew you were going to say that”. Not to mention the whole “double whammy” ammo from his lawgiver gun. But aside from those moments, he handled the action well and I enjoyed him quite a bit as Judge Dredd in this movie.

The biggest problem with this movie comes from the script, and also Rob Schneider’s character, Herman. The movie opens with this schlub of a character being released from prison after a 6 month sentence so it’s kind of through his eyes that we are introduced to the world of Mega City, an ultra-giant bustling metropolis that’s supposedly the size of the state of New York, or maybe a bit less, they’re not entirely clear on that. But it does have flying cars and a skyline full of skyscrapers that dwarf the Statue of Liberty tucked right in the middle of it all. Crime is rampant and that’s shown in part by Herman returning to his apartment, or his newly rented one, whatever, and find it being occupied by random violent criminals. We eventually find out that he is a criminal hacker known for tampering with service drones, and yet throughout the entire movie the extent of his “hacking” skills consists of him hiding inside a recycled food drone and ripping out wires of an attack robot. Later in the movie, though a fortunate coincidence, he is a lone survivor of a prison transport crash alongside Dredd. I can understand him teaming up with Dredd out in the “Cursed Earth” outside of the city, but I don’t understand why he continues to help once they are safely back in the city. He’s supposedly the comic relief and yet he makes very few jokes, he isn’t really all that helpful, and there’s also the brief concept that Dredd mistakenly judges his initial escape at the beginning of the movie as a repeat offense punishable by 5 years is barely even addressed.

The other problem the script has is that it doesn’t really know how to set up the conceit of the villain, and it surprised me that this part was actually taken from the comics because it’s the part that I thought sounded too ludicrous. Basically the Judge system wanted to create perfect judges so they used the DNA from the highest ranks of the system to create two super soldiers: Dredd & Rico. Dredd became the perfect Judge that they wanted, but Rico “was genetically mutated into the perfect criminal”. It’s not actually a bad concept, but it’s just the way that it’s presented in the script through clunky dialogue makes it sound idiotic. Armand Assanti, who looks nothing like Stallone despite what one of the character’s say and the fact that they’re supposed to have the same DNA, plays the villain like just a random wild eyed psycho rather than the “perfect criminal” that he’s supposed to be. There are very few instances in this movie where we get to see his criminal intellect come to play, instead we just see him and his pet robot shoot a bunch of people.

The most well-written character in this movie, and he only says 4 words.

I do have to stop for a moment to address the robot, while many of the special effects in this movie don’t hold up well at all, especially the hoverbike chase. But I love the design and the use of the giant war robot. It was honestly the highlight of the movie and I loved every scene it was in. I also quite enjoyed the design on the cyborg mutant cannibal from the family that shoots down the prison transport. It made me wish there was more of a subplot involving the Cursed Earth mutants or the war robots. The look of the Judge’s outfits is also quite good, looking very shiny and stately using the talents of Georgio Armani. They are overly elaborate and way too clean, but I thought that fit with the concept of the movie.

I also wanted to address Dredd’s kind of partner/friend/love interest Judge Hershey played by Diane Lane (who would later go on to play Ma Kent in this summer’s Man of Steel, FYI), while I did like her character overall, I really disliked her motivations and place in the script. She was way too pushy in trying to force her friendship onto Dredd. There wasn’t really a whole lot of chemistry, it just felt like a forced relationship that was all on her side. But aside from the relationship angle, I did like her as a character, she was a much more reasonable judge and helped to contrast against Dredd’s strictness in the scenes when they were together. In the end, I thought the action held up and most of the characters were well developed, they just had poor dialogue to work with. The movie isn’t a great one, but it’s not the horrible movie I expected it to be. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Crow: City of Angels 1996

I’ve been wanting to get to these movies for a while now, even though out of the four of them, there’s only one that I’ve seen and that same one is the only one that’s considered good. For that reason, I wanted to save it until the end, but I also wanted to be able to publish it on Devil’s Night, since the movie takes place around that day. After watching this movie, it really makes me want to skip straight to the original. This is a pale copy that pretends to be a sequel while at the same time apes nearly everything that made the original good, with only a handful of switcheroos here and there. Everything from the effects, to the stunts, even the soundtrack is not nearly as well done or entertaining. And since it’s been so long since I’ve watched the original, I spent most of the time being reminded of moments from the Brandon Lee version that were done immensely better. It has a few interesting moments here and there, but for the most part it tries to be like the original, but really misses the mark.

