Cast: Steven Seagal and a bunch of other people over 50 pretending to be under 30 and to have a variety of scary foreign accents.
Trivia about The Movie:
It’s a remake of a likely even more terrible 1998 movie “Black Thunder.” (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004738/) Steven Seagal co-ripped off the script and it has caused quite a stir amongst the “People Who Love Movies about the Military No Matter How Crappy They Are” community. Apparently the special effects in Flight of Fury are better.
The Plot in Review: Air force pilot John Sands (Seagal) narrowly escapes a “memory wipe” while in military prison for something undefined. It’s too bad for us that the erasure is unsuccessful, because there was a chance that by eliminating his character’s memories, Seagal could also diminish his awareness that he is an actor, a singer or is ever seen in public. According to IMDB, the brain fry attempt is because his superiors feel threatened by his intelligence and the totally amazing information he was able to get about sensitive subjects while on his special operations missions.
Within the first ten minutes of the movie, John escapes the detention center. If you’re Steven Seagal, no one can see you riding on top of a truck the size and height of a short bus, even when you’re wearing bright orange Timberlands. He gets away, and immediately showcases his brilliant gun-fighting techniques when he prevents the robbery of a diner/convenience store by sliding across the floor whilst shooting repeatedly at nothing in particular. What is causing his velocity is unknown, but is likely simply magic or perhaps the magnetic pull of the earth’s core on Seagal’s titanium hip replacement. This incident seems unrelated to the plot, until we realize it is the vehicle by which he is reunited with his former military colleagues when his arrest for the shooting deaths of the robbers is brought to the attention of his former commander. Upon reuniting, he sends him to find a top secret Air Force Stealth Bomber known as the X-77, which is the first ever to be totally invisible and has been stolen by John’s former partner, a now corrupt Air Force pilot named Ratcher. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, John escapes the detention center. If you’re Steven Seagal, no one can see you riding on top of a truck the size and height of a short bus, even when you’re wearing bright orange Timberlands. He gets away, and immediately showcases his brilliant gun-fighting techniques when he prevents the robbery of a diner/convenience store by sliding across the floor whilst shooting repeatedly at nothing in particular. What is causing his velocity is unknown, but is likely simply magic or perhaps the magnetic pull of the earth’s core on Seagal’s titanium hip replacement. This incident seems unrelated to the plot, until we realize it is the vehicle by which he is reunited with his former military colleagues when his arrest for the shooting deaths of the robbers is brought to the attention of his former commander. Upon reuniting, he sends him to find a top secret Air Force Stealth Bomber known as the X-77, which is the first ever to be totally invisible and has been stolen by John’s former partner, a now corrupt Air Force pilot named Ratcher.
At this point in the movie, I fell asleep briefly after having been lulled to sleep by an inordinate number of Top Gun-esque flight montages that displayed the boring power of the plane. After my nap, I woke up to the rebel forces of Banansistan (yes, Banansistan), who have British and also some sort of Middle Eastern or Spanish (I still am not sure) accents and are somehow affiliated with Ratcher and his evil plot.
As a completely necessary aside (or perhaps a merciful disclaimer), Steven Seagal clearly thinks he still looks like this:
In reality, he mostly looks like this:
And if we learn one thing from the wardrobe of this movie it’s that black is just not as slimming as Seagal thinks it is.
Here is a snippet of thrilling dialogue exchange from the film, proving that Seagal is like a brain damaged, nonsensical, one-lining Bruce Willis that has missed his midday geriatric nap:
Policeman: “Who are you?” Seagal: “I’m just a country boy.” Policeman: “Who’s your employer?” Seagal: “I’m self employed right now.” Policeman: “What do you do?” Seagal: “I travel a lot.” Policeman: “That’s no ordinary fighting.” Seagal: “I grew up in a bad neighborhood.”
The following is a list of requirements for a script written by Steven Seagal, for Steven Seagal:
1. All planes he flies must look impressive and bigger than the Death Star inside, even if they are small.
2. Names of normal places have to be called their most convoluted, vaguely racist and antiquated names. For example, the Persian Gulf becomes the “Gulf of Arabia.” Perhaps he’d like to meet some “Orientals” while he’s out East …
3. Any character Seagal plays at any age must have a girlfriend that is no older than 20. She also must wear teddies even when in military barracks and has to be a closet lesbian that uses her lesbian powers to trick the only villainess in the movie. This of course results in a lesbian scene that has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.
Seagal’s very tenuous grasp on the English language is obvious in the following three lines, the stand-out moments of this movie:
“We cut off their testicles, or we teach them how to sing soprano.” (Is this really an either/or situation? It sounds a lot more like cause and effect.)
“I would be ashamed of you. But I don’t think you deserve my shame.” (Personally, I believe everyone in this cinematastrophe deserves all the shame in the world.)
“Unfortunately, you ain’t going to get no big hit. I wish I had time to whoop your ass and shoot you, but I got to go.”
Do you mean it this time, Steven? Or are we going to see you back here in ten years picking up chicks in the high school parking lot?
While nothing’s more American than Steven Seagal half-assedly fighting terrorism in the Gulf of Persia, at least he has his career as a Mojo Priest to fall back on:
Theme Song: A collection of generic opera music in requiem style that sounds like it’s being played on set through a transistor radio.
Starring: Some of the ugliest men you’ve ever seen, plus an aging Leslie Caron in denial and Catherine Bach (Daisy Duke of the original Dukes of Hazard TV series), accompanied by her strange collection of toy ponies.
Plot Summary: Nicole (Leslie Caron, shedding her ballet shoes for the finest in polyester 70s fashion) is a beautiful (supposedly), single woman that has earned her fortune by being married to someone we never meet that either left her, died under mysterious circumstances (potentially he was the guy in that one semi-flashback scene that was drowned in the pool) or never existed. She lives in a big house with her creepy chauffer, Malcolm, who in the opening scene we learn may have killed his wife and her lover, using nothing but his rage and a rotary phone. She spends her days and nights playing opera music, watching a tiny television with really bad reception, taking pictures of herself (and of her television), obsessing over her hands and making her friends feel bad about themselves. Supposedly, this is a cautionary tale for rich bitches. As for what it is cautioning against, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s a lesson to you that if you are bat-crap crazy and also wealthy, you should invest your money in prescription drugs like lithium instead of self-medicating with booze and sex. It is also perhaps a cautionary tale for movie makers that drink and film.
From an artistic perspective, if awkward shots and blurry fadeouts into montage after montage were dollars, Crazed, aka, Nicole, aka, Where Did the Last 1:28 of My Life Go? would be a blockbuster. This film’s DVD release (or at least its Netflix Insta-Watch release) can be blamed on the Troma Team, the proud distributors of the Toxic Avenger series.
From the beginning, we know a steady hand was not a priority for the camera operator, who likely drank in order to overcome his feelings of dread about having to go to work every day on this. The opening scene provides a little back story development about Malcolm (who will later in the film become Nicole’s live-in butler, yet despite being a murderer, not change his name), who walks in on a man that is, if possible, more acne scarred than he is but apparently is having an affair with his wife Patrice. Patrice and the unnamed adulterer are quickly eliminated by an enraged Malcolm, and opening credits run over what feels like a 30-minute, thrilling aerial shot of a cul-de-sac.
The movie really picks up speed (goes from a tortoise’s to a turtle’s pace) when we see Nicole stripping down into a saggy white bra and panties while cranking up dark opera music, presumably a requiem to help her mourn the passing of the time when she was young enough to be able to get away with prancing around on screen without appropriate levels of clothing. She proceeds to wander around her house attempting to get dressed while engaging in a variety of “bad naked” activities, such as mixing drinks, pulling random objects out of closets and the refrigerator, stooping, crouching and yelling out to butler Malcolm.
I would attempt to outline the plot of Crazed, but after Nicole starts taking photographs of herself and the television – convinced, as we learn through flashbacks, that a car salesman with a chest hair vest of simian proportions on a commercial, named “Fletcher the Dollar Stretcher” is someone that abandoned her while she was hitchhiking cross country years before – my brain started to decline into madness and to protect myself, I had to stop trying to make sense of the movie. I also started to ask questions such as “Why can’t she afford a better television?” and “Why doesn’t she just take some Xanax?”
