Terror Train
Special holiday / childhood flashback / inaugural edition!
Yes folks, it's that time of the year for special treats. For having that extra cookie, that one more piece of fudge, the oh-hell-one-for-the-road-can't-hurt martini. In other words, it's time to revel in self-abuse because come January tenth or fifteenth or so, we'll all be back in the gym, eatin' South Beach and basically hewing the line.
One of three slashers JLC was in that year alone.
Basically hewing the line. Yeah, I'll clean up my physical diet, but psychically the poison parade will continue unabated. Remember, I watch bad movies so you don't have to. I take the punishment and pass the savings on to you. In that spirit, I'm announcing the inauguration of my new series: Instantly Regrettable. Wherein I trawl through the bottom of Netflix's Instant-Watch barrel, finding only the choicest muddy bottom-feeders and subjecting my eyeballs to the fail.
Seeing as how this is a serious endeavor, I've decided to ease into it a tad and kick off the series by revisiting an old fave from my childhood: 1980's scream-queen Canuxploitation classic, Terror Train, directed by the hilariously named Roger Spottiswoode. This is the real deal, folks: Jaime Lee Curtis herself is in this, not some second-rate imitator. Ben Johnson (the very definition of 'venerable') and David Copperfield round out the star power.
So much for the film's strengths. The rest of the film is comprehensible only if you understand the period's slasher cinema, which is to say, if you were an adolescent boy in the late 70s-early 80s. Or rather, if you paid any attention to the string of Halloween knock-offs that sought to progressively out-do each other in the wacky-kill department. (A progression whose absurd apogee was predicted and satirized in 1981's Student Bodies). The vaporously thin plot centers around a group of frat boys and their girlfriends celebrating their college graduation with a rail-bound, costumed bacchanalia. Unfortunately for our characters, they all played a part in a frat prank gone wrong three years earlier, in which a timid pledge named Kenny was sexually humiliated with a corpse. Kenny was driven insane by the prank, and now he's back for revenge. There's no doubt whatsoever that Kenny is the killer; the film tries to build tension via the masquerade. Since everyone is masked, Kenny can hide in plain sight, a conceit that the film milks dry.
Curtis stars as Alana, who as a student was suckered into pranking Kenny by her easily duped boyfriend, Mo. Mo is clearly second fiddle to the frat's charismatic natural leader and prank mastermind, Doc (Hart Bochner). ( I'll skip ahead a bit and let you know that one of the film's most entertaining sequences features Doc in a hysterical fit, screeching like a wildcat. A feminine, feminine wildcat). Alana has always (PLOT POINT) been remorseful for mindfucking Kenny, but Doc and Mo are just too gangsta to care.
As her brethren start to croak, Alana, assisted by the train's conductor Carne (Johnson) tries to find out who Kenny is. Their suspicions immediately fall on The Magician, played by David Copperfield's hair—no, I'm mistaken, the man himself is under that fountain of hair. Copperfield was hired specifically for the party (because nothing says frat party like a magic act) along with an overdosed-on-quaaludes funk band whose guitarist totally looks like Janice from the Muppet Show. Copperfield's act provides the film's only true glance at "entertainment", and only partly because Copperfield is a gifted magician. His sleight-of-hand, while impressive, takes a back seat to his act's resemblance to Gob Bluth's. If you're an Arrested Development fan you simply have to watch this movie, for the magic show alone.
While Curtis and Johnson seek to track down the killer, the bodies start to pile up, in more and more absurd ways. Indeed, the kills, while certainly tame by today's standards, really take the cake. They are ludicrously improbable; all the more so when you recall all this is supposed to be happening on a moving train. After about an hour, the tedium sets in, but at just over 90 minutes, it doesn't drag on too long. If you sit this thing out to the end, you'll be treated to several tiny little bizarre pleasures, none of which are substantial in their own right, but which add up to a worthwhile bad movie experience. Watch for the casual drug use (a sure sign it was filmed in '79) like the scene where a student offers a conductor a joint (an offer readily accepted). In fact, a little chronic is advised to help you through this thing.