This time around, there is also a ragtag gang of thugs led by a cultish drug kingpin. Only this time around they kill Ash and his son because they witnessed them killing some other random person. Sarah, which may or may not be the same Sarah from the first movie all grown up has been having dreams of their death and is drawn to the pier they were thrown off of by a Crow who revives Ash to take revenge on his killers. There are a handful of differences to the original, like Ash is an amateur magician rather than a musician, there isn’t any cop investigating things, since there is no past love-interest they turned Sarah into a current love-interest, and it takes place during the Day of the Dead rather than Devil’s Night. It has Vincent Perez in as far as I could gather his English language debut playing Ash. He has an unusual accent that is thicker in some places, and softer in others, and it also often feels like he is doing his best Brandon Lee impression but fails. He doesn’t have the same screen presence, and isn’t really able to capture the mischievousness during those moments when he’s toying with his killers, and the moments where he’s reliving the pain of his death & the memories of his son are way overacted and stilted.

We get to see a lot of this face in the movie. A LOT.

Sarah is an odd part of the equation of this movie. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be the same street urchin from the first movie, even though she’s much older than the two year gap between when the two movies were released. They tend to focus an awful lot on the ring she wears on her thumb, which I believe is the ring that Eric gives her at the end of the first movie. There’s also a street urchin that looks very similar to the way Sarah did in the original, and shares a scene with Sarah near the beginning of the movie, and with Ash closer to the end, yet it never really amounts to anything. The director also tends to have long, lingering close-ups of her face as if it were the most important thing in the world. I think she plays her part well, I just never really got a sense of what her role in the overall story was.

The villains in this piece are probably just as shallow and one-dimensional as they were in the first movie, but they also feel less interesting. There’s Monkey, who’s essentially the analogue to Skank where he is obsessed with drawings and photographs and is the first one to go. There’s Nemo, who likes to film everything and meets his end in a live nude show with his pants down, though it’s interesting to note that he is played quite amusingly by Thomas Jane. There’s Thuy, the asian woman who is kind of a cross between Bai Ling’s character in the first movie and Tin Tin. There’s Curve, played by Iggy Pop, who is the leader of the thugs and the most interesting character of the bunch. He has some of the best moments in the movie, and one of the better death scenes. And finally there’s the kingpin of the whole operation who is very much like a cult leader, walking around with stilted dialogue spouting philosophical nonsense with an air of over-importance. There’s also the blind seer who tells him about the Crow being the source of Ash’s power and plenty of overly artistic visions of BDSM scattered around his lair.

The visuals of the movie looked awful more often than not, there were too many color filters that might have intended to give it more of a graphic novel look, but instead make it look too cartoony. There’s also several green screen effects that were either early CGI or simply animated sequences that did not look professionally put together, especially the scene where Ash walks through fire, and the final scene with all the crows flying through Ash and into the main villain. Even the stuntwork overall was pretty poor, there weren’t really any fights and the best stunts were saved for the end, with a great looking fall, even though it didn’t really make any sense why Ash was scaling the building in the first place. If you’re looking for a Crow movie, do yourself a favor, skip this one and watch the original instead. It’s practically the same story, only ten times more entertaining in every way possible. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Crow 1994

I missed out on a few things that I wanted to do as far as scheduling goes, I wanted to watch all of the sequels before watching the original and have the review of this one up on Devil’s Night, right before Halloween. Instead, I only watched the first sequel and then watched this one on Halloween. But I’m sure none of this is very interesting to anyone reading this so I’ll just get straight to it. I loved the Crow when I first saw it, I probably did not watch this in theaters as I would have been 14 at the time and I was not the type of teenager who saw a lot of R rated movies in theaters. But when I did watch it, I fell in love with it, and I was also very intrigued with the whole behind the scenes story about Brandon Lee’s tragic death during filming and the early computer and optical graphics to complete the movie without him. But the style, the writing, and the feel of it still holds up, it’s extremely quotable and filled with memorable characters and an amazing soundtrack. I’m honestly a little disappointed that it’s taken me this long to rewatch it.

