Rowsdower!

Movie: The Final Sacrifice (1990)

Director: Tjardus Greidanus

Starring: Christian Malcolm, Bruce J. Mitchell

Written by: Tjardus Greidanus

ROWSDOWER!!!

That was the call that resonated through the hills and fields of fabled Canada in 1990, when this film became the country’s greatest national treasure.  This story of a washed up, mullet-sporting Denim Dan fighting the forces of evil is as inspiring as any tale since the dawn of man.  The heroic Zap Rowsdower – and yes, that’s his real name – perpetually exists one breath away from a cholesterol and alcohol-induced heart attack.  Yet he perseveres, and history is eternally in his debt!

The Final Sacrifice chronicles the triumphant tale of Zap Rowsdower as he combats an evil extraterrestrial cult led by Satoris, a Nazi-chic goofball with a popped collar and demonically dubbed voice.  Rowsdower is pulled into the fracas by Troy, a terminal Nancy Boy whose father died investigating the cult.  Undeterred by this radioactive sissy, brave Rowsdower takes young Troy under his wing, and the pair hit the road in a truck that’s even more close to death than our hero.  Extreme heroism ensues, including bike versus car chases, chainsaw home invasions, flaming automotive repair, awkward nights of camping, and close-range shootouts in which nobody takes a bullet.  At the end of this epic adventure, Rowsdower battles Satoris for the fate of the world in a grappling hook versus flaming torch deathmatch for the ages!

Mike Pipper - Grizzled Genius

I would be remiss if I neglected to mention the greatness of one more character in this tale of astonishment.  While on the run through the vast Canadian wilderness, Troy and Rowsdower discover the residence of one Mike Pipper, an old associate of Troy’s father.  This man is amazing!  Life has turned this former archaeologist into a grizzled old hermit bearing the improbable combination of a sweet afro, a giant beard, and a voice scraped from Yosemite Sam’s raspy soul.  Next to Rowsdower himself, Mr. Pipper rules this chronicle with squinty-eyed magnificence, and his sage advice and half-dead horse are essential to Rowsdower’s quest.

All of these elements combine to form a legend that will live on for ages.  Zap Rowsdower is both the reason why Canada will always play second fiddle to the United States and the reason why those same United States will never succeed in annexing its northern neighbor.  His story is an inspiration to us all!

October 5, 2010
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

The Kid and the Butler

Film: Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House (2002)

Director: Rod Daniel

Starring: French Stewart, Erick Avari, Michael Weinberg

Written by: Debra Frank, Steve L. Hayes

So there’s a story between me and this film that took place years before I actually watched it, and this may be my best display of customer service, ever.  It happened on Christmas Eve, appropriately enough, and I was mopping up the last minute shoppers at my retail environment.  The store phone rang, and the customer had one of the weirdest requests I’ve ever fielded.  She was looking for Home Alone 4, and she had to have it.  Her entire spiritual well-being, apparently, depended on it.  Well, it was an ordeal tacking down the cultural artifact, a time in which she grew more and more frantic, but I found it at last – and when I did, she screamed, screamed, in delight.

I never expected anyone to be that excited about Home Alone 4.

Having finally watched this rapture-inducing film years later, I still don’t quite get it.  Alongside a contrived divorce plot and a contrived royal kidnapping plot, a lot of the responsibility for this falls upon the shoulders of the child actor hired to battle the burglars.  To his credit, young Michael Weinberg steps into the Kevin McCallister role and makes it his own, but the problem is that, while he’s by no means horrible, he’s no Macauley Culkin.  What made the first two films in the Home Alone series work was Culkin’s wry and reluctant heroism.  As unfair as this may be to say – especially concerning a movie that takes place on Christmas – Weinberg rushes through almost every scene as wide-eyed as a kid on Christmas.

Still, a few factors keep this from becoming a disaster sequel.  Squinty-eyed French Stewart is a great fill-in as old Kevin Arnold Joe Pesci’s former henchman, whose latest bumbling caper involves his snarly new wife riding shotgun.  Chief among the newcomers is the fussy and potentially sinister old butler of dad’s new girlfriend.  As she descends from would-be stepmom to exasperated socialite, the butler, played by Erick Avari, becomes the film’s most realized character.  Figuring out his agenda becomes the most interesting aspect of the film.

The final thing going for Home Alone 4 is the smart house which Kevin turns against Mr. Stewart and Company.  While the core formula hasn’t much changed, the high-tech battleground plays with the template enough to give the film some inventiveness.

No, it doesn’t come close to matching the original, but Home Alone 4 is a perfectly serviceable sequel.  I probably wouldn’t call up a store and scream its magnificence, but I’d watch it again without complaint.

The big question: why has this man not starred in a B-52s biopic?