Bloodrayne
Short review, for the impatient:
Bloody awful. Ha ha! Always wanted to use that one!
Longer review:
First things first. It's an Uwe Boll movie. If you're the blessedly innocent type that has never heard of the man, or, if you're like my wife, who exhibits a preternatural ability to forget about his existence, you won't get the significance of that statement. And that's okay. I'll educate you. Uwe Boll is a film director of such staggering incompetence that he can't do justice to the story lines adapted from video games.
Welcome to boobies. I mean Hell.
Let's think on that one for a minute. Actually, it's not right to say Boll is incompetent. It's more like he just doesn't give a damn. Whether it's the oh-fuck-it-I'm-outta-ideas way he cut clips of the actual video game into his adaption of The House of the Dead or how he tried to pawn off Tara Reid as a brilliant academic in Alone in the Dark, Boll's video-game films, aside from being thoroughly awful, all have a special something, an aspect of visceral contempt for the audience, that puts them into a class by themselves. Bloodrayne has several such aspects. I'll get to those in a minute. By way of illustrating my point of current concern I'll say this: Boll has created a movie so bad that Meat Loaf can be rightly accused of 'slumming' by appearing in it.
Yes folks, you heard right. Meat Loaf Aday (editors note: easy joke about how he looks like he eats a meat loaf a day removed) has a fabulous three-snaps-up cameo in which he portrays an effeminate and super-stupid vampire. How stupid? Well, our heroes are able to escape his nefarious grasp by busting open the windows to let sunlight in. The windows of his own castle. I mean, really: what kind of vampire even has windows? The super-stupid kind, of course. I bring this up here and now because the scene with Mr. Loaf is, actually, the highlight of the film. Yup. It's all downhill from here.
And that's really saying something. Because if Meat Loaf is slumming, what is one to make of what Michelle Rodriquez and Udo Kier are doing in this? Not weird enough for you yet? How about Michael Madsen phoning in his lines in the most uninspired, jeezus-let's-just-get-through-this manner since John Malkovitch in the wretched Man In the Iron Mask, rendering lines like “We will never stop fighting” with all the gravity one usually reserves for “I'll take a whopper with cheese”? No? Still not weird enough for you? Okay. In a bizarro turn that Christopher Walken and Tim Burton working together couldn't conceive of, Ben Kingsley—yeah, the Ben Kingsley, the guy who played Gandhi, the Sexy Beast himself—shows up as the mother-rapin', father-stabbin' vampire baddie. For real. One begins to wonder when Cuba Gooding, Jr. will show up.
But back to the question: what are A-list (okay, B-list) celebs doing in this piece of shit? For the most part, just stoically and grimly reciting their lines, staggering from scene to scene, getting blood and gore and shit sprayed all over them, and, in Madsen's case, wearing really funny-looking wigs. In all cases they're hopping from an improbable scenario to a cinematic non-sequiter and back again, punctuated by dialog insipid by comic-book standards.
Enough generalities. Enjoy some specifics. The film opens with Madsen, some other guy who looks like Sean William Scott (but not as smirky), and Rodriquez riding horses around a renfair, ordering drinks, spouting little snatches of cryptic dialog, and killing idiotic vampires with no provocation in crowded saloons. Because, #1, it's the olden days, and #2, that's what happened in the olden days to vampires who waltzed up to bars and sat down right in front of mirrors where they cast no reflection and ordered a shot of absinthe.
Eventually we cut to some nearby carnival where our soon-to-be heroine Rayne is an abused freakshow attraction. Rayne is a 'dhampir'—half-vampire, half human who... wait. Let's stop for a minute. Let's think about what that means. Aren't vampires just basically humans? Like, humans-plus? Humans plus the ability to turn into bats and shit? Anyway... Rayne, (T3's Kristanna Lokken) despite being a scorching-hot half-vampire with self-healing capabilities that match Wolverine's, is a virtual slave to a nasty carnival operator and the motliest crew of halfwits since, well, Mőtley Crϋe. You'd think there'd be better opportunities for a girl like Rayne, or at least opportunities for escape. But no. Oh, there is a member of the carnival who is nice to Rayne, in that sappy she's-gonna-die-soon way, but, as she dies soon, there's not much to that story. Instead we get a nice scene featuring the sadistic ringmaster physically damaging Rayne, then getting her to drink blood, which heals her up real nice. The crowd goes wild.