To make a long story short (which unfortunately, writer/director Ventilla did not), she stalks Fletcher at his car dealership, starts sleeping with him, then seduces a young chickie, Sue (Daisy Duke) at her ballet class that she then spends the rest of the movie playing with like a Barbie doll, and also trying to coerce into a threesome with her and Fletcher.
The most important thing I learned from this movie (because it is clearly meant to be a very useful didactic tool for us all) is how rich people spend their days. This is how Nicole rolls (and presumably how all rich people eat up all their financially-fulfilled time). She …
1. Stalks anyone and anything that wrongs or doesn’t wrong her. 2. Listens to the many answering machine messages she receives but doesn’t return the calls or do anything about them. 3. Has thrilling conversations with strangers during which she asks 100-200 personal yet also uninteresting questions, but then doesn't listen to the answers. 4. Judges other people that do not share her stellar design sensibility, which rests entirely on making every home look like the Playboy Mansion as it appeared in 1978, but with a lot more wood paneling. 5. Takes staged photographs of herself checking out her pores, then gets them developed and talks about how great they look. 6. Orders around her butler Malcolm and tries to steal his breath while he sleeps by leaning over him and staring at him until he wakes up. 7. Fondles strange, vapid women’s breasts … or at least has fantasies that she is fondling their breasts, which are communicated through montages featuring blurred shots of disembodied boobs and equally disembodied female hands cupping them. 8. Dates awkwardly, jumping right into questions about religion, family background and money. 9. Studies ballet with women half her age. 10. Judges other people that are poorer than she is, like Sue. She asks her this series of questions about ten minutes after arriving at her house for the first time and looking through her things, which include an odd toy horse collection: “Are you a moon freak?” “Are you not over your horse phase yet, or what?” “Your father doesn’t give you any allowance?” “What’s this obsession with animals?” 11. Pays for plastic surgery for their uglier friends to fix their “nasal defects” so they can be prettier. 12. Redecorates apartments that are not up to her standards, without the permission of the owners. 13. Runs around crying and screaming frantically and aimlessly in her driveway after breaking up with her boyfriend.
The only thing Nicole doesn’t do that I always have assumed rich people do is play tennis well. In my face, Nicole. Thanks for turning a stereotype on its ear.
I would insert clips or a trailer for Crazed, but everyone associated with this film seems to want to bury it, just as Nicole buried all her former lovers … or as a dog buries its own poop in the yard.
A Bonus Tally of "Montages to Watch":
1. The “Pre-Threesome” Montage (accompanied by rollicking pop music). 2. Nicole’s “Depressing Story about my Mother” Montage. 3. Sue’s “Explaining to Fletcher why Nicole is Judgmental and Pissing Me Off” Montage. 4. The “Nicole Fondling Sue’s Breasts” montage. 5. The “Sue Getting Mauled by a Great Dane” Montage. 6. The “I Killed Someone” Montage. Reviewed By: Julia Rogers
In the spirit of the birthday of the U.S.A., Movie Deuce is pleased to bring you a very special theme week. Join us to celebrate "Double Threat to America" week, during which we enjoy the renderings of renowned actor/singers that can't really do either very well at all.
Stay tuned, beginning on July 1st (tomorrow!) for the best of the worst double threats. You likely already know who they are.
... and justice for all (but unfortunately, not really, because we all suffer).
In this Easter season, why not celebrate the potential second coming of Jesus with a bad sequel or two? Join MovieDeuce for the next two weeks as we sprinkle in some reviews of deucey deuces -- movies that should've never been reborn, but unfortunately were.
Suggested Title: “A Funny Thing Happened to Our Porno Script”
Tatonka Rating: 4.0
Director: Max Kalmanowicz
Writers: Carlton J. Albright, Edward Terry
Theme Song: The product of what must have been the most annoying string recording session ever, with extra violins.
Starring: A general “Who’s Who” of Hollywood nobodies. Only one of the actors has a head shot in IMDB, and his only acting jobs post The Children were in Law and Order episodes almost 30 years later, proving that anyone’s dad could’ve scored a part in this film.
Suggested Tagline(s): “Gettin’ Huggy with It;” “Don’t Get All Handsy with Me”
Actual Tagline(s): “... thank God they're somebody else's!” “Something terrifying has happened to the children... pray you never meet them!” “It only takes five to hold a town in TERROR.”
Plot Summary: A group of vacant-eyed kids are on a school bus in Ravensback, a small New England town, riding home from school on a typical day, and they go missing. A Sheriff named Billy Hart, who looks like Dennis Hopper meets Jim Nabors somehow misses a thousand obvious clues while hunting down the cause of their disappearance. Plot spoiler? The kids have turned into delightfully murderous zombies, thanks to exposure to a gas leak at the local nuclear power plant.
Trailer:
The Other Trailer:
(Spoiler Alert) The Children is a horror romp with a slowly-unraveling plot. It takes its humble first steps with stock footage and innocuous conversation – sprinkled with light blue collar humor – that largely fails to hint at an impending Chernobyl-style disaster, between two nuclear power plant workers, shot from afar, identified in the credits as “Slim” and “Jim.”
Slim: “I checked the intake and the outflow.”
Jim: “Maybe there really was a pressure drop.”
Slim: “And maybe they really will pay us overtime.”
As we watch noxious gas begin to creep from a pipe, we fade to a bus scene. Never have “99 Bottles of Beer” and “Here’s to the Bus Driver” been so ominous as here, when they are sung by children that have oddly hybrid Boston/Long Island accents. The bus rambles through the woods, and we see pregnant mother Cathy Freemont wave to it before it disappears into the toxic gas cloud.
We skip to a deserted road, where short-shorts, high-heel-wearing farmer’s daughter Suzie and Deputy "Rapey O’Toole," whose real name is Harry, played by the infamous Tracy Griswold talk about traffic suggestively while determining if they have enough chromosomes to one day responsibly mate.
The movie shifts again to pill pusher and lesbian co-mom Dr.-of-What(?) Joyce Gould (played by Michelle La Mothe), who spends her days in the company of her Doberman and her cellulite, sunbathing in weather-worn white bikinis. While her relationship to Ms. Button (one of the children, Tommy Button’s bat-shit-eating-crazy mothers) is unclear, she shields her from life’s truths with copious amounts of prescription drugs and soothing piano music. Here we are introduced to the investigative prowess of Sheriff Billy Hart, who brings an overly-pissy Dr. Gould with him to check out the empty bus, filled only with leftover school books and the bus driver’s fishing hat. From these clues, he is able to deduce that the bus driver and children are missing.
We cut back awkwardly to Deputy Harry, still with Suzie, who answers his police radio while approaching first base and says, “Nothing’s gone by us here” when asked if he’d seen the school bus or any other traffic. We have to trust his report, considering the foreplay to his failed barn kiss with Suzie was to talk about the lack of traffic in the town.
We cut without warning for the third time back to Dr. Gould searching for Tommy frantically near the bus after Sheriff Hart leaves her to go cock block his deputy. The vehicle is abandoned eerily in front of a cemetery, which makes our first sight of black-fingernailed, Goth Club ready Tommy even more impactful. Dr. Gould sees Tommy and chases after him, tripping over the burnt-out shell of the bus driver. She also gives us our first visible death scene via the “Hug of Death,” delivered by a male tween in a striped polo, and thwarts our expectations that she will be a main character. As he hugs his ornery second mom right into her grisly, burning death, his eyes are believably lifeless, potentially because he was already dead inside, or simply was given LSD during filming so he wouldn’t be weirded out by having to hug a bunch of girls from whom he might contract serious cooties.
And now, some quick FAQs about the gas-induced hugging disease:
How is it contracted?
It is airborne, but only for a limited time and in limited areas. It comes from unidentified gas produced by nuclear power plants.
Is it contagious?
It’s deadly, but not contagious.
Will it live on?
