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."

Ishtar [1987]

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

If you do any amount of research into the history of bad movies, "Ishtar" is a title that will come up over and over again. It's often seen as the definition of the "big budget flop" as it stars Oscar winners Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman and was written and directed by Oscar nominee Elaine May. The Benjamins flowed while making it with a budget of $55 million and in return, the Benjamins did not flow at the theaters. Because it sucks. Sucks like an early Adam Sandler movie, to be honest: the characters are bumbling morons, the plot is ridiculous, and while you may get a chuckle or two most humor is derived from laughable attempts at sentiment.

The movie tells the story of two really terrible songwriters who are probably in love but claim to just be heterosexual life partners. The first half hour or so is just about them writing and performing their songs in hopes of attracting a record label's attention to no avail. Warren Beatty wears a lot of eccentric hats (fur-covered trilby anyone?), can't pronounce "schmuck",  and gushes about how he loves Hoffman's everything. Then they have a long flashback to how they met, when they where dumped by their respective ladies, and when Beatty talked Hoffman down from a ledge in a scene where we 100% thought they we going to kiss. After aggressive flashbacking they decide to accept an offer to be lounge singers in Morocco and the real hijinks ensue when they are redirected to a small fictional country of Ishtar which is on the brink of a war of monarchy vs. communist rebels. I'm not even sure how to explain the rest of the movie as they somehow end up working for the CIA and the rebels and in particular a girl whose archaeologist brother died trying to protect an ancient map that told of two prophets. I wonder who they are. Eventually all the groups want to kill them. And then they don't. And they get to make an album. I don't know. There's also a really insincere sounding king ("I am shocked and saddened."), a lot of spies dressed like other spies, and a blind camel, the acquisition and behavior of which provided some of the only jokes we found funny.

In truth, we've definitely sat through both more boring and less funny movies than this but it is infamous not so much for being encumbered by bad but for being devoid of good. It lacks things that make movies good. And I think this was surprising at the time because of the clout and cash associated with it. It was the "Gigli" of the 80s and for that it will live on in fame.

Quotes:
"My life is fine. it's just full of a lot of pain."

"I can't walk out on him, Carol. He cries every ten minutes."

"You want a blind camel? I have a blind camel. I also have one with a broken leg. How would you like a dead camel?"

"Move the camel. . . move the camel . . . move the camel. . . MOVE THE CAMEL."

And the CIA Agent giving his best Tommy Wiseau: "We did NOT fire on two Americans in the desert. We did NOT."

The Roller Blade Seven [1991]

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

"This movie is meant to be watched with drugs." - Keith

Let me introduce you to a man with the post-apocalyptic vision of a samurai film obsessed George Miller but the directorial skills of "Spring Breaker"'s Harmony Korine on LSD: Donald G. Johnson, the director of this week's movie "The Roller Blade Seven." This is a man that I have gathered is more concerned with atmosphere than a coherent plot, a man who loves skating and swords, and a man who has no idea what he's doing when it comes to editing (triple cuts! No, wait, quadruple cuts! octuple cuts!), lighting (why is everything orange? VHS quality is fine, right?), sound (maybe 50 lines of dialogue; half are totally unintelligible), or character (weird costumes are how you show, don't tell). He also made the bold decision to show the credits throughout the entire movie whenever a new actor showed up. The man has vision.

So now that you're intrigued, I bet you're wondering what the plot of this "Mad Max" rip-off is, huh? We're wondering too. Sarah, Plot Following Expert, was able to keep us posted for the first 15 minutes but after that we were all lost in a haze of badly choreographed fights in the Los Angeles River at sunrise and clanging music that sounds like a bunch of genres through a prog rock filter. According to her, Biker Guy is sent on a mission to save Biker Nun who belongs to the Institute of Light from some Evil Dude working for the Big Bad. Biker Guy takes a pit stop to do shrooms with a girl whose sign outside her house reads, "Psychic or Not" and then mostly fights gangs and circus escapees for an hour. Said quirky characters include: Wiffle Bat-Wielding Clown Girl, Bag Face Banjo Man, The Black Knight, Pink Thong Leotard Girl, Metaltaur (metal Minotaur), Cow Camouflage Guy, and a bunch of extras from a Quiet Riot video. In the end Biker Dude gets married to someone. By this point we were in a zen-like state of "what?" and couldn't remember a world outside of this movie. Never have we encountered a movie that is simultaneously so very fascinating and so very boring.