Here's another of those huh? moments. One of the tortures inflicted on Rayne is burning her with water. Yep, her skin sizzles, pops, and cracks when exposed to water. Kinda makes you wonder how she keeps clean, huh? How does she wash her (obviously clean) hair? Why does she not stink to high hell?
Never mind. Later that night, as told in a confusing flash-back sequence, some chumpy carny comes to molest her and instead winds up as Rayne-chow. She finally grows a spine, escapes, disembowels her captors, and runs off into the wild. Exactly why she suddenly became a badass is never explained. Later she seduces and kills another brain-dead vampire right in the middle of a crowded street. A fortune teller, Madame Expository or something, witnesses this, invites her upstairs, fills in some backstory and tells Rayne she has to kill her vampire father. Or something. It's actually hard to concentrate at this point.
Rayne eventually falls in with Madsen and his crew, who are also out to kill Rayne's father, the evil Kagan (Kingsley). At this point it's just blood, guts, and tedium. There's lots of stabbing and shooting of arrows and damn near everyone dies, but that's not at all interesting. What is interesting is how poorly all this is executed. Boll obviously blew his wad on Kingsley's salary, and what little was left went into juvenile, and conspicuous, “special” effects shots of various and sundry combatants being torn to pieces. It's not enough that someone gets a sword rammed into his mouth; no, the actor has to turn just so into the camera to showcase the blade protruding out the back of his head. It's like a thirteen year old did the art direction—an attention-starved thirteen year old with a penchant for mindless, inchoate mayhem. “Look at what I can do!” the film seems to be saying. “Ewwwww! Are you shocked yet?”
And if that's not enough, the film's denouement is simply (if confusingly) a five-minute recap of the film's grisliest kills. Yeah, that's how it ends. A slow-mo montage of eviscerated monks, brutalized women, and exploding vampires. The end. To which I can only add: good riddance.
The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Take today's installment, The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior. One glance at the cover art tells you that something is wrong:
ALL-NEW, I TELLS YA
Yeah, it's an "ALL-NEW MOVIE". You can tell, because that's what it says in all caps on the poster. I don't know about you, but I find this disturbing. I mean, why did they find it necessary to add that? "NOT JUST A BUNCH OF OUT-TAKES AND B-UNIT FOOTAGE FROM THE FIRST MOVIE" didn't have enough zing? That's the best they could come up with? Not "ACTION-PACKED" or "A REAL THRILL RIDE" or any of the other standard canards liberally tossed onto movie posters these days? It's such an obvious, and obviously unnecessary, thing to say that it's practically an admission on behalf of the filmmakers that the movie is just not up to par. It's like getting a hamburger with the phrase "THIS IS FOOD" written on the wrapper. It's an odd—but as it turns out, oddly accurate—harbinger of what the film contains.
Because yes, technically, it's a "new" movie, but there's nothing about it that's original. And before we go any further, let me remind you I watch bad movies for fun. I'm not the most discriminating audience, that is, so I'm hardly a stickler for originality. In fact, I understand perfectly well that throughout human history we've been telling ourselves the same twenty or so stories over and over, and that's totally okay. All that aside though, there is a difference between retelling a classic tale and simply aping the superficial forms of other, recent films. Thus, the paradox of today's subject. This movie is so unrelentingly derivative, so remorselessly me-too, that it actually breaks new ground. It has elevated the art of the knockoff into brave new territory.
