International Guerrillas [1990]

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

Here's a Bad Movie Night first: our first Pakistani movie. Like with Bollywood movies, this film was almost three hours long so we needed to watch it in two nights but unlike the Bollywood movies we have watched so far, it should have been much, much shorter. That's some real cultural exchange for you, I guess. In America there seems to be this unwritten rule that a movie needs to be at least an hour and a half to be considered the right movie length so a lot of films will be padded out to reach that timestamp. This movie would have been padded to reach an hour and a half but was instead padded to two hours and 45 minutes. Yikes. It took 50 minutes of movie before we even got a title card. Towards the end, everything was so repetitive and boring, Keith actually set a timer on his watch for the last 12 minutes. I say all of this because my description of the movie will not make it sound as long as it is and you need to be warned that this movie is a real undertaking.

The plot of "International Guerilla's" is simple but insane. The antagonist is British-Indian author Salman Rushdie who is some kind of evil mastermind who has many clones of himself and an Israeli army and is trying to destroy Islam. If the idea of a real author being the evil villain seems strange, here's a little history lesson: in real life Rushdie wrote a book called "The Satanic Verses" that pissed off a lot of Muslim leaders and lead to a lot of people wanting his head on a platter (He's fine, by the way. At the time this movie came out he even made a statement about this movie and how he supports free speech even when he is made into basically a comic book villain). The protagonists are three dudes and a chick who are styled as defenders of Islam. Most of the plot involves battles between the two sides occasionally interspersed with songs from this girl who sings about how she's so beautiful while doing very violent dances in various outfits. In a footnote it is also mentioned that she is Jewish and in love with one of the guerrillas but they can't be together because, fight. At one point two dudes from Dubai who smoke giant cigars come in, possibly as comic relief. At the end, the guerrillas are captured by the Israeli army and strung up on crosses and they all have a big "Life Of Brian" style music number about how Allah is great, complete with text appearing in the sky and a veil literally coming down from the heavens to convert the Jewish girl. I guess this means the guerrillas won.

From a production standpoint, the absolute best thing about this movie is that the director is obsessed with zooms. This movie tries to make it seem like everything that happens is dramatic and important but the only way this is done is through the use of zooms on someone's face which happens probably over 100 times during the film. Also, the dancing is nuts. We just wrote this off as a product of 1990 which was still suffering from the 80s. And it's really anti-Semitic but this time it's Muslims discriminating instead of Christians. We're really diversifying our repetoire of movies with terrible messages.

Quotes:
"I am a proprietor of salt, no potato chip."(we're assuming this is a bad translation but who knows)

Spoon Rating: 3.5