Apparently it will, but only in children that contract it in-utero when their mothers drive through a cloud. It probably was supposed to produce a sequel film, but that didn’t work out so well.
After the first visible death, we get a delicious taste of the Plaid Ginger Twins, Hank and Frank, who are both balding fans of plaid and denim shirts. They introduce us to the small-town charm of the corner store that buys roadkill, especially dead birds from townspeople and sells things like ether and other confusing auto repair supplies. The store is staffed by the saucy, NRA-card-carrying grandma, Molly. The “that’s what she said” conversation between Molly and the brothers further shows us that the writers of the script were really aiming to make an adult film, but somehow the kids got in the way.
Hank/Frank (about the birds they’re selling): “If you want ‘em any bigger, you’re going to have to wait a couple months. This is as big as they are right now.”
Molly also has access to a CB radio, presumably so she can boff truckers on their way through town and also keep tabs on the admittedly senile school bus driver.
Next on the agenda is for Sheriff Billy to visit one of the other children, Janet’s mother. Dee Dee Shore, played by an actress whose only other role was a hooker in a different movie also filmed in 1980, has hobbies that include sunbathing topless on overcast, chemically-polluted days and watching her heavily-mustachioed boyfriend Jack lift weights by the pool in a grey Speedo that perfectly matches his ashy skin. He gets visibly winded holding up his giant, oiled torso, and angrily turns down a cigarette from Dee Dee while calling into question the not-so-thinly-veiled message Sheriff Hart is delivering: “Exactly what are you trying to tell us Sheriff?” The prospect of a kidnapping inappropriately excites Dee Dee, who exclaims, “A kidnapping in Ravensback! Oh Jack, how exciting!” In an attempt to deflect the twisted nature of the situation, Hart strikes up a conversation about an art “piece” he finds and many awkward silences ensue.
We are introduced to one of the main characters, John Freemont, a father of two of the “Children” and owner of a regularly-broken car. As he waits for Sheriff Hart to help fix his car, girl zombie in a fuscia jumper, Ellen looks on from the trees, but is forced to delay her attack.
Ellen takes real pleasure in her work:
One of the skills of this movie is to switch between sex and death awkwardly with zero transition. After Ellen kills both her parents, we cut to the Ginger Twins spying on Harry and Suzie. They talk about how pretty her hair is, likely eying it as potential stuffing for future pillows. While the purpose of this scene seems to be to give the writers an excuse to wax philosophical about hand jobs with homoerotic overtones, it is really to introduce a character that serves no future purpose in the film. Enter a man in a Pimpmobile, who may or may not be Terry Kiser, but is definitely styling with his giant car phone. He is there to see Dee Dee Shore and her boyfriend.
When Dee Dee’s name is mentioned, Hank and Frank, now the official Greek Chorus of this movie say,
Hank: “I’d like to hump that bitch.” Frank: “Well, you’d have to take her on your own then.” Hank: “I’d take her on my own.”
At this point, Suzie dies at the hands of her brother, Paul. Initially, we think she might get away, since in her only perceptive moment she finds his incessant attempts to hug her inappropriately out of character and starts to slap him repeatedly. Unfortunately, the spinning bike tire and gurgling scream tell us Suzie is dead. Paul then kills his before-now-not-introduced father.
The magic really happens when Harry finds three children in the darkness and tells Molly over the CB radio, “Hey, hey, hey. Harry the Hawk does it again” right before he alliteratively gets hugged to death. Billy comes across his lifeless body and morphs into full-on Gomer Pyle in order to more appropriately display his grief over the situation.
Now there are officially feral children on the loose, but Sheriff Hart’s fear of dogs is what almost prevents him from going in to check on Dr. Gould at the Button house. The only thing more horrifying than finding burnt, dead bodies on the scene is that the phones are dead.
The next stop is back to Molly’s store. She provides us a new twist on an old expression when Hart bangs on her door, presumably because she is used to warding off the gentleman callers she phone sexes via short wave: “Alright, keep your pants zipped!” She makes a loose and fast promise to protect herself by adding, “Anyone tries to get in here, I’ll blast their ass to kingdom come!”
Having still not put together the very conspicuous pieces of the mysterious “The Children” puzzle, Sheriff Hart and John Freemont join forces and find a missing child, Janet on the highway, who thankfully for them is not feeling very affectionate. They repeat her name 100 times, thus turning her into the most well-developed character in the movie.
Then, the death toll really mounts … again.
The film picks up additional steam when bodybuilding, eye-candied Jack dies. Thankfully, his death is more dignified than his life, as he is found lounging by the pool wearing a nice dress shirt and slacks. The death of Jack’s amazing mustache – the only thing left on his burnt carcass that is recognizable – finally helps John and Billy discover that Janet and her friends are part of the problem rather than the solution.
And now, a still from the moments before Molly’s very anticlimactic death:
After the sad demise of the town’s only badass grandma, we cut to a scene in which an adult is slowly killing a child, as we see pregnant Cathy Freemont smoking, with apologies to her baby. Since – spoiler alert – the baby ends up being infected in the end, perhaps the whole movie is a PSA against exposure of children to toxins of any kind.
When Billy and John arrive at the Freemont home, going through major caffeine withdrawal, they demand that Cathy make them coffee. At this point, Goth-nail-infected Freemont daughter Jenny attempts to break into her own house. Cathy almost gets the hugging of a lifetime, but the hug is brutally rebuked. John and the Sheriff start to wrangle the children into the barn/tool shed, and John learns the hard lesson that you should never hug a child that’s gone full Goth when his hand is singed by touching Jenny. A barrage of threatening hug attempts ensue as all the zombie children rally.
Billy sets up a firing-squad-style shooting post inside the Freemont house, but the children are immune to the blasts. They are also apparently excellent climbers, and start to try to invade the Freemont house to hug the crap out of their families. A game of hide and seek goes horribly wrong as yet another Freemont child, Clarkie, starts to kill …
but gets ass-blasted in dramatic fashion over the railing of the stairs. At this point, we discover the Achilles Heel of the infected: cutting off their hands cuts off the disease and also kills them.
Likely this movie was an excuse to satisfy the urge to kill child actors without the authorities being alerted. The fact that these young actors and actresses completely disappeared from show biz after this could be more than just a career side effect of starring in this.
“God … if they get those hands on you!”
Giving up any hope of salvaging the movie, the writers decide to make their characters adopt a passive aggressive stance on solving the problem of the zombie kids by having them propose waiting it out and seeing what happens, echoing our sentiments about what we might be able to do after watching this film to erase it from our memories: “Maybe it will just go away.” However, like the characters and also the actors, we know we will never get that hour and thirty minutes of our lives back.
While debating, they manage to cut off the hands of Ellen, the girl that had the most unquenchable bloodlust. The end of the movie is a series of flashlight scenes, interspersed with John’s conflicted feelings about filicide. He almost succumbs to the power of his daughter’s high-waisted khakis (Jenny is truly ahead of her time in the fashion department, as such pants were not seen in their full glory until the early 1990’s). As she advances on him in her zombie hug stance, he is saved by the Sheriff, who systematically kills the children in the shed one-by-one.
Unfortunately, losing one “Huggy Hand” does not fully kill Ellen, and she delivers the final death blow of the movie to Sheriff Hart from the backseat of his police cruiser, bringing about the untimely end of one of the most majestic movie bromances of all time.
John is distracted from his corpse-holding grief by the cries of Cathy from inside the house. The baby is being born, bringing about the swelling of the violin-heavy string theme again. He finds her in the bathroom, and she starts to list the usual laundry list of items – boiling water, sheets, scissors – you’d think you’d need to carry out a successful home birth, even though she does not use any of them in the end. As the sun rises, the true horror of the film unfolds as the creepy sounds of Cathy giving birth that are likely indistinguishable from what conceiving it sounded like fill the house.
John exclaims, “The head’s clear! You did it, Cathy!” And the baby is born – a girl … with Gothy fingernails.
The moral of the story? If your kids die, you can always have some more; but they might turn to the Goth lifestyle to fill the emptiness you created when you told them they failed to meet any of your expectations.
