Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Eye Of The Tiger [1986]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

Scenario: You've just made a movie. You're kind of proud of this movie in a "this will make me back the money I spent" kind of way. It's a classic revenge tale, the plot of which is mostly a ripoff of "Mad Max" (who doesn't love "Mad Max", you wonder), and it stars Gary Busey's giant teeth. It's violent enough to appeal to anyone's id and it's got the required family element since you smartly decided to skip the romance element because you want it to be somewhat believable with your choice of lead. You're pretty satisfied. But then you watch the finished product and realize, oh crap, this movie is awful. Well, it's too late to have less wooden side actors or a better, more original script, or even crazier effects but you do have a little money left in the budget. So what do you do? Capitalize on a musical phenomenon. Buy the rights to Survivor's "Eye Of The Tiger", use it at least three times, and name your movie after it. Done. Pay me.

That's all just speculation, of course, agreed upon by a room full of movie fans who have been studying bad movies for three years. Here's what I can tell you for sure. The movie is about our Vietnam War vet main character, played by sketchy guy at the bus station Gary Busey, getting out of jail with a drug lord friend he made there and returning to his hometown to find it overrun with a motorcycle gang. His parole officer, the consistently Hawaiian-shirted and bolo-tied sheriff, does not give a damn about him or the gang (as long as they pay him) and his one friend in town tells him about how messed up everything has gotten since he left. After Busey saves a nurse from getting raped by the gang, in particular a man in a chainmail tank-top, they decide to get disproportionate revenge on him by wrecking his entire house and killing his wife, an experience that leaves his daughter kind of catatonic. Busey calls up drug lord friend who hooks him up with a pick-up pimped out with guns and then he goes on his revenge. And it is silly. He pulls a wire across the street, decapitating a dummy! He gives a rousing speech in a bingo parlor full of old people to try to get back up! He literally shoves a stick of dynamite up chainmail tank-top's butt and lights it! And then in a bonkers finale Busey's friend dresses like a 1940s era pilot and bombs the gang from his plane and Busey shoots them up with his gun truck. Cue "Eye Of The Tiger". Roll credits. Cha-ching.

If I can say one undeniably good thing about this movie it's that among the Bad Movie crew we had some of our funniest commentary in a while while watching it. We're hilarious.

Quotes:
"If you so much as fart and I get wind of it . . ."

"What are you looking at, black man?"
"I'm looking at a white man."
"That's right. A real white man. Take a good look."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "That was a five out of ten. Last week was a ten."

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