September 28, 2010
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Transformers - The Movie. The REAL One.

Transformers: The Movie (1986)

Directed by: Nelson Shin

Starring: Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, Orson Welles

Written by: Ron Friedman

I held out for as long as I could. When Michael Bay released his update on the robotic heroes of my youth, I expected the worst. The Bruckheimer/Bay school of filmmaking has always been high on shit blowing up, vapid dames, and bad puns. While this formula produces some winners – I’m the only person I know who consistently defends Con-Air as hilariously cool – the average is dumbed down action film self-parody, malformed Rambo spawn. And when the average drops out, we get truly wretched cinema like Armageddon. So when I, a person who owns every single episode of the original Transformers cartoon, heard that Mr. Armageddon was at the helm, I imagined a highly erotic scene in which Optimus Prime paraded animal crackers along Megatron’s exposed midriff. And so I avoided modernity like the plague.

It’s all Mike Nelson’s fault. These days, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 star is doing, well, pretty much the same thing as he did on that show. But as opposed to the old-school skewering of obscure cinema, Nelson’s enterprise, titled RiffTrax, takes a larger aim at Hollywood blockbusters, savaging them alone or with guests including the old MST3K crew and Neil Patrick Harris. Obviously, the studios which produce such wonderful films as Roadhouse and Batman and Robin probably aren’t too keen on some wiseass selling their movies, much less providing them with overdubbed mockery. To get around this, Nelson only provides the commentary, and leaves it to the viewer to supply the movie. Sync the two together (or find an already synced up file), and magic!

One of these movies was the updated, super-cool, Michael Bay Transformers flick. Though I remained fearful of the sure bastardization of my old champions, I figured that if I was going to watch it at all, taking on the ordeal with the RiffTrax choir at my back would be the best way to do it. And being drunk.

Nothing helped. Transformers was a flaming piece of shit, as bad as my worst fears.

Where do I even begin? With the tweeked-out military dudes who kick more ass than the robots? With the cadre of sassy government-appropriated hackers, which of course includes a sultry blonde Australian? Bernie Mac as a scummy used car salesman? Shia LeBeouf as the hope of the universe, albeit one who owns a drugged up Chihuahua? How about the midriff queen who serves as his overtanned love interest? Why be choosy? They’re all assholes. There is no human in this movie that I didn’t want turned into robot hamburger.

Including this fine piece of cinematic cyanide.

The androids aren’t much better. Say what you will about kids’ cartoons designed to pump out toy lines – their characters at least tend to have some shred of personality, traits which set them apart from the rest of the line. The Transformers cartoon mastered this maxim. Among the ranks featured a methodical tape deck, a quixotic UFO, and dim-witted robot dinosaurs. Michael Bay had an evil cop car, an evil helicopter, a token black guy robot (who of course is the token casualty), and an evil ninjabot whom nobody could apparently see, even in plain view. Whoopee. Starscream, a villain on par with the great Skeletor, is reduced from Machiavellian opportunist to one more of the all-grey legion. If the robot isn’t the heroic Optimus Prime, the evil Megatron, or Shia LeBeouf’s Camaro, it’s disposable, and that goes against the spirit of the entire cartoon. Oh, they crash into things, and the violence is all very impressive, but Transformers it ain’t.

So (once again), fuck Michael Bay and his hip fucking movie.

I present an alternative. Straight from the golden age of toy-marketing cartoons, it’s Transformers: The Movie – the original animated one, where the robots have personalities and the humans know their roles and stay out of the main plot. The original cast is far superior. John Bender from The Breakfast Club teams up with Mr. Unsolved Mysteries to take down Mr. Spock and Citizen Kane? A Citizen Kane who is, in fact, a robot planet which devours other planets for sustenance? Hell yes! The story? Everyone dies! In this rare case, the toy marketing demands of the cartoon offered an opportunity to break from the sitcom formula and leap into a drastically new direction. So Optimus Prime gets blown away, and children weep. Gravitas!

Why thousands of kids in the 80s cried themselves to sleep.

And in the course of determining the new order, this movie lays down some musical gold. “The Touch” is a horribly wonderful “Eye of the Tiger” wannabe that later found its way into Mark Wahlberg’s singing repertoire during Boogie Nights. And Weird Al’s greatest song ever, the Devo-robbing “Dare to be Stupid,” accompanies a robotic breakdance-fest on a junkyard planet. The movie could have ended right here, and it would have been perfect.

So that’s it! The old Transformers movie is better than the new one. Bah-weep-granna-wheep-ni-ni-bong, motherfuckers!

This is how it's fucking done.

September 7, 2010
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Not Derivative At All.