Brandon Lee is a major part of why this movie holds up so well. He is charismatic, good looking, and can handle all the stuntwork and action scenes thrown his way. The look of his painted face after he comes back as the Crow is iconic, and this movie is so damn quotable. He’s got a ton of great lines “Victims: aren’t we all?” is one of my favorites. The writing for all of the dialog just works, from the somewhat biblical spouting hoodlum T-Bird who has a line that doesn’t sound like it would work, but in the context of this movie, I can’t imagine any other line that would sound more fitting than “One of my crew got himself perished.” Even something as simple as when Ernie Hudson who plays the beat cop investigating this whole situation leads off with “Don’t move!” instead of “Freeze!” turns into a great little back and forth between himself and Brandon Lee.

One of the other things that this movie is famous for is that this is one of the first instances of actor replacement using digital technology, mostly during the scene near the beginning when he is roaming through his old apartment, using a combination of a body double whose face we don’t see, they also used moments of when he had just come out of his grave where they cut him out and placed him in the apartment background, and the final image of his body double standing in the shattered window when lighting reveals his face, which was digitally added to the body double’s face. Most of it still looks great, if I didn’t know about it, I’m not sure how much I would have realized, and the final reveal of his face looks better than other digital effects I’ve seen in more recent movies, though when his whole body has been inserted into this new background, that part has not aged nearly as well.

The villains in this movie are very colorful and interesting, even if most of them are fairly one-note characters, there are enough of them that when you put them together, you get more than the sum of their parts. T-Bird, as I mentioned before is the biblical spouting leader of the small group of thugs, so named for his car. Funboy is the heroin addict, Tin Tin is the one who loves his throwing knives, and Skank is always seemingly strung out on speed, mentally slow, and more or less a source of comic relief. I found him to be fairly annoying during the first half of the movie, but when he ends up being the last one left, his scene with Top Dollar is priceless. And of course, I have to mention Top Dollar, who I always used to think was played by Christopher Lambert, I think it’s the long hair and the case of old looking swords he has at his disposal. He is actually played by Michael Wincott and is the sadistic druglord crime boss in the town and the facilitator of the arson extravaganza called Devil’s Night. Along with his “sister” Bai Ling, they are an interesting pairing, from the early moment where they roll over a dead, naked woman “I think we broke her.” He has a very morbid sense of humor, but like everything else in this movie, works well in this context.

I haven’t even gotten to the visuals and the soundtrack yet. This was probably one of the first soundtracks I ever bought. I am a collector at heart, once I get into something, like really get into something, I like to collect everything I can surrounding it. And at this point in time, I was really into the band Nine Inch Nails, so I was in the process of collecting all of their albums, as well as any singles they had on soundtracks that weren’t also available on one of their albums, which included the Lost Highway soundtrack, and this soundtrack where they did the song “Dead Souls”. There are a ton of great songs in this soundtrack from bands like Stone Temple Pilots, and a cameo from My Life With the Thrill Kill Cult. The visuals also do a great job of making it feel more like a graphic novel come to life. The city itself looks great, with many high sweeping shots following a crow flying over the city, there is also more of a limited color palette for most of the movie, except for the flashbacks which are over-saturated with color. I also really like the little detail that Brandon Lee puts the Crow makeup on towards the beginning of the movie, and when we get to the end, it’s almost completely washed off by the rain and fighting.

I think one of the weakest points in the movie is the subplot with Sarah and her mother Darla, who is a waitress at a dive bar and Funboy’s girlfriend. I have no problems with Sarah herself, I think the young actress does a great job, especially during most of the voiceovers. But I didn’t really get a feeling that Darla’s presence was very important or connected to Eric Draven or the Crow. The only part that is kind of interesting is the fact that it does give the Crow an extra set of powers that aren’t directly related to getting revenge. But at the same time, Sarah felt like she would have been just as interesting if she were the exact same character, but just with no real mention of her mother. But overall it’s a fairly minor part of the movie and the rest of it works so well that it doesn’t really detract from it that much. It’s one of my favorite movies and I’m really glad I made the time to watch it again. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Timecop 1994

