Drive Angry

Warning: This entry contains much stronger language than is usually found on this blog. It can't be helped, though; the movie is full of it.

Drive Angry is half of the best B-movie in recent years. I sat aghast, unable to believe grindhouse fair like this got a theatrical release without the names Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez attached. And I know who we can thank for that: His Cageness.

Yes, Nicolas Cage, a man who is no stranger to this blog and will no doubt continue to make appearances in the future. Cage, like fellow scenery-chewers Al Pacino and Richard Burton, are capable of strong performances when reined in. But when left to their own devices, they tend to go so far over the top they end up dodging low-flying aircraft. By all accounts, the 2008 financial crisis is the worst fiscal disaster to strike the world since the Great Depression, but it did have one positive outcome, one small flicker of joy in an otherwise catastrophic event: It left Nicolas Cage so broke that he's willing to appear in crap like this.

And since Cage's name retains a vestige of prestige, his involvement meant Drive Angry was given an Empire-wide release. Yes, this played in cinemas. This is a movie in which a man kills a half-dozen assassins who burst into his room, dodging their bullets while returning uncannily accurate fire with his own pistol, all while still penetrating the woman he's having sex with. This is a movie that has a woman catching her fiance in the midst of an act of infidelity, pulling the naked interloper off of her man, pushing the harlot (still naked) out the front door and into the garden, and then beating her into unconsciousness. This is a movie with lines like:

"Oh, baby. Why don't you fuck naked?" "I never disrobe before gunplay."
"But no one reaches the end and says, 'I wish I hadn't fucked so much.'"
"Between now and then, I'm gonna fuck you up."
"If you try and kill me and dump me in the woods, I'm gonna cut your nuts off."

Most of these howlers are spoken by Piper (Amber Heard), a truly revolting piece of southern white trash that is never once believable even in the context of a violent grindhouse flick. She blackmails her loser boyfriend into proposing marriage by refusing to sleep with him, becomes enraged when she catches him getting some on the side (leading to the beating mentioned above), punches loser boyfriend in the face until he finally loses it and clocks her a good one, and then leaves with Cage, never giving so much as a thought to him ever again. That very night she picks up a guy at a club to sleep with. Sure, it could be some kind of twisted revenge sex or an expression of freedom from a man who was, well, a loser, but the way Heard plays the scene (which is presumably how director Patrick Lussier wanted it), it comes across as just another night out for her, something she does all the time.

As for Cage, he stars as John Milton(!), a man who escapes Hell in a 1963 Buick Riviera in the film's opening scene. How does he do this? Apparently by just driving out the front gate. Yes, it seems Hell has a bridge connecting it to the physical world that any old damned soul can drive across if it gets its hands on a sweet American classic muscle car.

Milton is a bad man who has done very bad things--and I don't just mean writing Paradise Lost--but after his damned soul witnessees his daughter's murder and his granddaughter's kidnapping, Milton busts out of Hell and...um, ends up somewhere in the American South, presumably wondering if he wasn't better off in Hell. He's chasing some men in a truck, and when he captures them, he brutally executes all but one, whom he tortures to discover where his granddaughter is. He learns that a cult is taking her to "Stillwater Marsh, Texas" in order to sacrifice her to Satan, but leaves before finding out where in Texas Stillwater Marsh is, or even what it is! Is it a town, a road, an actual marsh, a neighbourhood? (It turns out to be an abandoned prison.) He does this so that he will need to go into Piper's diner to discover this information and decide to commandeer her 1969 Dodge Charger. I was ecstatic at this new development, because it meant I could spend the rest of the film humming "Dixie" and talking in a redneck accent about how them Duke boys done blowed away some cops and ran over a cultist or two. I was considerably less ecstatic when Piper, who you'll recall was whomped a good one by her fiance (a man she blackmailed into proposing to her, yet!), decides to leave with Milton and so will be in almost every scene hereafter.

Loser boyfriend/fiance is thus left to the tender mercies of The Accountant (William Fichtner), a representative from Hell sent to bring Milton back to its fiery pits. The Accountant is our first indication that the makers of this film really, really love The Prophecy, as Fichtner's performance is clearly a riff on Christopher Walken's Gabriel in that film. Now if you're going to rip off a movie, you could do a lot worse than The Prophecy, and normally bad movies are improved when they copy a good film exactly and usually fail spectacularly whenever they stray outside the bounds established by their inspirations. But in this film, it's the opposite problem. If you're going to make a grindhouse version of The Prophecy, which is apparently what they set out to do, then do it. Have a powerful supernatural being come to Earth and be badass. That's all you need, and the first time The Accountant appears, they almost get it right, making the first words out of his mouth a calm and composed, "Hey, fat fuck." He kills anybody who mildly irritates him, in quite gory ways, where Christopher Walken's archangel Gabriel seemed pained whenever he was forced to use violence. But it turns out the filmmakers copy The Prophecy too much, trying to get serious when a movie like this should never been anything but over-the-top.