The internet tells me that there was no script which is not surprising but what is surprising is that this movie has both an Estevez (Joe) and a Stallone (Frank) and there are two sequels. I guess some people really do appreciate art.

Have some images:

The pantless director gives advice (we think).

Wiffle Clown beats Metaltaur.

Biker Dude is tenderly fed 'shrooms.

Quotes:

"May the light shine bright on your bloodstained blade." *gives peace sign*

"On the dark side you can see nothing."

"Mask me!"

"Go forth and skate the path of righteousness."

"Bless the United Skates of America!"

Adam: "Who is that guy?"

*Screen displays the words "Utility Ninja."*

And the line that explains the entire movie: "Time is an illusion."

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

Shoutout to Kay's friend Alex for randomly giving her a build your own donut kit in the mail so that we could have a delicious intermission.

 Adam and Sarah split a vanilla one. Kay's is the one bleeding chocolate.

Keith's is caramel and AMERICA flavored. Grandma just had caramel, hold the America.

It wasn't drugs but it definitely helped.

The Neighbors: Episode Six [2015]

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

In the most recent, and what we can only pray will be the last, episode of "The Neighbors" we were introduced to the idea of "triple vanilla sex." The phrase came up multiple times and even seemed to be the title of the episode and yet, it appears to be a nebulous concept that may even fluctuate in meaning. Troy, the stoner, claims ownership of the idea and yet he defines it two different ways during the episode and neither way involves the idea of "triple." First he says that it's just a large tube of vanilla ice cream with a lot of weed in it which I guess for some could be the equivalent of good sex. Then he says it means eating vanilla ice cream off of one another during sex. These things are fundamentally different but equally poorly named. Why is "triple vanilla sex" not eating vanilla wafers topped with vanilla ice cream while having vanilla sex (i.e. conventional sex)? Why does Tommy Wiseau think this is amusing? Why have I devoted an entire paragraph to this?

Well, the rest of the episode was really boring. The Asian dude from the first episode rents a penis pump from Ed, the handyman, and discusses the terms of boning Mariana who never appears. Monica is still pregnant and her boybandhusfriend is still torn between her and Patrick but now makes a clunking noise when he talks for some reason. Cici and Princess Penelope yell at each other in some kind of propriety vs. 'Murrica battle ('Murrica wins, I guess). Ricky Rick is still the worst. And in what may be the most realistic plot twist so far, Lula, the witch, wants to become a pimp to the girls who live in the apartment thereby finally turning this practically-a-brothel into a bona fide brothel. I say, Good luck, Lula, and thank you for bringing this apartment complex to its only logical conclusion.

Quotes:

[repeated line]

"My head is not on!"

"Excuse me?"

"Excuse yourself."

Cliffhanger [1993]

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

Keith was pretty familiar with the director of last week's movie, Renny Harlin, so we ran him through IMDb to see what else he had done and we found this one. Since it is by the director of "The Covenent", stars Sylvester Stallone, and has to do with rock climbing (putting us in the mindset of another movie we've watched at Bad Movie Night, "Vertical Limit") we decided to give it a watch.

Like all rock climbing movies, it starts with someone significant to the main character falling off the rope with nothing the main character can do to save them. In this case it's Stallone's rock climbing BBF's girlfriend who he casually flirts with. After becoming rock marooned, Stallone and his rescue team come to save the two of them, her harness gets untied, and he has to shimmy out on the rope to try to save her from plumeting to her death. He fails, she dies, he laments until he must go back into the mountains with his friend who blames him for her death to save same climbers. Surprise! No one's in trouble. Some evil dudes lead by John Lithgow have tried to steal suitcases of money off a plane and landed it among the mountains with the suitcases scattering around. They take Stallone and friend as hostages who could also find the suitcases and lead them to safety. What ensues is an hour of mountain climbing, deception, Stallone having fewer and fewer clothes in spite of the fact that they are on a freezing cold mountain, a few explosions, and death by icicle. I fell asleep.

The biggest crime this movie commits ultimately is being boring and stale. The bad guys other than Lithgow are caricitures, the use of sound stages is obvious, and the plot is so predictable you could easily guess the end without me telling you. The best thing about it is easily the real shots of the mountains which are supposed to be the Rockies in Colorado but are actually the Dolomites in Cortina, Italy. Maybe Stallone co-wrote and starred in this movie because he wanted a vacation.

Quotes:
"No bullets bitch!"

"I must admit you're a real piece of work."
"I must admit you're a real piece of shit."

Adam's Grandma's Review: "I liked it. I liked the part where Stallone was there."