Tatonka Rating: 4.0 Director: Sheldon Lettich Writer: Sheldon Lettich, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes
Theme Song: “Feel the Impact,” Performed by Gen
Actual Tagline(s) … (Because a Twin Movie Should Have TWO): “One Packs a Punch. One Packs a Piece. Together, They Deliver.”
“Two Brothers Separated by the Violence. Now Together in a Mission of Revenge.”
What I Remember the Tagline Being: “Twice the Van Dammage.” Suggested Tagline: “… Like Jean-Claude Van Damme Having Sex with Himself.”
CAST:
Jean-Claude Van Damme (Muscles from Brussels), as Chad Wagner, aka, “Mr. California, Mr. Silk Underwear.”
Unshaven Jean-Claude Van Damme, as Alex Wagner
Geoffrey Lewis as Frank Avery, the guy that can insert “fuck” into just about every sentence (in real life, he is also Juliette Lewis’ father)
Cory Everson as Danielle, the person who most acutely feels the Van Damme double-team action in this movie.
THE PLOT:
Double Impact is a double-the-pleasure movie from that 90’s that took four whole people to write and proves Jean-Claude Van Damme (JCVD) is the King of getting inappropriately over-enraged and over-excited about nothing in particular. This action-packed movie was also clearly sponsored by the belt industry and the makers of high-waisted pants.
Throughout Double Impact, JCVD proves that when you have two chances to suck, you can really do it up right. The movie is essentially comprised of a collection of uncomfortable extreme close-up shots of him checking out mentally interspersed with a lot of bewildering high kicks.
To be honest, for the first ten minutes, I wasn’t sure I was watching the right movie. We find ourselves in Hong Kong (potentially really the hills of Southern California) witnessing a vague political event involving the creation of the Hong Kong Island Tunnel in the 60’s, orchestrated by twins Alex and Chad Wagner’s father in a ceremony attended by a small collection of movie extras. As the family leaves, they give their body guard, Frank (Lewis) the night off, thus causing them to be killed after thousands of failed shots from 100 or so Chinese wielding what appear to be red paint guns amidst an assault of tom-tom-intensive, violin-riddled elevator music. One of the twins is kidnapped, though Frank is able to save Chad, who he takes back to California by boat after being shot by the main villain who has been confusingly shot in the face (possibly by his own henchmen). From this bloody scene, we learn that the second you take a night off from being a body guard in an action movie, unless you are JCVD, your charges are immediately brutally slain, and you can do nothing at all about it.
(DISCLAIMER: Because the director/producer didn’t bother to provide any English subtitles for the Chinese spoken in this movie – either out of respect for the culture, or more likely, because they are not actually speaking Chinese – my plot interpretation is loose, at best.)
In any good twin movie, one half of the twin set has to be raised by nuns, causing that twin to develop a massive chip on his shoulder. However, 25 years after the horrific slaying of the twins’ parents, the first one we meet as an adult is supposedly well-adjusted, over-sexed Chad in California.
As we learn more about Chad and wish someone had told the movie's music supervisor to take it easy on the synthesizer, we are left wondering which is more unbelievable – Jean Claude being 25 in 1991, or the character Chad building a fortune by teaching aerobics and karate. Regardless, his wardrobe was clearly selected based on what would make his ass look most like two ham hocks wrestling.
(The above picture has been minimized for your protection.)
After almost getting beaten up by an entire karate class (the members of which object to his choice of blue spandex as much as we do), he is told by a now older Frank (who finds out Chad’s twin is still alive while he is inappropriately massaging some of his students) that he needs to go to Hong Kong for undisclosed reasons. This prompts JCVD to change into an outfit that makes him look like he mugged Don Ameche in Cocoon.
Once Chad reunites with his twin Alex, we realize that the only thing they have in common is their high kick and their need to call attention to the extreme size of their penises. We also discover that you need more than a little luck to successfully explain a conspiracy theory to one JCVD, let alone two.
Alex, the evil twin, does dastardly things like provide the nice people of China with pretty cars and American cigarettes. He is also so badass that when on a boat, he can just look at people sideways, and they decide to immediately jump overboard while screaming.
A Tribute to JCVD’s Sarcastic, Ineffectual Punchlines in Double Impact:
“Nice going?! Nice going, my ass! I almost got killed!”
“Hey – can this piece of shit move any faster?”
“Welcome to Hong Kong.” (Delivered by Alex after throwing a Mercedes emblem from a blown-up car at his brother, Chad.)
(Chad, referring to the soup he is eating) – “What’s it supposed to do … make my dick bigger?”
(Chad, Right before getting kicked in the nuts) – “You go fuck yourself.”
(Alex, talking about Chad) – “Big kiss? I’ll give him a big kick in the ass, that’s what I’ll give him!”
And, the most offensive Jean-Claude Van Damme line ever delivered (by Alex), and potentially why we really don't see him in movies anymore:
“Maybe I’m drunk, tomorrow I’ll be sober, but he’ll always be a faggot.”
In general, the ass kicking in Double Impact takes a while to get started. With double the potential Van Dammage, you’d think they’d want to get it started right away, but they really make us wait for it. However, once it's on, it's ON, and we get a taste of what JCVD clearly believes about himself – that he is a better martial artist than all of China. Eventually we also discover that if you’re going to get high-kicked by JCVD in slow motion, put water in your mouth first to increase the drama.
The slightly bumbling Chad provides a nice reward for those of us that have been frustrated by JCVD’s inability to get very hurt in any of his movies. Watching him get repeatedly nailed in the nuts while wearing pleated Dockers will be one of the most satisfying experiences of your life, especially after watching him carefully drag his garment bag everywhere to protect his rockin’ 90’s wardrobe.
One of the most unique characteristics about Jean-Claude is his signature scream, which is offered up in great supply throughout Double Impact. It’s basically like an Arnold Schwarzenegger scream, if Arnold ate more bran and spoke slightly better English.
At one point, there is an interchange between the brothers that was probably repeated after production wrapped whenever JCVD thought about this movie while he was looking in the mirror:
CHAD: “Hey bro! We did it!” ALEX: “Did what? You fucked up!”
In terms of sexual tension in Double Impact, it is most strongly felt in interactions between Jean-Claude Van Damme and himself. Of course, whenever any woman is around JCVD, her clothes fall off inexplicably and her hair dries seconds after swimming (undoubtedly, food also loses its taste and birds sing). However, the only sex scene – between Chad and Danielle, Alex’s girlfriend – looks like it was ripped uncomfortably from a naked production of the “Blue Man Group.” Thankfully, we get a great interplay between Chad and Danielle having sex on a boat and Alex somehow knowing through twin intuition they are having sex, knowledge that causes him to randomly punch everything in sight and shoot bourbon angrily out his nose.
A good twin action movie would be nothing without the main actor epically kicking his own ass at some point, and we get that in spades in this movie. They eventually reconcile after Chad proves his total confusion over geography and threatens to swim from Hong Kong to California (and truly believes he can do it) and join forces to totally kick everything in sight for the last 10 minutes.
Biggest Lesson Learned: If you see an Asian falling from a great height, JCVD was probably responsible.
Fun Trick: If you listen to Double Impact without watching it, you get a pretty close approximation of what it would sound like if JCVD could really have sex with himself.
Tatonka Rating: 4.0 Director: Neal Israel Writer: Neal Israel (teleplay), Arnold Margolin (screenplay, story) Actual Tagline: “Will Solve Any Case by Dinnertime.” Suggested Tagline: “Will Do Anything for a Buck.”