I think it’s funny that the last time I participated in The Lamb’s movie of the month it was Demolition Man, a 90′s sci-fi movie that featured an 80′s action star and someone getting frozen and shattered, and this time around I watched a 90′s sci-fi movie that featured an 80′s action star and someone getting frozen and partially shattered. Anyway, this is one of Jean Claude Van Damme’s biggest movies from that era and with good reason. It came out a year after Demolition Man, but it tried to be a much more serious movie than the former. There is a heavily sci-fi mumbo jumbo plot, but instead of just jumping forward in time to a utopia, there is quite a bit of jumping back and forth through time with the occasional alternate timelines, and surprisingly I thought they were actually fairly well thought out and intriguing. It also featured Mia Sara who I remembered from the Ridley Scott fantasy movie Legend and she has a bit of a sex scene in the beginning of the movie that I wasn’t quite expecting. Overall the movie wasn’t quite as much 90′s cheese as I was expecting, and while it’s not the greatest sci-fi action movie by any stretch of the imagination, I had a really great time watching it and it was better than I was expecting it to be.

Van Damme plays a cop in present day 1994 where the government has discovered that there is a scientist who has stumbled upon time travel, and yet somehow has kept it a secret from the public. The president decides that the best plan of action is to create a new department to monitor and police any unauthorized time travel that might disrupt the present. Of course someone is using unauthorized time travel and is disrupting the present which we get to see in a couple fun little scenes in the past during the civil war and the stock market crash of the 20′s. They also don’t waste much time explaining time travel with sci-fi mumbo jumbo. They can’t go into the future because “it hasn’t happened yet”, though I did have a bit of trouble with the fact that you can’t touch your past self because “the same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time”. Because your past self isn’t remotely the same matter, unless it is a very recent past self as the cells in our body die and are shed. People are almost completely replaced with new cells every 6 years or so. And even though it does predictably play a part in the climax of the movie, it’s not a major issue.

The villain of the piece is Ron Silver who plays MacComb, a corrupt senator who has a cadre of semi-futuristic looking sleazy goons working for him to go back in the past and create a fortune for him in the present so he can afford to run a successful presidential campaign. And anyone who comes across him, he goes back into the past to completely wipe them out of existence by killing their grandparents before their parents were even born. He does a good job of playing sleazy, as well as playing slightly naïve and clueless as his 1994 past self. He has a simple enough motivation as a villain, and has the resources to back it up. It’s a little bit of a stretch that he can completely hide the fact that he’s basically this time travel mob boss when all of his henchmen except for the inside man from the stock market scene look like sleazy biker gang henchmen. It also doesn’t help a whole lot that none of the henchmen have any personality whatsoever, they are merely stuntmen there to give Van Damme people to fight.

The big time travel conjunction comes back to the year 1994, the same year that the time travel was invented, which was also the same year that Van Damme’s wife Mia Sara was gunned down by future villains before he got the chance to learn she was pregnant, which was also the same year that MacComb backed out of a deal with his technology partner right before he had a major breakthrough and cornered the microchip business, costing MacComb billions in lost potential revenue. Even though I did think that the future tech in this movie was quite optimistic, considering some of the things in their 2004 like the self driving cars which we are 10 years past that point and they’re still at least 5-10 years down the line. I did like the fact that Van Damme had spent these 10 years working for the time police, but unable to use his position to save his wife because that would be one of the crimes that he has been trying to stop. There’s a moment that reminded me of Minority Report where he watches a home video that he has seen so many times before he has it memorized.

As for Van Damme himself, he plays his part well enough though it was obviously catered to him. There’s a line about him not speaking English very well, and there’s plenty of places for him to show off his kickboxing skills, specifically his jumping splits which he seemed to be able to do in every single movie he was in during the 90′s. He was fairly likeable in this role, though he doesn’t really bring a whole lot extra to the role aside from his accent and martial arts skills, but there’s enough stuff going on around him that he doesn’t have to be an extremely charismatic character. In the end, even though this movie doesn’t really do anything special, it does everything well enough to be quite enjoyable. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Tank Girl 1995

It’s really hard to know where to start with this movie. I was originally going to do a month of female superhero movies back during the first year of this site, that is until I realized that there’s only like 5 of them, I had already reviewed 2, and they are all horrible movies except for this one. Kinda. This is also much more of a sci-fi movie than a superhero movie, except for the fact that it’s impossible not to realize that this was based on a comic book as there are comic book images and animation thrown at you at almost every scene change. The plot of this movie is all over the place and so is the tone, there’s even a musical sequence in the middle of the movie that comes out of nowhere. Really the only thing that holds this entire movie is the performance of Lori Petty as Rebecca, the Tank Girl herself, which was enough for me and my wife to enjoy this movie, but only just.

