Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is the worst movie made since Resident Evil.

Director’s Wife Kate Beckinsale is back as Selene, a spindly white woman who wears black leather and kicks a bunch of people. She’s a vampire, which is why she’s only ever seen at night shooting people with machineguns as vampires are wont to do. The Fanged Ones have a blood feud (ha) with the lycans aka werewolves, which is why Kate kills them with perfectly normal non-silver bullets and knives. In the first movie Kate killed one of the three vampire elders or gods or whatever, so now, she tells us, the vampires will come after her, too. They never do, though. It’s that kind of movie.

Kate is joined by living wax dummy Trunk Slamchest, a vampire-werewolf hybrid who was the Macguffin of the previous film. Yes, he’s a vampire-werewolf hybrid. A vamwolf, if you will. Kate exposits that Lump Beefbroth is unique, that there has never been a hybrid before, and that his power might be unlimited. (Doesn’t the first bit imply the second bit?) Because he was vamped in the last movie, Gristle McThornbody has to drink blood to survive. He’s not down with the whole blood-drinking thing, but Kate insists, “Normal food might kill you.” She leaves to do some vampire stuff and Slab Awesomefist immediately goes to a pub and orders a plate of potatoes that he barfs up after maybe 2 bites. Not the brightest bulb in the pack, our Big McLargeHuge, but I for one applaud the actor for his convincing performance as a vamwolf that eats potatoes and pukes.

Meanwhile, the bad guy from the last film brings a few goons to murder Marcus, the First and therefore Most Powerful vampire of them all. No, they don’t bring stakes or knives but instead the traditional vampire hunters’ weapon of choice: machineguns. Haven’t you read Dracula? The Count went down under a hail of automatic weapons fire. I’m sure I’m remembering that right.

“Ah ha!” I hear you shout at your phone as you prepare to smugly correct the smartass author of a blog no one reads, “the first movie had UV bullets, so they can machinegun vampires to death!” Yeah but these guys forgot to bring those, I guess, since they shoot Marcus over and over and he just kills them all. Yep, the villain of the last movie, who somehow made it to this one, is unceremoniously dispatched 15 minutes in. I haven’t seen an anticlimax like that since the last guy who went to bed with Tomi Lahren. Marcus has the ability to see clips from the previous movie people’s memories by drinking their blood, because as we all learned in Science! class, that’s where memories are stored. And no, obviously Marcus doesn’t see those events from the victim’s perspective, that would require shooting new scenes and do you know how much work it is to shoot a scene? You have to like point the camera at actors and shit, it’s hard. Marcus decides he’s going to free his brother William, the First and therefore Most Powerful of the werewolves, imprisoned lo these 800 years because Billy couldn’t control his savagery and was just eating everybody. Why does Marcus want to do this? So he and Bill can be godbros and Take Over The World. Why didn’t Marcus do this oh, say, about 8 centuries ago? Because the movie’s happening now, why did you even ask.

Marcus somehow knows Bulk Vanderhuge is at the pub, so he goes there to obtain the key to Billy’s prison. Kate somehow knows both that this is happening and where, even though she left before Rip Stigface decided to go to the pub. People just kind of know things when the movie needs them to. All three characters end up getting shot, but since they’re all vampires or hybrids or some damn thing they just shrug it off. Kate helps Smoke Manmuscle hulk up by letting him drink some of her blood (that’s…not how vampirism works), and he uses his awesome power to shoot Marcus with his machine pistol, disabling him while he and Kate flee in a truck. Guns just sort of work on vampires and werewolves, or don’t, as the movie needs them to. And man, that unlimited power sure is making itself known, eh, what with how he shot Marcus with a gun he had. No mere mortal could shoot a guy. But alas! Marcus has a winged demon form, and he flies onto the truck and there’s more fighting and more injuries that don’t actually cause any harm. “Dead or alive, you will tell me what I want to know!” Marcus screams at Kate. Genius, it might help if you told her what it is that you want to know.

Finally Marcus gets to the point in the script where it says the heroes get away, so he stops chasing them. Slate Slabrock asks Kate if Marcus is a hybrid, and she replies yes. Okay so earlier Slate was unique and there had never been a hybrid before, but now the First Vampire is a hybrid(?). Right so there was never a hybrid vampire before Slate, and the first ever vampire to exist…was a hybrid. Makes sense if you don’t think about it. Kate is slightly burned on the hand and face by sunlight, so they park inside an abandoned building and Brick Hardmeat light-proofs it for her (including one shot where you can clearly see the sunlight shining on her head and shoulder). He runs to get some first aid to treat Kate’s wounds. Treat. Kate’s. Wounds. With a first aid kit. She’s a vampire, you colossal dope! She will heal any wound. You spent the entire last movie learning this shit. Oh and you are also a vampire and at this very moment you have no injuries even though you just got shot in the chest a dozen times and run over by a truck. Christ.