Ashley Olsen, as the Stuck-Up, Old-Lady-Hat-Wearing, Is-Afraid-of-Everything One
Tracy Nelson, as the fake mom (you might remember her as daughter of Ricky Nelson and the one that played a nun on the deuce-worthy television series Father Dowling Mysteries with Tom Bosley) William R. Moses, as the dreamy fake dad (who has over 90 TV movies under his belt, usually playing the fake dad in those too)
Despite being a quasi musical, no one was willing to take credit for having written the songs. The theme song, which apparently provides an opening for all parts of this episodic movie series is best listened to after imbibing a vat of malt liquor purchased from your local registered sex offender-staffed convenience store … or after smoking a pound of crack:
The story of this particular movie begins when the Olsen Twins’ fake parents – who are marine biologists at Sea World in Orlando, Florida (who we’d like to especially thank for endorsing this particular cinematic bowel movement) – invent a way to talk to dolphins. Their discovery is in great part thanks to their love of neglecting their children, who after a hard day of aggressively interrogating birds and Sea World mascots with their basset hound “Clue” still cannot find a plot for this movie.
While they are being babysat/harassed by and also criticizing two mimes named Flippy and Bobo in one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, the twins almost miss their daily dose of child abuse – performing dressed as penguins for tourists in the dolphin show. (Perhaps the only thing I have in common with Mary-Kate and Ashley is their hatred of mimes and the pleasure they get from verbally abusing them.)
The movie really starts to hit its stride once Mary-Kate and Ashley rap (because they can’t sing worth a damn) in penguin suits as dolphins do their bidding. Winning lyrics from their musical extravaganza include those found in a quirky back-and-forth between the sisters, which throws you into a tailspin because you pretty much can’t tell them apart without their signature hats:
The song reaches Shakespearean levels when it collapses onto itself like a dying star with “Hey comma comma c’mon, comma comma c’mon let’s jump the moon/We’re so much in tune I want to flip.”
Their public humiliation complete, the twins go onto their next fit babysitter, a maniacal 30-something woman (who must be a recurring character in the series) who tells them a story about a girl named Cindy and some pizzas … and an old lady that shoves gingerbread into someone’s face before or after seeing some gerbils. While she is talking, they drift off and rudely interrupt her by doing what they do for most of this particular episode – talking about not having a case to solve and illegally spying on people.
A seeming non-sequeter (until the very end), the twins’ parents’ boss tells them they better take a vacation or he’s going to call child welfare on them for forcing their children to have to pretend to be detectives instead of behaving like normal children (or at least he implies he’s going to take some drastic measures to get them to stop working). Thankfully, he never really makes good on his threat, as he depends on the twins for entertainment, provided in great supply when he makes up fake cases for them to solve that almost get them killed, raped or kidnapped on his days off.
The twins finally find a case about 15 minutes into the episode when they discover what they think is a corpse in the woods (yep!) and are thrilled to report it. As they are running off to tell a local policeman, the dead body gets up and leaves a wallet behind, which they find when they come back to nothing.
As they are following the clues (which lead them on a trip up in the Sea World Sky Tower), we learn something that might have helped us take down the Olsen Empire before it became catastrophically problematic: Ashley is deathly afraid of heights.*
The Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley: The Case of the Sea World Adventure takes a turn towards Weekend at Bernie’s until the bitter end, when the twins start seeing a woman parading the corpse in a trench coat around Sea World, taking it on rides and generally pretending it is alive and having one hell of a good time.
And now a break for “Precious Moments to Support Good Parenting inThe Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley: The Case of the Sea World Adventure”
1. At one point, Mary-Kate declares, before doing one of many dangerous things that will lead to being kidnapped and becoming a hot commodity in human trafficking, “We’re detectives … detectives never think about safety.”
2. The twins flirt with the idea of taking a cab with a stranger, but their plan is thwarted not because of safety concerns, rather because they can’t afford it.
Their poor choices lead them to become buskers singing tribute songs to Miami (where they are trying to go). Fortunately, they meet a steel drum band that is willing to put their ramblings to music, dress up in whorish Flamenco outfits and combine forces to sing about Pastrami, Afro Cuban music and Key Lime Pie. Of course, random crowd people start helping them by doing a dance that looks to have been choreographed by Ed Grimley, but really wants to be an exact replica of the stairs dance scene during the big parade in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Thankfully, people in Miami are more than willing to pay top dollar for high-quality, live kiddy porn and the duo makes $98.50, enough to hire a limo to drive them to Miami.
And then, this movie goes one place with a dead body that Weekend at Bernie’s never went – a Carnival Cruise ship (but I’m betting Carnival wouldn’t have had the balls to capitalize on the death of Terry Kiser).
All-in-all, this is a great series to watch when you’re deliriously sick and stuck at home with nothing but Netflix instant watch by your side. It would also be fuel for a really high-volume drinking game.
PLOT SPOILER, so you can avoid watching this entirely: The dead body is Flippy the mime, and Bobo is a transvestite.
BONUS: It’s only 28 minutes long, and there’s a blooper reel at the end.
Reviewed by Julia Rogers
*If an Olsen Twin is pushed off a cliff, and there is no one around to hear it, does she still make a sound?
Tatonka Rating: 2.0 Director: Jeff Renfroe Writer: Based on the Book by Lois Duncan
Lifetime Movie Network’s Film Synopsis: After the shocking and untimely death of her husband, Shelley Stratton (Catherine Hicks) moves her daughter Alexis (Emily Hirst) and her adopted daughter, Laurie (Alexz Johnson), to their remote summer house in hopes of giving her family a fresh start. As Laurie begins to settle in and put her life back together, she gets the eerie feeling that she is constantly being watched. Laurie's uneasiness grows when people start claiming to see her in places that she has never been. The family’s delicate state begins to unravel when Laurie unearths the dark past, discovering a twin-sister that she never knew she had. Laurie is forced to delve deeper into her twin’s secrets, for as it turns out her twin has been locked up for years! Laurie must now understand their strange connection in order to prevent her sister from taking over her life and harming her loved ones. Based on the book by author Lois Duncan.
My Film Synopsis: After the chick from Devil’s Diary’s father dies (in this movie named “Laurie" instead of "Dominique"), she moves to the island where her family has a summer house. She has a hard time making friends, because all the boys she made out with during summer break really didn’t expect to have to see her at school every day (and now they have to explain who she is to their girlfriends). After telling everyone else in the world except Laurie that she is adopted, her mother (the nice lady from 7th Heaven who has been playing a mom in movies and on television since she could speak) finally tells her the truth, and supernatural hijynx ensue.
Suggested Tagline: “Because Your Twin is a Crazy Slut …”
The first thing I noticed was the score, which was most likely royalty free and also sounded like a sampling of variations on the Law and Order theme song … or the soundtrack from one of two hundred romantic mystery comedies starring Julia Roberts.
As the movie begins, we get about one minute of plot set-up; we see the main character, 16-year old Laurie painting in her living room (which is apparently in a large city … which can only mean we’re in New York City, as we learn later) and visited spiritually by her father seconds before he dies when he is hit by a car just outside. I do appreciate how fitting it is that Lifetime killed off the father (who did not die in the book), because we need him gone to understand that women are much more powerful when they’re on the loose.
The great lesson learned immediately (and never really recanted or revisited) is, “When your husband dies, the right thing to teach your children is that you need to run from your problems in order to be happy again.” The family packs up their apartment in New York and heads for their summer home on an unnamed island. We are reminded of how painful death is (and why running is justified) when they arrive to find family photos (that look like they came with the frame or a wallet) at their new home.
The first night in their new home establishes that every single night on this island is so stormy that the power goes off, and they search for batteries, only to find the opportunity to tell us for the first time what the now dead father did for a living; because they find fully-charged batteries for which he was responsible, they remark, “He was pretty practical for an artist.” As we know, typically artists can’t even figure out how to put their pants on the right way, often needing to be taken care of by other people who are charged with changing their diapers, providing them with clean drool cups, etc.
The story progresses at a snail’s pace, and we realize that Laurie has been seen quite a bit in town when she hasn’t even left her bedroom. She’s even accused of hooking up with the school cripple in a boat house. If you’re going to have an astrally-projecting twin sister, you better hope she’s not a total skank, or that she has good taste.
Laurie starts to sort of make friends on her first day and befriends Helen, the school deviant, played by an actress who might turn into Shannen Doherty in 30 years. Helen’s rebellious acts include reading true crime novels on the steps when she’s supposed to be in class and acting as an armchair psychologist for anyone that tries to befriend her. She also gives Laurie permission to “go nuts,” which she seems to follow for the rest of the movie. Despite only being in the movie (at least awake and not in a coma) for about 10 minutes, she is Laurie’s best friend in the world.