Tank Girl takes place some random time in the future after a comet hits the Earth and somehow gets rid of all the surface water considering it hasn’t rained in nine years. 95% of the planet is controlled by the evil corporation Water and Power led by Malcolm McDowell. Rebecca is on the one sliver of land that’s not controlled by Water and Power along with a small group of rebels. And that’s rebels in the punk rock sense of the word in that they dress very randomly, smoke, drink, and party rather than actually form a resistance towards W&P. So of course, it doesn’t take too long before W&P comes in and kills everyone. Except for Rebecca, because of reasons. And Malcolm McDowell decides to break her and force her into working for W&P because of reasons.

The plot for this movie is really all over the place, Rebecca gets captured relatively early in the movie and most of the rest of the beginning is all about her being in W&P’s capture where she is put through a set of random imprisonments and tortures like carrying pots of dirt up a ladder, put in a straight jacket in a large freezer, and shoved down a pipe that gets smaller the deeper you go which is somehow the most effective punishment that still doesn’t get her to break. There’s also this mousy tech girl that seems to be a prisoner, but a prisoner with benefits because she knows how to fix the planes and tanks and whatnot so she’s kind of working for W&P, but also kind of a prisoner and the new second in command keeps trying to hit on her. Then after their escape there’s this odd bit of comedy where they find out that the little girl from the rebel house in the beginning actually survived and they have to sneak in/break in to Liquid Silver, this giant brothel/strip club where she is also some type of kind-of prisoner/forced sex laborer who gets freed from her first job before it goes over-the-line creepy. Then there’s the whole section with the Rippers who are mentioned from the very beginning as extremely dangerous mutants who can take down an entire W&P brigade without them getting to fire a single shot. And yet when they actually meet them, they are dopey looking kangaroo creatures wearing regular clothes with comedy trope personalities before it finally shifts into a semi-action-y battle where they invade the W&P headquarters. It’s really just all over the place.

The biggest high point in this movie is Lori Petty as Rebecca/Tank Girl, even though the tank is actually a pretty minor element in the movie. She wears a different, eccentric outfit in practically every scene, sometimes it even switches back and forth between two outfits in a single scene for some reason. She has a bizarre haircut that’s mostly shaved except for a few long strands around the outside which are often colored different colors throughout the course of the movie. She takes absolutely nothing seriously and will toss out a random quip as nearly every other sentence, but she does it with such energy and cheerfulness that it is completely endearing every single time. It was never laugh-out-loud funny in my opinion, but I found nearly all of it quite amusing. It’s also an interesting choice that this movie uses what I can only assume is actual art from the comic books as well as a few animated scenes in the same style as the comic for many of the scene transitions. Sometimes they are just flashes of different artwork of Tank Girl, and other times the animation and art are actually used to further the plot which I imagine was cheaper and better looking than trying to use the mostly practical effects for the tank and plane, though it did create a bit of a dissonant tone on occasion with the jarring transition to art & animation. In the end, I did enjoy it, but it’s not something that I can easily recommend to anyone. It’s not cohesive, it’s not that great of a sci-fi movie, it’s not funny enough for a flat out comedy, and it’s not bad enough for a B-movie, but it’s also anything but a bland, mediocre movie. It’s just Tank Girl. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

*Tank Girl poster design by Alex Kittle and it’s her birthday today!

Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight 1995

The Graphic (Novel) Horror blogathon is coming to a close, but not before I manage to eke out a couple more horror movies here in March. Also, if you haven’t checked the main page for the blogathon recently, there are a couple updates with folks out on different blogs who have contributed their own articles so be sure to check them out. I was a big fan of the television show Tales From the Crypt, and even though it was around the time when this movie came out, I probably didn’t catch it in theaters, instead finding it when it came to home video and agreeing with the general consensus that the movie wasn’t nearly as good as most of the episodes made for HBO. I especially found it interesting in this viewing that I had a hard time finding good screenshots to take as there is rarely anything interesting happening on screen and the creature effects are mediocre at best. The movie eschews the show’s typical morbid twist and instead relies on a macabre fantasy/action plot with demons and a fun wraparound with the Cryptkeeper tying it in with the television show. There are moments of fun in this movie but they are few and far between.

One thing I will say about this movie is right from the beginning it made me want to watch the television show, it opens exactly the same way each half hour would with the opening credits, the theme song, but instead of going straight to the Cryptkeeper there’s a bit of a mini-episode with some bare breasts, a dead body, and John Laroquette for some reason before the Cryptkeeper pops up in a director’s outfit talking about the Tales From the Crypt movie. It’s a great way to open the movie, getting the most of that R rating right away and pleasing the fans of the show. And when he comes back at the end to close out the show it’s just as enjoyable, they even go fairly easy on the puns he’s so well known for.

The best part of the movie right here.

Another thing that is really great about this movie is Billy Zane as a demon going after this key held by William Sadler. He seems to be having a lot of fun in this role as a slick demon more interested in negotiating than fighting, instead leaving that up to his zombie minions. He’s especially great during the scenes where he is seducing the various characters stuck in this motel. Each character is a bit of a cliché and he uses those tropes to seduce them in various different and entertaining ways, especially fun is when he goes after the drunken old uncle with a pool full of topless women and a bottle of alcohol. While every other character in this movie is pretty dead on serious, he brings the right amount of fun for a Tales From the Crypt movie.

I suppose I should mention the other characters, besides William Sadler as the defacto leader of this ragtag group of motel guests trapped by a demon horde there’s also Jada Pinkett as the young woman with a troubled past, a lot of attitude, but a good heart underneath. There’s also a very young looking Thomas Hayden Church as the redneck punk Roach with his girlfriend slash whore Cordelia who’s lusted after by the nerdy Charles Fliescher who you may know better as the voice of Roger Rabbit. Rounding out the rest is Uncle Willy, CCH Pounder as the motel owner, and the deputy. They’re all fairly one-note characters though I do actually admire the fact that the two black women last longer than most of the rest of the group which is atypical for a standard horror movie, though the slut does go first.

P-p-p-p-p-lease Cordelia!

The biggest problem with this movie is that it seems to forget where it came from. The Tales From the Crypt show was known for its smart scripts, morbid twists, interesting direction, and decent special effects. This movie has very little of any of those things. The direction was fairly boring, I had a difficult time even seeing anything worth taking a screenshot of. The most interesting moments were the seduction scenes and the opening & closing with the Cryptkeeper. There wasn’t really any interesting twist to speak of, it was an oddly generic knight’s quest style story or vampire hunter or any number of things like that only it was demons. None of the demons even looked that interesting, they were just zombie-ish looking things with green eyes. And to top it all off, it never really had the feeling like it was a Tales From the Crypt story. There was too much sci-fi, too much action, and the blood and breasts felt like they were shoved in there to try and make it more like Tales From the Crypt. It had its fun moments, like the neat little scene with the comic book, and especially any time Billy Zane was on screen, and I did think the ending with Jada Pinkett was well done though they really dragged out the final spit take way too long. I would much rather recommend either watching the television show, or surprisingly watch the original 70′s Tales From the Crypt movie, both are better than this movie. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. 1998

This is one of those movies that I’ve heard about since the start of this site, and not in a good way. This was a TV movie made for the Fox network starring Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff as Nick Fury and written by prolific superhero screenwriter David Goyer with as many hits to his name as misses. It has a very 90′s generic action feel to it with a ratio of pithy one-liners to actual action scenes at around 20:1. Everyone on screen really hams it up from the Hoff himself pretending to be the hardest hardass that ever lived, his ex-girlfriend Val who’s just as tough as he is, the over-confident fledgling British recruit, to the always-angry executive who thinks Nick Fury is the biggest mistake that S.H.I.E.L.D. Has ever made. And I haven’t even gotten to the villains yet! The special effects look 90′s TV cheap, the fights look like they were done by actors who have never taken a martial arts lesson in their lives, there is more talk about the threats than there is actual action against any threats, but as usual with these kinds of movies, there is plenty of laughable cheesiness to get some enjoyment out of watching this movie.