Movie: Remember the Daze (2007)

Director: Jess Manafort

Starring: Amber Heard, Chris Marquette, Lyndsy Fonseca

Written by: Jess Manafort

It appears that the 90s are officially fair game for the nostalgia industry.  Remember the Daze is entirely summed up in its name.  Though I’m willing to blame the film studio for the naming, this is little more than an unofficial sequel to Dazed and Confused, a film which told the story of a town of teenagers (mostly incoming seniors) on the last day of school in 1976.  This retelling does little more than wind the clock forward to the last day of school in 1999 and removes the freshman abuse, sweet hairstyles, and Ben Affleck’s greatest role ever.

Furthermore, Dazed and Confused isn’t the only film absorbed by this upstart.  It’s very appropriate that Remember the Daze was originally titled The Beautiful Ordinary, because this film also seems to aspire to be American Beauty. If there’s a reason why this film isn’t drowning in the throwback tunes that plague such nostalgia flicks (though lameass 90s radio rock does get some face time), it’s because the filmmakers elected to make the score wistful, attempting to drive home the idea that these are the best of times and every moment toward adulthood is a moment lost.  So when the kids aren’t running around getting wasted, they’re softly pondering the future.  All the while, a silent (and obviously blessed) teen photographs the day’s events, capturing this one perfect moment in time.

Most of the kids who populate this film are likeable enough, though only a few really stand out.  On the one hand, the spastic blue-haired punk, the quixotic older drug dealer, and the rap star with a piss-wasted alter ego provide the easy comedy.  Less blatant are the two girls who spend the evening babysitting while on mushrooms, which leads to some amusing quirk.  On the serious side lurks a lesbian couple divided on whether to come out of the closet, which is as close as this movie comes to obtaining gravity.

One strange side effect of this film’s clash of styles is that there are many moments in the film in which it seems as though something disastrous is about to happen.  Yet the film swerves away from calamity every time.  A car accident is averted, domestic abuse is hinted at but never shown, and a possible heart attack is laughed off.  The film plays at darkness, but when asked to choose between goofball antics and melodrama it almost always takes the safe route.

Maybe every decade deserves its own Dazed and Confused, its own captured moment of ended youth and disillusionment.  All the same, Remember the Daze is a lesser adaptation.

August 30, 2010
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: Leave a comment

Drop Dead Fred: Best Hero Ever

Drop Dead Fred (1991)

Directed by: Ate de Jong

Starring: Phoebe Cates, Rik Mayall, Marsha Mason

Written by: Elizabeth Livingston, Carlos Davis, Anthony Fingleton

This is my favorite movie. No question. I’ve loved this movie ever since I was 11, when its joy came primarily from the ridiculous idea of a child robbing her own house, at the prompting of her crazed imaginary friend. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to appreciate the grown-up bits, which show the former child selling out and falling into a miserable life. Elizabeth’s husband is a beautiful dick who screws around, and her mom is a psycho megabeast who storms back into Elizabeth’s life after the husband splits. The grown-up is forcibly returned to the family house, where she discovers an abandoned jack-in-the-box which releases her imaginary friend from his prison. Once freed, Drop Dead Fred, a magnificent creature of wild orange hair and leprechaun green suits, destroys everything in sight. He smears dog poop on chairs, sinks a houseboat while playing pirates, and removes muscular winos from their togas. Drop Dead Fred is one of the greatest comic madmen of all time, and without doubt the king of the imaginary friends.

The film’s narrative shuffles between the child and adult Elizabeth’s dealings with Drop Dead Fred, and to be honest, Fred’s misadventures with young Elizabeth will always be the most fun part of this film. The figment’s effect on the grown-up is purposely awkward, illustrating how much Elizabeth has forgotten since the days when her imagination wreaked havoc. However, the scenes depicting those halcyon times are acts of insane happiness, with the kid giving herself completely to Fredness and dancing in his clouds of Cornflakes Disease. This manic glee, while being delightful to watch, also gives a great sadness to the point in time when Fred gets locked away and Elizabeth slides into the gray world of manners. Consequently, the broken adult to come from this grows more sympathetic as Drop Dead Fred continues to ruin her life and save her soul.

Rik Mayall, who gained fame in English television for his various twit roles – the most notable of these being the Cliff Richard worshipping college anarchist in The Young Ones – is absolutely perfect as a figment of imagination. His Fred prances, and sneers, and smashes, and punches Go to Hell Herman in the face – all with a sarcastic majesty that gives the film an overwhelming, childish joy. From the moment I set eyes on him, Drop Dead Fred became one of my all time heroes, and even though I’ve grown up, I still love him with all my heart.

So much so, that I did this. COBWEBS!

August 13, 2010
Categories: Bizarro Masterpiece Theatre . . Author: Y . Comments: 3 Comments