Everything about this movie emanates "knockoff". While it's easy to call professional MMA-fighter Randy Couture a knockoff of The Rock, it's also true. But while The Rock (amazingly) actually has a knack for comic timing and the ability to deliver a line in a mailbag, Mr. Couture does not. That's not to say he's a bad actor, it's to say he's no actor at all. He could do very well in a film, really, provided he were playing a cop or a drill sergeant. No, for real. Every word, every syllable he utters has that clipped, martial 'huah' to it. As a villain/sorcerer... eh...
Michael Copon, as the hero, just looks like a young Lou Diamond Phillips so much that I couldn't stop thinking about the resemblance. It's just there, in your face the whole time and it never lets up. Not that it matters much, for his character is so one-dimensional that he might as well be reading from the phone book the whole time. Come to that, it might have been better if he had, for that would have spared us the awful dialogue he's given here with requisite hot chick Karen Shenaz David. Their scenes are littered with cutsie-poo eye-rolling and cringe-inducing anachronisms ("not my cup of tea", "you just go on ahead acting like a big jerk") engineered to endear the characters to 21st-century illiterates. (I think it was also supposed to create sexual tension, but since none resulted, I'm not 100% on that.) As it is, though, David's heroine is the overwhelming anachronism here, with a huge "I'm as good as any man" chip on her shoulder and enough sass-and-baditude to embarrass a sitcom writer. She's just totally out of place, and it's painful to watch.
Then there's the character Aristophanes ("call me Ari"), and he's a gem. He's a mash-up of sidekick tropes—a full serving of tweedy, arrogant academic, a dash of mincing faggot, a spoonful or two of comic buffoon—stewed together and topped with an incongruous British accent. He's all over the place, and he's the narrator too. Oh, right, the movie has a narrator. Forgot to mention that earlier.
There's also "Fong", a goofy, gibbering Asian who (spoiler alert!) turns out to be a martial-arts badass and a troupe of mercenaries so expendable they might as well be wearing red Star Trek jerseys (one of whom looks like a poor man's Gary Oldman). Actually, these guys are even more expendable than that: at some point several of them just disappear, with no explanation whatsoever. It is possible that their exits are in some deleted scene somewhere, but that presupposes that the director deleted scenes, and I consider that highly unlikely.
This film runs roughly 1:45, but it feels so, so much longer. Shit happens that nobody seems to care about, and then it happens some more, and so on. But even when you've accepted that you're in for a tedious slog, the hero's party finds their way to "The Underworld" and the film, inconceivably, grinds to a halt. Long, talky "confrontations" betwixt hero and some evil goddess ensue, and again, nobody gives a shit. David's sassmouth gets her into a chickfight with the evil goddess, while Copon stands around looking smug, and Fong and Ari perform some hijinks. Wash, rinse, repeat for a while, then it's back to the goddamned talking. I swear, this goes on forever.
Ah, but all that's a breeze compared to Copon's showdown with Couture. I was thinking, as Couture in real life is a very frightening man with a very real ability to fight, that we'd at least be treated to some decent cinematic fisticuffs for a showdown. But no. It starts off talky and stays that way for a surprisingly long time. An all-too-brief punchy period follows, but then, it gets plain silly. After badmouthing our hero and besmirching his manhood, Couture suddenly has to play the heh-heh-now-let's-all-calm-down-didn't-mean-it card when Copon has him at magic swordpoint. Well, at least until Couture can recite some spell (sounding like a cop reading a statement in court) and turn into a very poorly animated giant scorpion. Then follows at least six hours of Copon hiding behind pillars while the scorpion batters the room, very much like the cave troll going after Frodo, only it sucks. And it keeps going.
This is interspersed with Fong and the hot chick desperately trying to foil some ludicrously complicated scheme to set an entire amphitheater on fire. I'd describe it, but it's really lame, so fuck it. Long (and I do mean long) story short, the people are saved, Couture gets his, and the rightful king is restored to the throne.
Oh yeah, the rightful king. No one had mentioned the guy at all through the whole film, but at the end, there he is, smiling and waving and giving a suspiciously Barack Obama-esque speech about how it's all going to be about the people from now on etc. etc. In like 2500 B.C. or whatever. 'Cos, ya know, fuck it.