If only they had stayed grindhouse and hired the actual Christopher Walken. Then this would've been the most awesome movie evar.

The very Jim Jones-esque leader of the cult is Jonah King, played by Billy Burke. Yes, Mustache Dad from Twilight. *sigh* I can't get away from these people. First Harpo in The Last Airbender, then Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman, and now Mustache Dad in this. Now I just need to see Cosmopolis for the Twilight has-beens grand superfecta! Still, Mustache Dad is the only actor, apart from Heard, who truly embraces the movie's nature. He's suitably vile and disgusting while still being at least a little charismatic, reminding us once again of why his is consistently the best performance in all the Twilight films. Heard isn't great, but all she's supposed to do is look hot, freak out whenever Milton is in danger even though she has no reason to give a rat's ass about him, and say the word "fuck" at lot, all of which she handles just fine. Cage is way too laid back, never once letting loose with his patented crazy, which would've been perfect for a film like this.

A film that, for example, has Heard repeatedly taking punches and kicks to the face throughout the movie without so much as smudging her make-up. Whatever, it's a B-movie, I accept that. But the movie tries to have it both ways, and that's why I said Drive Angry is half of a great B-movie. When it has its characters driving fast cars, punching the bejeezus out of each other, and blowing things up, it's B-movie bliss. But then it wants to be serious, as when it has Heard get believably hurt (by movie logic, anyway) when loser boyfriend smacks her in the mouth early on. It tries to get real pathos out of Cage's suffering in Hell. It has a truly pointless interlude with David Morse as an old pal of Cage's. Now I'm always happy to see Morse, but Drive Angry isn't the sort of movie that should have Morse's gentle, sweetheart charisma and quiet human decency. And movies like this aren't about pathos. They're about catharsis, about bad men getting what's coming to them, dealt to them by other men who are almost as bad but have some twisted sense of morality that allows them bring the pain to people that deserve it in a way that we, the Decent People, cannot.

It's true that Cage gets a nice monologue in which he says the worst thing about Hell isn't your own suffering but that you are forced to witness to the suffering of people you care about while being powerless to do anything about it. So when Cage's daughter was murdered, he, in Hell, had to watch it happen. But this moment, while effective on its own, can't make up for the fact that a scene like this shouldn't be in a movie like this.

Once Cage gets shot in the eye (reportedly the scene that made him want to do the movie), it's all downhill from there. The movie becomes more and more a Prophecy wannabe, right down to the forces of Hell helping the hero against the bad guy because Satan doesn't like what the bad guy is up to. That this particular force of Hell is the Accountant, who earlier in the film told two cops to kill Milton on sight, just makes it even stupider. If he was helping him, why does the movie have him act like he's trying to capture/kill him and return him to Hell? The answer, of course, is the filmmakers thought this would be a neat twist. Instead, it lays bare how confused the movie is about what it wants to be. Piper has known Milton for a few hours, yet she is so dedicated to his cause she murders a cop to protect him and becomes hysterical when he is seemingly killed. The Accountant tells the two cops to shoot to kill when they confront Milton, and later The Accountant kills a bunch of cops to help Milton escape. Milton gets involved in a gun battle while never interrupting intercourse in a hilariously cheesy scene that is completely ruined by a later scene showing Milton's paramour as utterly traumatised by the experience as you undoubtedly would be. There's a reason B-movies don't show this sort of realistic fall-out from their outlandish situations.

You know, people make fun of 1980s action films like Commando for being stupid and illogical, and they're right. Commando is stupid, and it is illogical. Yet it's smarter film than Drive Angry and most 21-century action movies even try to be. In Drive Angry, Jonah King, who has known of Piper's existence for at best a few hours, decides that, rather than keeping her alive so he can "break" her, he'll just kill her. He says this as he points a revolver at her, so he puts the gun down and goes after her with his fists. Dude, you just said you're going to kill her. Why do you need to punch her in the face first? What if you, like, lose the fistfight? Boy, will you have egg on your face when she kicks you in the balls, grabs the gun you so graciously left for her, and empties the cylinder into your face!

Now, a similar thing happens in Commando. The chief villain, Bennett, has Arnold Schwarzenegger's Matrix (yes, the hero's name is Matrix) dead to rights, since he has a gun and Matrix doesn't. But Bennett puts down the gun and instead engages Matrix in a knife fight. Same thing, right? Just as dumb?