I have to hand it to LMN for saving money on production costs by re-using teen couples from other Lifetime movies. Laurie hooks up with Jeff, played by the actor who was also Alexz Johnson’s one-dimensional male counterpart in Devil’s Diary. Do I smell an epic serial romance a la Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks? I think maybe there was a sale on creepy location rentals and they just decided to film two movies in one shot.
The most confusing element of this movie is its time line. I would expect some confusion of place and time, given there is a major focus on astral projection, but we never get deep enough into a traditional plot to understand how the plot gets screwy. At one point, as Laurie is going to meet Helen near the cliff outside her house, she sees herself (her twin) on the rocks. As she walks further to find Helen, she says, “Earlier tonight, I thought I saw someone on the rocks that looked just like me.” Earlier tonight as in 30 seconds ago? Most likely this type of definition of time is what makes the plot drag.
Not only does the plot not make any sense, but the mother is largely unresponsive to major events, even when Laurie is suspected of trying to strangle her sister Alex in her sleep. Whether it’s bad writing or Catherine Hicks’ complete resignation to the fact that she’s never going to have a real career, she is barely awake in most of her scenes. Her revelation to Laurie about her adoption is also treated by her as a non-event, and she explains that they left her twin behind because they were dirt poor and essentially could only afford to buy one baby.
One of the most entertaining things about this movie is the way it bases all its male characterizations on blatant stereotypes. Gordon, the douchey school stud, is the ultimate panty peeler. In order to seduce Laurie, he uses clever phrases like, “You’d rather curl up with that book instead of me?” He also tries to get her to succumb by attempting to convince her that his desire to do so is motivated by wanting to take her mind off her troubles and heal her pain. If Laurie’s twin hadn’t thrown him across the room from the next dimension, he certainly would’ve tried, “If you don’t do me, my balls will fall off and I will die,” or “If a guy stays a virgin too long, his penis explodes.”
Jeff is another excellent stereotype; the misunderstood, damaged (in this case, crippled) boy that seems to be bad but is actually good. He is also a vehicle for showing how boys (especially the cute ones) prevent girls from having super powers; Leah tells Laurie that Jeff is in the way of her truly being able to astral project. Jeff is entertaining because he does intelligent, completely logical things like walking to Laurie’s house in the middle of the night along a busy highway and hanging out in deserted places alone or standing near cliffs when he’s almost been killed by the soul of his girlfriend’s twin four or five times.
Another thing this movie does well is avoid explaining complicated topics. If you don’t want to explain astral projection, all you have to do is show a montage of a character reading every book under the sun about it. We see Laurie learning everything she can about astral projection at the school library; when she pretends she doesn’t know what her twin Leah is talking about later, Leah simply calls her on it and we then don’t have to ever know what astral projection really means or any details about it beyond the generic. We just have to trust that someone else in the movie understands the concept and will lead us down the right path.
The movie doesn’t really get entertaining until Leah convinces Laurie to astral project so she can take over her body. And she does really dastardly things when she gets in there. Her evil deeds include, making breakfast for Laurie’s family, making friends with popular girls at school by giving them compliments about their outfits, trying to sleep with hot guys that like her and trying to fix Laurie’s reputation for being a total nutbag around school by behaving like a normal teen girl.
If you can make it through the first hour and a half, this movie gets pretty good, especially if you have Schadenfreude badly enough that you might enjoy watching a crippled boy get beaten by a semi-ghost with his own cane.
Just a reminder to get "deucey" tonight with Lifetime Movie Network's World Premiere of Stranger with My Face. Although we're sure it will be on another 20 times in the next month, don't you want to say you saw it first?
I actually do remember reading this Lois Duncan story as a teenager (because I was totally fascinated by the supernatural, and that was her thing), so I'm interested to see what they've done with it (and if they were able to crap it up enough that it will register on the Tatonka scale). I'm pretty sure that with the subject matter, budget and the cast, we won't be lacking in the over-acting and bad special effects department.
Of course, look out for and enjoy interactive special features at the LMN site related to this movie (including deleted scenes, etc.). As much as we rip on the quality of the movie buffet LMN provides for us, we adore it and can't get enough ... and would probably go to the trouble of organizing a telethon (which we would try to get Michael Nouri to host) if the news broke that it would be going off the air.
Sleeping with the Devil originally aired in April of 1997 as a CBS Movie of the Week but has since nestled its way deep into Lifetime’s misandry-based repertoire. Starring Shannen Doherty (pretending to be an aspiring medical student and a good person) and Tim Matheson (and his acid-washed-enveloped prosthetic ass), the movie lays out a cut-and-dried case for how when we, as women, abandon our principles by becoming Homecoming Queen or quitting medical school to become world-renowned fitness models just to please our future husbands we will be raped and nearly killed by a hired hitman. However, it simultaneously mixes messages by showing us how we will ultimately realize we need men (especially doctors who can give us new legs when we become paralyzed) to help us achieve all our wildest dreams after we’ve made a half-hearted go at trying to make something of ourselves on our own.
Sleeping with the Devil starts with a bang (literally), as Rebecca Dubrovich (Doherty) is seen slow-motion waving and riding the Homecoming float wearing her crown and sash in a wholesome small town parade. The events dramatically unfold as we see exaggerated, blurry camera work that spells out the juxtaposition between an unnamed middle-aged man – one of many largely useless ancillary male characters in this filmic receptacle for out-of-work actors – in the crowd looking lasciviously at her, and her parents smiling proudly. Of course, as Rebecca leaves the float and heads towards the crowd, the unnamed man follows her, and she decides to walk briefly through a poorly-lit back alley, allowing him to have his way with her as the scene fades and we flash to four years later. We thankfully never have to see her coming to terms with the rape, but we do walk away with a lucid explanation for the emotional damage that tritely leads to all her ridiculously bad decisions regarding men throughout the rest of the film.
We are fed some important plot information as we learn that Rebecca has overcome some of her trauma by getting really into triathlons by day and also deciding to go above and beyond being a nurse and go to medical school by night. Though we never see her actually taking any classes or doing anything at the hospital besides gossiping with her co-workers and rejecting them when they attempt to make sexual advances towards her, throwing up in the bathroom or complaining about how much work she has to do, the frantic royalty free music tells us she is very busy and also somewhat lonely.
… Enter the deliciously elderly Dick Strang (Matheson), who pops a wheelie on his red penis of a motorcycle to impress Rebecca while she is running one day and unfairly forces her to have to show an actual emotion (anger). Millionaire Dick Strang holds several important positions, including getting sued, yelling at people on toaster-sized phones, flying to undisclosed locations and misogyny. Only one of these jobs seems to be full time (the misogyny), so he ends up eventually having a lot of time for vacations and convincing impressionable, damaged young women that he is totally awesome.
Dick stalks Rebecca silently until he completes his first and only napkin masterpiece – a childlike drawing of her running and him riding his motorcycle – which he passes to her while she’s eating alone at a restaurant. The ice is broken as she realizes that he must have been an art major, so he has to be pretty damn sensitive, and they begin their unlikely, initially sexless courtship.
If awkward romantic moments were dollars, Doherty and Matheson would have probably been paid more to be in this movie. As their relationship deepens (and she reveals that she was basically having promiscuous sex and doing hard drugs to overcome her abuse – while apparently also managing to become an R.N. – during the four years we missed), we discover that though she can have robotic sex in red silk nightgowns with Dick, she is still pretty sexually dysfunctional as she announces, “I don’t even let my mom see me naked.” That’s quite a bold statement, considering well-adjusted women call their mothers on a regular basis to come over and inspect their business. Once they break the sex barrier, Dick starts to lure her deep into the seedy, graffiti-patterned-high-cut-briefs-riddled world of fitness modeling and she struggles to stay awake as she attends random fundraisers and dinners and becomes the uneven-eyed face of his growing business empire.
