The Book Barn never seems to let us down when it comes to finding the most obscure made-for-television movies that excite us just from hearing the title. Matthew Blackheart? Is he in Joan Jett's band? And what do you mean by "smasher"? As opposed to killing or destroying, does he punch them with a giant fist? (Spoiler: most unfortunately, no.)
The whole story is told in a framing narrative of Blackheart reading a comic book about his life. During World War II, a scientist named Dr. Franken (yep) pieced together a bunch of courageous American soldiers to make the ultimate patriotic weapon against monsters. Somehow or another he gets frozen for 55 years like Captain America and returns to New York to find that now the monsters look just like us. In detective-style narration, Blackheart tells us his story through ambiguous, out of order flashbacks with liberal use of nonsensical analogies as he searches for a place to go back to. At one point he stumbles into an S&M club in a church and we are treated to an odd fake!British Bjork-style rendition of "If You're Happy And You Know It." At the club, he ends up bumping into a teenager who sets him up with a place to stay and who turns out to be Dr. Franken afflicted with Benjamin Button disease. Blackheart has a tacked-on romance with a diner waitress who apparently falls for him after he hurls a series of misogynistic comments at her. Apparently he had a girlfriend or wife back in the day but there's no real resolution on what happened to her. She appeared to have drowned somehow. Most sadly about this movie is that the monster smashing is really minimal and not really smashing. Blackheart eventually finds the bad guy, who is the most annoyingly pretentious guy at the goth show, and his dwarf assistant. Although Blackheart never dons the American flag cape featured on the DVD cover, he does kill the big bad with an American flag flagpole which is an okay substitute.
This movie was pretty enjoyable. It was hard to follow the plot with the way they did the weird flashbacks (even Sarah was struggling to understand) but really, more movies should be in detective-style narration. Needs more smashing. A protagonist who's less of a jerk would probably help to but who has time for kindness when 'MURRICA.
Quotes:
"Stop now!"
"I'm gonna stop you like a bad habit."
"He's got eyes like pissholes in the snow"
"Roosevelt?"
"No. Eisenhower."
*wistfully* "I liked Ike."
Adam's Grandma's Review: "I don't know."
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