No. Because throughout the film, Bennett has been boasting that Matrix is such an elite soldier that only Bennett himself can match him. He sarcastically tells his boss that despite the army of soldiers around him, only Bennett can protect him from Matrix. "Matrix and I could kill every one of [your soldiers] in the blink of an eye," he says. Bennett believes only he is Matrix's equal, in fact his superior, and he never tires of reminding everyone around him of that fact. Bennett is also rather crazy, having no compunction about stabbing a young girl to death or betraying and murdering all of his trusted comrades; it's heavily implied he enjoys killing people. So when Matrix says that Bennett doesn't want to just shoot Matrix dead but to defeat him, to prove he's better--and to kill Matrix in a much more up close and personal way, with a knife rather than a gun--the movie has actually bothered to set this up. You can believe Bennett would want to kill Matrix with a knife, that he would want to kill him in a fair fight, just to finally prove that he's better, as he always thought he was.

There, I said it. Commando, the stupidest movie I've ever seen that I still love, is a smarter movie than Drive Angry. If it had stuck to its grindhouse homage roots, Drive Angry could've been the best bad movie I've seen since The Happening. But then it got a case of Something Important to Say, and now all I have are the broken dreams of what could've been.

The Wicker Man

The Wicker Man is misogyny the likes of which even God has never seen.

Now we all know that Kim Ki-duk hates women, and film is his medium to preach his gospel of hatred for vaginated persons. Women in the world of Kim Ki-duk are screeching harpies--conniving, deceitful creatures whose sole purpose is to pervert the purity of Man with their dirty sex and menstruating and having babies and then abandoning their babies. The only proper response is to kill them, and if Kim Ki-duk's hero fails to accomplish this, you can be sure that Nature itself will wreak divine vengeance upon them for their sins.

Now we in the Empire have our own Kim Ki-duk...or maybe Kim Ki-duk Lite. Neil LaBute isn't quite as misogynist as Kim Ki-duk--who possibly could be?--but daggone it, he's trying. He can't bring himself to outright murder the "bitches", but he does have Nicolas Cage kicking them into walls and punching them in the face while wearing a bear suit. Maybe this weakness on LaBute's part is why The Wicker Man remake hasn't been hailed as an art house masterpiece by Eurotrash hipsters wearing berets and quoting lines from Superbad "ironically", like Kim Ki-duk's "work" has. I guess misogyny is only cool when exotic Orientals do it.

The Wicker Man is a disastrous train-wreck of a film, a cinematic nosedive into the mind of a writer/director with serious relationship abandonment issues. Yet it's redeemed by outrageous overacting (especially by Nicolas Cage and his hair) and some tremendously silly sequences. Like the scene that has Cage almost...but not quite open a burlap sack that may or may not have a shark in it. The women carrying the sack then laugh uproariously, because it's apparently hilarious on Summersisle to almost...but not quite open burlap sacks that may or may not have sharks in them.

Summersisle is the name of a feminazi colony that sucks men in and consumes their life essences  New Age commune off the coast of Washington state. California highway patrolman (cue CHiPs theme!) Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) goes to the island to investigate the disappearance of his old flame's daughter despite his having no jurisdiction in Washington. Our man Eddie is a cop on the edge because in the opening sequence he pulls over a mother and daughter in a stationwagon to return to them the little girl's doll, only to have a semi come out of nowhere and smash the stationwagon into splinters. Eddie feels responsible and has flashbacks to the little girl's fiery death throughout the film in a failed attempt to connect his grief to his ex's missing daughter, which only get more hilarious every time you see them. "Whoa, Carl Eusebius!" I hear you saying as you thoughtfully stroke your neckbeard. "Little girls getting run over by semis isn't funny. And also your blog sucks and you're not funny." Well you see, my otaku friend, it is funny in The Wicker Man, because this movie fails just that badly. No matter how hard it tries to scare you, it's so incompetently filmed and acted and so absurdly staged that you can't help but laugh.

If you watch this movie, I guarantee you'll laugh at sixth iteration of a little girl getting run over by a semi, even on a ship in the middle of the ocean. The Wicker Man is that kind of movie, folks.