If you’ve seen almost any of the recent Marvel movies you have a good idea who Nick Fury is already, but before the comic book artist for the Marvel’s Ultimates series decided to make him look like Samuel L. Jackson, he was someone who looked more like… well, more like David Hasselhoff. Although I couldn’t tell you if the comic book version was always chewing on a cigar like it was a Slim Jim like the Hoff is during most of this movie, it’s such a small thing to pick on, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone smoke a cigar like that in my life. Anyway, aside from that part, he had been kicked out of S.H.I.E.L.D. A few years back and spends his time living in a cave in the middle of nowhere, for some reason. But he’s been called back into duty because someone is after Baron Von Strucker, head of Hydra who’s been dead for a few years now at Fury’s hands, but he also holds the key to the Death’s Head virus which “makes the Ebola virus look like a skin rash”. It’s not long before his body is taken by his daughter, Andrea von Strucker who is also known as Viper. And interestingly enough, she has a vaguely similar look as Viper from The Wolverine and also is immune to a dangerous poison which she gives to Fury through a kiss.

The rest of the movie is a combination of the agents trying to track down Andrea and the Death’s Head virus which she intends to release across Manhattan, and Nick Fury powering through a deadly venom with no known antiserum except for the possibility of creating one from Andrea’s blood as she must be immune to it. On top of that, the executive bigwig spends all of his screen time yelling at Fury and blaming everything on his incompetence. In many ways, it felt like a buddy cop movie except Nick Fury was left without any real buddy aside from Val who has barely any personality. Some of the best moments of the movie are when Andrea is absolutely chewing up the scenery with her badly accented megalomaniacal villain, complete with hysterical villainous laughter for no real reason and a creepy looking brother who she is willing to let die to further her own plans. There’s also a handful of weird Hydra lieutenants who are wearing black suits, sunglasses, and are all pale, bald guys that don’t really talk.

what a difference a few years and a few million dollars makes.

I think one of the worst parts about this movie is that there is no real action anywhere to be found. There are less than a dozen punches thrown, a couple kicks, and maybe a dozen gunshots. The rest of the runtime is filled with exposition and the occasional tension build. Fairly early on, Fury gets hit with the poison and is told that he has 48 hours to live, and that he will be in a weakened state much sooner than that, and he certainly lets everyone know that he doesn’t have much time left and that he’s not at 100%, but he’s still able to out-everything everyone around him. Not only that, but after only a few hours, he’s convinced both the pompous British recruit and the ESP agent with barely any screentime to risk their own careers to follow Fury to Hydra’s base of operations to stop the Death’s Head virus on their end. I could go on about this movie, but there’s just not all that much that really happens. There is an rather pointless subplot involving a life model decoy which has a payoff at the end that makes absolutely no sense at all as to where it came from. It just appears out of nowhere so that Nick Fury can fake his own death to Andrea. And of course it ends in a very 90′s fashion with the villain getting away to come back in a TV spinoff or sequel I’m assuming, and Fury and Val get back together complete with a line from the psychic mention how she didn’t need ESP to see that coming. I think I’m just glad I’ve seen it and now I’m done with it. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.

The Phantom 1996

I vaguely remember when this movie was coming out back in 96. It was during that second comparatively small wave of superhero movies after Tim Burton’s Batman, and when the movies were still trying to stay true to the look of the comic book heroes but not always everything else, and while there was a minor change to the Phantom’s typical striped shorts making them solid purple it looked almost exactly like how the Phantom looks in the comic books, and in my opinion it looked completely ridiculous, and purple is my favorite color. While it’s billed as a superhero movie, it plays much more like a much lesser Indiana Jones adventure movie as it is set in the late 30′s, takes place mostly in the jungle, and they are even going after some skulls with crystals in them. I remember hearing about how bad of a movie this is, but it ended up being a lot more fun than I expected. It’s quite cheesy at times and has plenty of silly dialogue and plot elements, but I went in expecting a flop and came up with a halfway decent pulp adventure.