Just before their relationship goes sour (shortly before Rebecca discovers she is pregnant with Dick’s child), she finds out he’s actually married when his wife shows up on their doorstep ranting, stating his full name approximately ten times interspersed with some G-rated expletives, which she apparently learned from her husband who regularly uses forceful words like “crummy” and “crap” to make particularly strong points. She also says, “There’s never been anyone but Dick in my whole life,” which is pretty easy to mishear as “There’s never been anything but Dick in my whole life,” particularly when his name is repeated by at least one character in the movie every 30 seconds to help us make the connection between the fact that his name is Dick and he also IS a total dick. The lesson we learn when Rebecca leaves him for one night to stay with her parents and Dick shows up the next day having magically started and completed his divorce proceedings overnight is that if you’re trying to convince your girlfriend that you’re really divorced, make sure it’s announced on the front page of your local paper the day it happens.
As their relationship continues its downward spiral, Tim Matheson’s wardrobe increases in intensity. Not only does he wear jeans that turn him into a human Double-Stuf Oreo™ and couple these with marvelously bland sport coats, but he also rocks the V-Neck sweaters from your high school boyfriend’s closet in 1991 and work-out gear that makes him look like a geriatric Danny Zucco … or like he just stepped off the stage after a Sha-Na-Na reunion special.
After an hour and fifteen minutes of loud arguing, open-fisted slapping, miscarriages and Witness Protection Program-style hiding out, Rebecca finally thinks she has some peace. Flying high on the wings of an anti-climactic court case, the result of which is her winning back her furniture, underwear and family photo albums from Dick, she decides there is no better way to celebrate than going down to the local donut shop in her convertible and eating an apple fritter in the parking lot. Big mistake, as she is shot in the spine by a Dick-hired man, and to add insult to injury, before she even gets one bite of the fritter. Her final act of strength is to reach up from the passenger side floor and dramatically honk the horn to call attention to her distress.
After a brief coma and receiving the startling news that she is now a paraplegic as well as some hot one-on-one innuendo-exchanging with her Latino physical therapist, Rebecca gets kicked out for being uninsured and starts to pursue a personal injury lawsuit against the now very estranged (in Europe) Dick. While researching her medical condition, she comes across a miraculously single doctor named Jerrold Petrofsky, “Jerry,” who is developing a machine that electrically stimulates muscles in the legs and has the potential to help her walk a marathon again (or kick the next man that wrongs her squarely in the nuts). Once she determines she is completely not sexually attracted to Jerry (because that’s what leads to trouble for women in relationships), she stalks him and successfully is able to trick him into allowing her to become his lab assistant.
One of Dick’s spies hunts down Rebecca while she is swimming at the research facility, and the good doctor saves her life by being there to hold her the only time during the movie Doherty is able to get really upset about anything. She introduces him to her parents to consummate the reality of the relationship. Just a tip, as taught to us by Doherty via Dubrovich, if you are a paraplegic and your parents suggestively ask you if your new husband-to-be is “good,” the best response is “He’s a good man.” The optional subtext is, “… and I can’t feel it when he’s in my vagina, but I suspect he’s there.”
Rebecca’s new deep love prompts her to proceed full force to get Dick off the streets. During a meeting with his sister (who has gone against her brother), they define another essential Lifetime movie principle. Dick’s sister states, “It won’t be safe until Dick is behind bars.” The translation of that statement is, of course, “NO woman will be safe until EVERYONE with a dick is behind bars.” Despite the defense’s attempts to prove Rebecca is incompetent with riveting, provable facts such as, “We have witnesses that will say she is a tramp,” she prevails and is awarded millions, though she believes she will never see any money because Dick is on the loose.
The just desserts come at the end of the movie, when we discover that Dick Strang has been successfully and profitably running a fake passport ring using multiple identities. Proving he has the worst case of multiple personality disorder since the Yorke/Sargent debacle on Bewitched, he eludes the police for years despite never using any other first name besides “Dick” in any of his pseudonyms. He manages to get through customs freely despite having regular lawsuits filed against him during which his financial assets are scrutinized, but does not get busted for good until he fittingly becomes “Dick O’Toole” after growing a beard.
At the end of the film, an obligatory hotline for abused and battered women lingers on the screen as the inspirational theme song plays in the background and a friendly voice invites you to speak out against domestic violence. What it should say is, “If you were wronged by Tim Matheson in 1997, please call this number.”
We're thrilled to announce a very special week-long event coming up in just TWO days at Movie Deuce. Saturday, August 29th - Friday, September 5th is officially Double Deuce Week; we'll be celebrating the best, worst movies featuring your very favorite twins!
The party will start off right Saturday night with the world premiere of LMN's new original movie Stranger with My Face at 8 p.m. EST, based on the teen thriller (remember when people used to write books?) by Lois Duncan and starring perpetual mom Catherine Hicks (from Child's Play and one of the most generically-Jesus-infused television shows ever, Seventh Heaven) and Lifetime veteraness Alexz Johnson (of Final Destination 3 and the movie that broke the Tatonka rating scale, Devil's Diary).
We'll continue throughout the week with a different review of a twin-injected movie EVERY SINGLE DAY. Keep your plate empty for double helpings of wacky hyjinx, evil deeds and high-kicking, hard-punching action ... and very likely a heaping side of Guttenberg.
Help us harness the power of two ... don't miss Saturday's riveting premiere!
We would be remiss if we failed to let you know when movies that we highly endorse are going to make an appearance. We would also be total failures if we didn't alert you the second any made-for-TV movie with Shannen Doherty was going to air.
So, let us excitedly tell you that tonight at 10 p.m. EST on one of our favorite channels, Lifetime Movie Network (LMN), the wonderful 1997 movie Sleeping with the Devil will air for about the 50th time this year. This classic is based (probably pretty loosely) on the real-life, mildly inspirational story of Rebecca Dubrovich (Doherty) and her bat-crap-eating-crazy, inexplicably rich husband (played by Tim Matheson, the bad guy in Fletch) who shoots her while she's eating at the drive-thru of an In-and-Out Burger and leaves her paralyzed from the waist down.
This movie epitomizes the joy that is a good 1990's TV (and particularly Lifetime) movie and includes everything from low-quality royalty free music with lots of saxophone, to a theme song that celebrates the joys and triumphs of womanhood. It also reminds us that running an entire marathon with a walker after being shot in the spine is as much of an accomplishment for a woman as marrying a doctor. Additionally, it magically creates a fantasy world in which Shannen Doherty makes a completely believable nurse-turned-spokesmodel (we really do love you, Shannen).
Stay tuned for a comprehensive review, but in the meantime, check your local listings and watch at 10 p.m.
Sleeping with the Devil Movie Trailer (in Low-Quality 1-D):
Tatonka Rating: 2.8 Director: Paddy Breathnach (yes, really) Writer: Pearce Elliot Actual Tagline: “Get Ready to Get Wasted.”
Shrooms is a little Irish jig of a darkly-trying-very-hard drug movie directed by Paddy Breathnach and written by Pearce Elliot, strangely released initially in Russia in 2007. The completely unmentionable cast includes actors and actresses that look vaguely like other famous actors and actresses:
Lindsey Haun as the overly-complicated female lead Tara who resembles a not-snaggle-toothed Kirsten Dunst (aka, Kirsten “Dunce”);
Jack Huston as Tara’s brooding Irish-ish boyfriend Jake (a chromosomally-challenged-looking, unfunny and not Shakesperean hybrid of Russell Brand and Orlando Bloom);
Max Kasch as Troy (Jason “P.U.s” – because you need at least one character that looks like someone from a Kevin Smith movie if you want to make a movie about stoners … preferably one that wears a hat);
Maya Hazen as the vaguely Asian girl Lisa that everyone keeps saying has breast implants but really just looks like a pre-pubescent Tia Carrera (Tea “Whore-era”);
Alice Greczyn as “the hairy one that is not any of the other female characters,” Holly;
Robert Hoffman as Bluto, the horniest, skinniest steroid addict ever … and the only person in the history of the world outside of Popeye named “Bluto.”