The girl's mother, with the embarrassing moniker Willow, is played by Australian actress and animated coat rack Kate Beahan. This gal is skinnier and more wooden than a Calista Flockheart voodoo doll. With her enormous eyes and lips and hallow face, she looks like some kind of bizarre human-bush baby hybrid. I blame LaBute for this, because he's the one who filmed her looking like that. Try looking through a few pictures of (alleged) actress Beahan on the IMdb. Flip through a few of them until you get to a still from The Wicker Man. See the difference? When she's at a film premiere, Beahan doesn't look like a drowned corpse with eyes made of glass. This is LaBute's idea of a feminine beauty: giant childlike eyes constantly on the verge of tears or emotional breakdown, lips approaching Angelina Jolie levels of trout pout, and a body so thin Brittany Murphy asked her for dieting tips.

Willow sends a letter to Eddie, asking him to come to Summersisle to find her missing daughter. Why isn't she asking, I don't know, a police officer in Washington to investigate? Because she was engaged to Eddie before she abruptly left without a word to return to Summersisle some years ago. And if that doesn't make sense to you, that's because it's stupid and pointless and is only in the movie so LaBute can film a scene of Eddie demanding to know why she left while she evades the question because women are devious and spiteful and they're only messin' with your head, man.

Eddie has to bribe the pilot of a private plane who makes regular runs to Summersisle to take him along, since, despite Eddie's claim that it's close enough to the mainland he could swim to it, this plane is the only way to get there. Eddie doesn't even check in with the authorities in Washington to let them know he's going off alone to investigate a possible kidnapping in their jurisdiction (no doubt because they'd ship him right back to California after taking his statement and the letter if he did), so that way there's no-one to help him when he finds out the colony of New Age lesbians is evil. (Oops. Sorry to blow that plot twist for you.) And yes, of course his mobile doesn't work way out here in the sticks, because, well, they didn't have mobiles in the original 1973 Wicker Man.

Eddie arrives on the island, has the encounter with the burlap bag mentioned earlier, and essentially goes about town being told by everybody that the little girl, Rowan, doesn't exist. Now, everybody in the original film denied Rowan's existence, too, but in that film, this includes her mother. That's because the original wasn't a piece of bitter chauvenistic tripe, so the letter sent to the cop was anonymous and not from Willow, he and Willow didn't know each other, and Willow was just as adamant about Rowan's non-existence as everyone else. In the remake this denial is just silly, since Eddie has Willow right there. There's some lip service paid to Willow perhaps being delusional and never having a daughter at all, but the women on Summersisle are all so obviously evil--well, apart from their being women; I mean that they're openly hostile and uncooperative with our hero, which is movie-speak for "they're hiding something"--that we never doubt they're lying about the girl's existence.

Eddie eventually figures out that Rowan is to be sacrificed to the pagan Goddess (of course it's a female divinity!) that these tree-hugging hippie chicks worship, and so he takes off the kid gloves and karate kicks Leelee Sobieski into a wall of framed photographs, punches out LaBute's offensive bull dyke caricature, puts on a bear suit, and lays out another woman witch with a Nic Cage haymaker in his attempt to rescue Rowan. I don't want to spoil the M. Night Shyamalan-like twist of the ending, but let's just say it ends with some of that patented Nic Cage crazy, including a scene of him robbing a woman of her 1920s bicycle at gunpoint ("Step away from the bike!") and the immortal line "BITCHES! YOU BITCHES!"

There isn't a moment of tension or horror in this piece of crap. It's so ludicrous you can't do anything but laugh. Now, some people might object that, given the scorn I've heaped on this movie for its misogyny, that it's wrong to enjoy it on a bad movie level. Isn't it so hateful that it ought to be avoided? Should I really be encouraging people to see it?

Yes, I should.* Because you will laugh at its absurdity. And that's what should be done with misogynists. They should mocked, ridiculed, and laughed at for the ridiculous charicatures of humanity they are. If something is made taboo, it's got an edge of cool. What, I'm not allowed to do that? I'm not allowed to say that? I'm not allowed to watch that? Screw that, man! I'm a rebel. I want to know what you're trying to keep from me. It only makes people more curious about it. Read up on the Video Nasties if you're interested in how this works. (Long story short: People in the UK successfully sought out and watched films they'd never heard of and didn't otherwise care about just because they were banned.)

But misogyny isn't something that should be hidden from view, squirreled away and locked up hoping nobody finds it. It should be dragged into the light, tossed into the centre, and held up for ridicule until it's too embarrassed to continue existing.

And that's why I love The Wicker Man. By being so naked, it exposes the absurdity at misogyny's rotten core.

Oh, and it's got this scene. It's worth seeing for that alone!

==========================================================

* Since there's almost as much stammering and unfinished sentences in this movie as in your average Twilight film, for those of you who can't bear to sit through the entire movie, YouTube has a video that compiles five minutes of the movie's best (worst?) scenes, including all the ones I've mentioned here. Warning: Make sure you aren't in a library or otherwise not supposed to make loud noise!