One of the best things about this movie is Billy Zane himself, even dressed up in that ridiculous outfit he manages to be completely charming. There was also an element to his fighting style which I found quite interesting in that he tends to fight much better when he’s not looking at what he’s trying to hit. It’s something that I haven’t really seen before or since and it added a bit of a unique element to the handful of fights in the movie. The costume was something that I had a hard time with, even though it looked very similar to the comics, it just didn’t fit into the style of the rest of this movie, it always just looked out of place. The concept of the superhero itself is a bit of a strange one, he’s a part of a long line of Phantoms fighting pirates in the deep jungles, though the legend is perpetuated that it’s still the same person, which gives him an aura of immortality even though it never really comes into play aside from one of the henchmen keeps insisting that he’s killed the Phantom before. He also has an intelligent horse and wolf as his companions who are used a couple times then never really heard from again.

And is it just me, or does a young Zeta-Jones look an awful lot like Mila Kunis?

Kristy Swanson plays his love interest, the niece of the newspaper editor-in-chief Diana Palmer, and she does a great job at it. It’s refreshing that she never plays the damsel in distress at any point even though she is kidnapped. But instead she is completely capable of taking care of herself, and not only that but the Phantom doesn’t try to ignore that fact except during a brief moment during their first encounter and instead embraces her headstrong nature. In fact, Ms. Palmer isn’t the only strong female in this movie, there’s also the pirate captain Sala played by Catherine Zeta Jones before she took part in the Zorro movie ,here she plays an air pirate captain heading up a league of female pilots. While she does have some fun moments, she is one of the weakest characters. She’s supposed to be this villain, yet she is extremely easily bested when the Phantom casually grabs the gun out of her hand and she acts as if nothing has happened and pulls him in for a kiss. She also shifts allegiance near the end of the movie after Ms. Palmer’s extremely convincing argument consisting of the line “Why are you so evil?” Besides Sala, there’s the other henchmen played by James Remar who seems to continually insist that he has killed the Phantom already and even kept his old gun belt, though he never seems to understand until the very end that the current Phantom is the son of the previous Phantom, and also never gets to do much aside from making a young boy cross a rickety bridge with their truck since he would be the lightest.

The head of all of these villains is Xander Drax played by Treat Williams. He’s the debonair businessman who moonlights as the head of a criminal organization, though the movie never tries to play off the fact that he is anything other than a villain aside from a brief comment he makes to Mr. Palmer the newspaper editor-in-chief. Drax also gets a cheesy dialogue moment where he confronts yet another pirate leader and while explaining who he is, he spells out his name and also mentions that “it begins and ends with an ‘X’!” He was an odd choice for a villain, he never seemed overly intelligent to pull off a Lex Luthor style villain, he never really put on airs that he was anything other than a ruthless crime lord posing as a legitimate businessman, and his relationship with his pocket cop was somehow turned into boring exposition.

Technically Jade is a crystal, right? So it would be a crystal skull?

And of course I haven’t mentioned the macguffin of the movie, a set of three skulls which turns out to be four skulls including the ring that’s been passed down from Phantom to Phantom, oh sorry I should say “spoilers”? The first one is taken at the beginning from the jungle and that leads into the legend and brings both parties to come head to head for the second skull which then lead the way to the third. And when they’re combined they hold the key to some unexplained ultimate power which ends up being a weird laser beam that the Phantom repels with his ring’s laser beam which doesn’t make sense because they are acting like they are controlling the beams even though it’s supposedly not tied to their minds and the skulls end up destroying themselves for no apparent reason. It’s enough to drive a person batty, and unfortunately all the good graces this movie builds up with its fun sense of adventure is shadowed by this awful climax that ends with the volcano island erupting in the distance for no real reason either. I did still enjoy most of the movie, and while it seems like it’s been a long time since getting my daughter’s thoughts on one of these movies she did watch it with me and seemed to like it well enough though she thought one scene where Drax kills a librarian with a booby-trapped microscope was too scary even though the violence happened offscreen. It’s not the disaster I thought it was going to be, but the ending really threw me off of it. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.