Replicant [2001]

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



Some facts: This is the fifth Van Damme movie that we've watched for Bad Movie Night and, according to Wikipedia, it is one of four movies in which he plays a duel role. The others include "Double Impact", "Maximum Risk", and "The Order". At some point the people in charge of creating more things for Van Damme to do (I assume there is a team that handles this and only this; same with Steven Segal) decided that one Van Damme was simply not enough and that what the people really want and need is at least two Van Dammes per film.

Van Damme #1 is a serial killer who seems to seek out young mothers so he can kill them and set their houses on fire. The protagonist is a cop, hours from retirement, who managed not to catch him again after three years of trying and enters his retirement relatively unfased. Then he starts getting threats from the serial killer and a shady government agency decides to fix everything by cloning the serial killer and giving Van Damme #2, who is inexplicably psychically connected to the killer, to the protagonist as a crime sniffing pet. Van Damme #2 is basically a human Lassie combined with a parrot and a lot of the humor comes from him trying to navigate the world around him. The protagonist is particularly unhelpful to Van Lassie and frequently treats him as he would like to treat Van Killer. After numerous shenanighans involving Van Damme on Van Damme violence and Van Lassie trying to solicate a prostitute with no idea how, there is a lengthy final showdown in which Van Lassie's loyalty to his master is proven stronger than his loyalty to his "brother" and he dies heroically while Van Killer dies in a fire of irony. Or does he?

All in all, it's your typical Van Damme movie: silly (although this time often intentionally) and full of dragging fight scenes. What is crazy about this film is that the budget for it was $17 million and most of that probably went into destroying property. Was it worth it to see Van Damme staring dumbly into the camera for over an hour? You decide (but the answer is yes).

Quotes:
"Hi." (offers hand) "Wendy Wyckham."
(repeating) "Calm the fuck down."

Sometimes the clone repeats lines from his human training video - "I am sitting. I am walking."- and it seems like Van Damme is reading the script.

"I beat the shit out of him. Honest mistake."

(last lines said wistfully) "He likes rain."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was good."

Howard The Duck [1986]

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

More than half of the movies we watch at Bad Movie Night have not been seen before by any of the members which certainly poses a level of risk and a variance in the quality of the films we watch. Mostly everything we can be sure will be bad on the basis of notoriety or just a plot description (and occasionally on the DVD cover) but what we can't be sure of is whether the level of bad will change thoughout the film in unexpected ways and that is always a dubious delight.

And here we find ourselves at "Howard The Duck", a bad movie classic we have been putting off for no particular reason other than we've had movies we wanted to watch more. At first the premise is pretty straightforwardly bad: an anthrpomorphic duck from a universe exactly like ours but with ducks as the dominent species is transported to our world and found by a startlingly open-minded 80s girl named Bodacious Beverly who is in a rock band named Cherry Bomb which they unfortunatley did not cover in the film. In spite of the fact that Howard is a jerk who doesn't appreciate her hospitality and seems weirdly unconcerned with finding a way home, she falls in love with him and again we must watch scenes that would make anyone who is not a furry cover their eyes (see also: WolfCop). At the point when they have met up with awkward scientist Tim Robbins and real scientist Jeffery Jones to try to send Howard back home, we realize with creeping horror that the movie is only half way done and wonder how much more of this duck out of water premise we can handle. Thankfully for us(?), they turn the crazy up to eleven when the experiment goes wrong and Jeff Jones gets possessed by an extraterrestrial demon who wants to take over the world. Bodacious Beverly gets kidnapped by demon!JeffJones to be used as a vessel for another demon and Howard and TimRob chase them in a personal helicopter thing for what feels like four hours before the saving-the-day thing finally happens. The movie ends with Howard being forced to stay on Earth and becoming the new manager of Cherry Bomb. No one finds this weird.

I think the only reasons this movie made money were because people are fans of the comic and because George Lucas funded it and he does all he can to not let you forget it with tons of shameless advertising for Lucas films throughout. In terms of the technical aspects of the film, it blatantly ripped off other famous directors including Kubrick and Scorsce with references to "2001" and "Taxi Driver". We think they were trying to be clever but the sheer amount of pathetic puns in the movie makes us doubt that clever is something the movie's creators are capable of.