How to Save Hollywood

It's no secret that the Imperial film industry is sinking. Budgets are higher than ever, fewer tickets are being sold, and the money stream of DVD sales and rentals that has sustained Hollywood's current model is drying up. The Olympics and crazy people with guns are getting the blame, but where does the fault truly lie? The system is in danger of collapsing under its own weight, but fear not, my little droogies! Your old buddy Carl Eusebius is here with a plan to save Hollywood. Follow these simple steps, rich studio executives, and you'll continue to produce a steady stream of godawful films for the undiscriminating masses to eat up like the cinematic pigs they are.

1. Free Wesley Snipes
Okay, I know he didn't pay his taxes, and that's all, like, illegal and stuff. And yes, he defended his non-payment by claiming to be a non-resident alien even though he was born in Florida. But he must be released, and that now! Not because he's a celebrity and therefore the law doesn't apply to him. No, because the man could be making awful sequels in the Blade franchise and painful Woody Harrelson collaborations at this very moment. But no, he's locked up in prison, his prime years of crappy action movie-making being squandered away behind bars. Hollywood, just pay off whatever Mitt Romney shell company owns Snipes's prison and Let My Daywalker Go!

2. More Nicolas Cage Insanity
Overacting is a dying art. These days, bad actors are schooled in the cutting-edge technique of "not acting". Your Hayden Christiansens, your Zooey Deschanels, your Channing Tatums--their method of sucking is to impersonate a department-store mannequin whenever the camera is on them. The Al Pacinos, Faye Dunaways, and Ray Liottas of the world will soon be lost to us, and then whom can the next generation look to for training in the hallowed traditions of rampant scenery-chewing? Let us drink in the euphoria of the Madness of Nic before it's too late! I accidentally watched Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and the filmmakers blessed us with but one scene of that patented Nic Cage crazy. And not even one scene of him punching out women while wearing a bear suit. Get this man $10 million and a director with no ability to rein him in! HADDAGEBURN? HADDAGEBURN? HADDEGEBURN, HADDEGEBURN!

3. Ban Peter Jackson
Sure, his movies suck, but not in a fun way. Every film he makes now is seventeen hours long. Who wants to see that? Nobody. The Hobbit has ballooned up to not two but three films. New rule: Peter Jackson is to go back to New Zealand (alternate name: "Australia's Canada") and live off the blood of the young virgins he sacrificed to make people think his Lord of the Rings is any good. All movie cameras everywhere are to be wired with self-destruct devices and proximity fuses to detonate whenever Jackson comes near them. Seriously, even if you like Jackson's Rings--and God help you if you do--please ask yourself if we really need three Hobbit movies.

4. Enough With the Remakes
Wait, I'm not complaining about how Hollywood isn't original anymore. Hollywood was never original. I know better than to ask for an innovative story, a new take on character, or a fresh perspective. All I'm asking, Hollywood, is that when you rip off an old idea, change the name. That's it. How long does it take to put words in a configuration into which no one has put those exact words before? The next time you decide to steal from Philip K. Dick (by which I mean, oh, tomorrow), have the decency to try to hide the lack of creativity behind a slightly different name. Instead of doing a remake of a beloved classic like Fright Night or Conan the Barbarian, just do what you used to do: Steal the story and characters but slap new names on them. No fresh characters, no plot that avoids cliche--just take 5 minutes to change the names. You know, like Avatar. Xerox the exact same movie as Dances with Wolves, but like, the title's different. Creativity! Oh, and don't let Kevin Costner be in it. Because, really, Kevin Costner eats more than Rosie O'Donnell at a Golden Corral.

5. Pander to a Different Demographic
Wait, you thought I was going to say stop pandering to the audience and green-lighting movies based on demographic "research"? Puh-shaw! This list isn't about making movies good. It's about making them entertainingly bad. So instead of pandering to 13-year-old boys and making every movie Transformers, start pandering to 13-year-old girls and make every movie Twilight! Let's have more Blood and Chocolates, more Snow White and the Huntsmans, more Red Riding Hoods. I can't get enough of pale teen-agers staring moon-eyed at each other and occasionally mustering up enough energy to stammer out a half-formed sentence before sinking back into Hot Topic-induced lethargy! Give me half-baked alleged rip-offs of Romeo and Juliet or give me death! But mostly give me the rip-offs.

There you have it, my ideas for how to save Hollywood from a mortal slide into the failure of utter mediocrity. Follow these suggestions and...well, you'll still fail, but your implosion will provide some damn fine entertainment! Forget the whimper and go out with a bang! What do you say?