The most shocking news about this movie is, it was actually nominated twice for the Irish equivalent of the academy awards: “Best Director;” “Best Film.” (Did I mention someone farted on someone in it?)
The movie starts out with a yawning ramble through the 10 different companies that invested in it, including Magnet Pictures, Capitol and Ingenious Film Partners. Normally I would not fixate on the pre-opening credits, but in this case, it lasted for (what felt like) five minutes*, leaving me to wonder, “How many partners does it take to make a film set in rural Northern Ireland about a drug trip gone bad? And how did they find so many film companies to stand behind them in support of a movie that advertises (whether falsely or truly) that Ireland’s potentially biggest contribution to the world is its hallucinogenic mushroom supply?”
Once the actual story of the movie begins, after we learn two important plot elements through Tara’s denim-encrusted journal with a kitty on it – that she is taking her American friends to visit her quasi-boyfriend in Ireland and that she is deathly afraid of doing drugs – we immediately feel the explosive chemistry between two of the main characters – Bluto and Troy.** After appropriate amounts of guy-on-guy baggage claim conveyer belt wrestling and as little character development as possible, we’re out of the airport and deep into our introduction to non-stop, totally accurate Irish culture.
As they leave the airport in Jake’s off-white van, a ghetto-fied “Mystery Machine,” they manage to hit what appears to be a dirty unicorn (thanks to a lack of special effects budget, or perhaps an attempt at wise directing decisions, we never see exactly what it is) and bludgeon it to death to put it out of its misery. This introduces troll-like people that Jake refers to as the “indigenous people***;” they creep out of the woods as if smelling the delicious stench of dead mythological creature and babble incoherently while wielding filthy, rusty axes and drooling. In Ireland, the indigenous people eat these dirty unicorns for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as explained expertly by Jake, and if you hit one, you are supposed to give it to them to keep the peace.****
As we discover later on in the film, these inarticulate indigenous people can also be infuriating smartasses; they invite a panicked and running Lisa into their cabin and tell her they have a phone, which she complains doesn’t work. They proceed to mutter the only thing you can understand them say during the entire movie – “You asked if we had a phone … you didn’t ask if it worked.” I’m not quite sure how these mutants can be both brain damaged and able to comprehend the definitions of subtle phrases and linguistic nuances, but I’m guessing these idiot savants would also really appreciate one of my favorite comedic bits –
Man 1:“Do you know what time it is?” Man 2: “Yes!”
After offering up a unicorn sacrifice, you are supposed to walk away casually as if nothing happened and start hunting for mushrooms in the woods in order to stock the drug party you have planned for the next day while setting up a campsite. However, first you need to leave your cell phones in the car; because drunk dialing is okay, but calling someone while tripping out on hallucinogens is a faux pas from which you might never recover.
The sextet leaves the van, and we discover the answer to an important question as Tara gives a couple very important party favors to Holly and Lisa – “If you were a chick, what would you be disappointed NOT to have while tripping out on shrooms?” Tampons and candy … that can later be fed to little mutant rat boys you encounter in the swamp in order to gain their friendship and trust.
With so many Irish supporters working day and night to make this film happen (albeit in Russia), you’d think someone would be able to find a real, out-of-work Irish actor to play the only main Irish character, Jake. However, despite being born in London, Jack Huston can’t even do a British guy doing an Irish accent, thus leaving the ghost stories he later tells around the campfire which are integral to the plot unintelligible. Fortunately, Jake somewhat enunciates all you really need to know: “massacred beyond belief;” “kid living with the feral dog” and “three-inch steel blade.”
Unfortunately, aside from some inadvertent unicorn poaching, the magic of the movie doesn’t truly begin until Tara – the drug-fearing, rule-abiding one of the bunch – decides the time is nigh for her to stop acting like a total priss and ends up taking and almost overdosing on what she later refers to as the “heroin of shrooms.” This mishap largely occurs because she is out of earshot when Jake describes that the mushrooms with the little black dots on them are Death’s Head Fungi and off limits to responsible trippers. As he explains, “Your heart explodes, and all of your lungs and kidneys.”***** When Troy asks what happens if you live, Jake basically implies that you become an ESP-infested superhero that can talk to the dead, tormented by your own demons. So, basically, Death Shrooms are the Red Bull of fungi … they give you wings! Unless, as we find out later, you’re jumping off the balcony of an abandoned insane asylum, and then, you still break your legs.
And now a break for A List of Essential Irish Definitions You Will Need to Know to Understand Important Concepts in Shrooms:
“Dogging:” Essentially, voyeurism. The premise is that couples in Ireland “park” in the woods and flash their lights if they are open to having a stranger watch them and eventually participate. According to the American girls in Shrooms, this practice is “vile,” but in the end, not as vile as what goes on in “convent school,” which they attended.
“E.S.P:” Early signs of this gift include knowing your boyfriend will attempt to save your life if you almost die when he is a few feet away from you and knowing that your horny 18-year old guy friend (Bluto) will follow a naked woman into the woods at night, and that she will kill him with the knife she happens to be carrying.
Speaking of Bluto, Shrooms also provides strong commentary on the dangers of steroid use. Bluto’s friends are regularly blaming steroids for his penchant for being “all up ons” everyone else’s girlfriend or boyfriend, calling people “douchebags” and for regularly making a play for anything that moves, including sometimes just a car window (or a talking cow).****** Eventually, he goes missing thanks to his own horniness and raging 'roidocity, and the plot thickens, much like the frog semen that fascinates Troy while he is supremely high.
If we learn nothing else from Bluto’s ominous disappearance, it’s that when the shrooms call, you stop looking for your friend and get in on the action. How many times are you going to be in Ireland in the rain digging for drugs with your friends and some weird vaguely Irish guy you probably met on the Internet?
A horror movie of either good or bad quality has to set itself up for a sequel. However, this one pretty much ties itself up by feeding you a fast-paced, very convenient twist in the last 30 seconds, delivered in flash-backs … or IS it a twist?
The benefit of a drug movie that is also a horror movie is, you’ll never know if it was real, or all one extended trip. My suggested sequel title is Shrooms 2: Use of Deadly Spores.
3 Actually Decent Filmic Elements about Shrooms:
The telescopic lens effect used to distinguish between Tara’s premonitions and reality.
The director’s occasional use of the power of suggestion instead of pure gore to make scene more effectively frightening.
A fairly good completely instrumental, REAL musical score that fits the horror genre very well.
Quotable Quote: Girl Fight!
In a particular scene, Holly and Lisa master the art of irreverence as they call each other out on their shortcomings after Holly is convinced that Lisa’s boyfriend Bluto was peeping on her tame make-out sessions with Troy.
Lisa: “What, you think he wanted to peek at your hairy ‘stache?”
Holly: “You know what, bitch? At least my tits are real.”
Lisa: “Ohhh … you wanna play like that, Chewbacca? ‘Cause I will rip that hair right off you.”
*Is this the director’s cut? **PLOT SPOILER – Unfortunately, their girlfriends Lisa and Holly have accompanied them on the trip, and they are never able to consummate their angsty, testosterone-infused love. ***You know, the indigenous people of Ireland … the ones that are not Colin Farrell or Liam Neeson or in famous rock bands … and that don’t live in the only cities most people know about, i.e., Dublin and sometimes (but not always) Belfast. ****Leprechauns are more of a desserty dish, like Spotted Dick or Bread Pudding. *****ALL of your lungs?! I thought I only had six … ******“Bluto Needs a Steroid Intervention … or to Join a Boy Band in which His Highlights Are Appreciated.”
1 Tatonka = Too Good to Be Bad or Not Bad Enough in the Right Way to Be Good 2 Tatonkas = Pretty Bad, but Still Pretty Disappointing 3 Tatonkas = Delicious Head Cheese on a Stale, Generic-Brand Ritz Cracker 4 Tatonkas = The Devil's Diary or Friends 'Til the End 5 Tatonkas = Buffalo Patties on a Hot Log or a Deuce Dropped from a Great Height***