Quotes:
Everything said by the waitress at the Cajun Sushi restaurant. She was the best character in the movie by far.

"I bite your face. You're a dead man, Ginger!" (N.B.: The man's name was Ginger. I don't think he was a ginger.)

"Where's my baseball cap?"
"Shut up."
"Fascist!"

Adam's Grandma's Review: "Zzzzzz."

Maniac Cop [1988]

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

Because Robert Z'Dar, an actor who has appeared in many B-movies and straight-to-video releases including Bad Movie Night favorite, "Samurai Cop", passed away last Monday, we felt it was only right to honor him and take in the feature that really made him known: "Maniac Cop", or as we came to think of it, "A Tale Of Two Chins."

After the best uniform-donning montage since "Batman & Robin", a New York City police officer whose face is masked in shadows kills some random people, causing a fear in the civilians (that is too real) and distrust among the other NYC policepeople. Our main cop protagonist, played by a giant chin named Bruce Campbell, is introduced a few minutes into the film when his wife, suspicious that he is the maniac cop, discovers that he is having an affair with a coworker and later turns up dead. Now everyone thinks Chinbell is the maniac and it's up to Lieutenant McCrae and the coworker he was screwing, Theresa Mallory, to figure out who the real maniac is. Turns out it was this vigilante cop who got sent to prison and supposedly died there but complete negligence enabled him to live on, brain-damaged to kill innocent people now, with the help of his fiancee who was so obsessed with him that she jumped out of a window when she thought he died and now has a leg brace. He kills her randomly when he breaks into the police station but she seems okay with it. When the lieutenant encounters maniac cop, it is then up to Mallory and a broken-out-of-jail Chinbell to evade their fellow cops (one of which had the brilliant idea to handcuff himself to Mallory) and stop the maniac cop who turns out to be Robert Z'dar with rotten teeth and cuts on his face. After a chase scene ending with Z'dar impaled and drowned, no body is recovered paving the way for "Maniac Cop 2".

This movie falls on that thin line between bad theatrical release or decent straight-to-video release and was fairly enjoyable to watch in all its cliched glory. We may continue with the other "Maniac Cop"s and thankfully the main cast seems to return for the sequel. Even more interesting is that apparently a few years ago the director and Nicolas Winding Refn (director of violent artsy films often starring Ryan Gosling) were in talks to do a remake. We can only dream.

Maniac Cop full in the face.

Bruce Campbell, horrified to discover that he doesn't 

have the most magnificent chin in the film.

Quotes:
"[Your wife's] throat was cut from ear to ear. You wanna see the pretty pictures?"

[to a man with a giant bandaged hand] "What happened to your hand?"
"I cut myself shaving."

"He would shoot first and ask questions later . . . He was a nice guy though."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was two chins up!"

The Room: Rifftrax [2009]

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

With our semi-annual viewing of "The Room" we decided to mix it up a little bit by watching the film with a Rifftrax. While we are usually more than capable of providing our own witty commentary, we've watched "The Room" twice since we started Bad Movie Night and have heard each other's jokes before so we decided to instead hear it from the professionals. If you haven't heard of Rifftrax, I suggest you check it out. The guys from "Mystery Science Theater 3000", a show that many attribute to the rise in bad movie watching, make audio commentary tracks to be played along with movies, many of which are big-budget films that are perfect for mocking or bad movie cult classics that became popular after the end of "MST3K."

There's not much to say about this viewing since if you really want to know more about "The Room" itself, you can just go back and read the post I wrote about it the last time we watched it here, but I will say this: after watching all those episodes of "The Neighbors" the real quality of the film making of "The Room" by comparison is a startling and welcome change.

Next Monday will not be another Wiseau feature but will probably be a film featuring Robert Z'dar as he just passed away this week. We know him best from "Samurai Cop" but he has apparently starred in tons of silly cult movies so it seems fitting that we should find another one.