Matthew Blackheart: Monster Smasher [2001]

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

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."

Exterminator 2 [1984]

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

After a two week extension of Bad Movie Night while Kay was in Italy, the nights are back with a crappy sequel to a crappy movie we watched a year and a half ago: "The Exterminator 2". The first one was pretty devoid of plot, a revenge story with some side vigilante justice done by a guy with a flamethrower, and the sequel is, well, almost the same movie just more 80s than 70s.

The Exterminator is still living in New York and maintaining his secret identity while lighting some murdering liquor store robbers on fire. He meets up with another Vietnam War buddy who drives a garbage truck and we know nothing is going to go wrong there. He's also dating a go-go dancer at a club he likes to go to where everyone dances like they are listening to a different song. Life is pretty great. Too bad about the uprising of a gang of street kids, mostly break dancers and new wavers, who all follow this "Road Warrior" styled dude who calls himself X and thinks he's Jesus reborn. They go around murdering, stealing money, and getting drugs from the mob to sell and somehow (the plot wasn't fully clear to us and Sarah wasn't around to explain it) they end up encountering the three good guys and decide to be evil to them. The girlfriend and the garbage truck driver get killed and then about one third of the movie ends up being the boss fight between Exterminator and X. Exterminator wins and goes off to presumably find a third Vietnam War buddy to start the revenge cycle again.

When the movie was over, Adam said it reminded him a lot of an old video game called "Bad Dudes" where you walk to the right a whole lot and fight ninjas until you have saved the president from ninjas thereby proving you are a bad dude. Watching 15 minutes of a 23 minute walk-through of this game was more captivating than most of this movie.

Quote: "I don't like that shit. Guys like that are freakos."

The Adventures Of Sharkboy And Lavagirl In 3-D [2005]

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

Theoretically, making a decent kid's movie shouldn't be too complicated. Invent some fully developed and funky characters a kid can relate to or look up to and a primary lesson that you want the kids to learn and build a compelling story around that. Maybe, if you have some skill, throw in some subtle winks to the parents in the audience and make the theme universal for all age groups. There's a formula, although as we have often seen, it's apparently not as easy to follow as one might think. And on a last note: don't let your kids come up with the premise if it makes no sense, Robert Rodriguez. 

The plot involves a kid named Max who sees visions, but not really because they're real I guess, of two superkids named Sharkboy and Lavagirl and, reasonably, no one believes him so he gets made fun of. Eventually all his classmates are proven wrong when Sharkboy and Lavagirl burst into the classroom and take him to Planet Drool, a manifestation of his dreams, because they need to save the planet from the bad guy who is also the class bully and his sidekick who is also the teacher. The rest of the movie follows a video game structure with tasks Max must perform to go onto the next task all in gloriously cheap CGI. Ultimately, he's trying to reconcile dreams with reality or something while working through the issues he has with the people in his life. Sharkboy and Lavagirl seem to have their own problems too that are never fully explored. Lavagirl literally has amnesia and Sharkboy has a superiority complex and is played by Taylor Lautner who is quickly becoming a Bad Movie Hall-of-Famer. Throw in a hasty resolution, things being waved in front of the camera (because the original was in 3-D, don't you know), and a pretty obvious "Be Our Guest" ripoff where Lautner sings about dreaming and does gymnastics and you've basically got the whole movie.

Here are some GIFs of the aforementioned song:

And some weird stills:

 I relate.

Kill it with fire.

Casual.

o god stop smiling i feel so unclean

Her response to Sharkboy's dance routine.

I have seen hell.

Quotes:
"The ground is thumping too much."
"My highly trained ears can hear it too."