Then they have PG-13 sex because even though the movie’s rated R, Kate’s not exposing her goods for this crap no matter what her hubby says. Now this is absolutely moronic for a number of reasons. First, we all know that thematically vampirism stands in for repression of sexual desire, which totally goes out the window when you have vampires having actual se—I kid, this is a Len Wiseman movie, subtlety and metaphor are right out. Okay then, second, vampires are dead and have no heartbeat or blood flow, so Crud Bonemeal won’t be performing, if you know what I mean and I think you do. And even if you posit that he’s a vamwolf so he can still rock the red rocket, Kate’s a regular vampire so she won’t have the necessary blood flow to even have sexual desire. Unless she does have a beating heart. And blood carrying hormones to her living brain. Which is affected by those hormones just as a normal human brain would be. In which case she wouldn’t be a vampire at all but just a super-powered person…hey!

Kate decides to visit vampire lore expert Tanis Half-Elven to figure out why Marcus has gone all killy on his own vampire clan. Tanis was exiled 300 years ago, and no one has seen him or heard from him since. Buck Plankchest asks how they’re going to find him given all that, and Kate replies, “I’m the one who exiled him.” Okay…and? How is that an answer to his question? Does the screenwriter—yes, this movie was actually written, by an actual human being—know what exile is? Just because you sent him away, even to a specific place, doesn’t mean he’s still there 300 years later. So they go to his house, and yep he’s still there having had contact with no one. Is it me or is this less exile and more imprisonment? The house is guarded by lycans, two of whom Kate easily dispatches with ordinary knives. Werewolves are immune to non-silver metals, or aren’t, as the movie needs them to. Then she sees two scantily clad women in a hallway and immediately murders them. Yes, they were vampires and were approaching her with the intention of defending Tanis, but how did Kate know that? She attacks them before they do anything but walk slowly toward her! It turns out Tanis Half-Elven is the one who came up with the UV bullets that helped the lycans finally start doing real damage in the vampire/lycan war. Boy, vampire-killing bullets sure will come in handy against Marcus.

(They don’t take any of the UV bullets.)

(Nor is Tanis armed with them when Marcus shows up in the very next scene and kills him.)

(Stupid movie.)

Tanis says there’s a second key and that Kate is the only one still alive who knows where Bill’s prison is, so she and Splint Chesthair absolutely must escape Marcus because he’s stronger than them and can get the first key from Punch Sideiron and the prison’s location from Kate. Tanis points them to Dad Immortal, the father of Marcus and Billy who is neither a werewolf nor a vampire but is immortal because he just is okay and don’t ask why. That's right, Dad sired both the world's first vampire and the world's first werewolf. I guess they had different mothers. Dad has watched the entire centuries-long war between the vampires and lycans and the 800-year imprisonment of Bill and has done fuck-all about it because he loves his sons and doesn’t want to kill them. Well Daddy-O, you’re clearly okay with the eternal imprisonment of one son (which seems a lot more cruel than death, frankly), so why didn’t you just lock up Marcus, too? Then stopping the war wouldn't mean killing either son. Stupid movie. It turns out Dad has the second key. Pretty convenient for Marcus that the 3 people who have the 3 things he needs to carry out his evil plan have all gathered in one place. Marc shows up, kills Dirk Hardpec, and takes his key, and instead of running away Kate attacks him and gets beat down like the 2008 Lions, allowing him to learn Bill’s location from her blood. So well done Kate, way to keep your eye on the prize. Marcus then mortally wounds Dad, takes the second key, and demon-flies off to free his wolf-bro. Dad tells Kate to drink his blood and gain his power.

What power? The power…to be killed by Marcus? Dad never displayed any power apart from not dying of old age, yet somehow Kate taking his power will make her able to beat Marcus, confirming that Dad could’ve killed Marcus but just didn’t want to. He’s okay with giving Kate the power to do it, though. I guess giving someone else the ability kill his son is different from killing him directly, but yeesh, the old geezer could’ve prevented a lot of suffering and death over the last 8 centuries if he’d had the huevos to just whack his monster-kids.

Marcus goes to the prison and frees Bill, who attacks him until Marcus says, “It’s me, Marcus!” so he stops. It turns out Bill can’t control his savagery except when he can. Kate arrives in a helicopter with Blast Thickneck’s corpse (gee, I can’t possibly see where this is going) and some Expendable Meat soldiers who worked for Dad and now apparently work for Kate because she’s their boss now she decided. One of these guys is played by Spirit of the West, the CAG in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica miniseries. That this random Canadian folk singer playing a thankless “sir-yes-sir” role turns in by far the film’s best performance physically pains me. Not because the guy’s not a decent actor (he is), but because Bill fucking Nighy is in this movie. I know Nighy is slumming it in this trash, but good god his performance is abominable. Nicolas Cage would tell Nighy that he’s a bit over the top. So thank you Spirit of the West for lending a little class and dignity to a movie that doesn’t deserve it. You left us too soon.

Let’s wrap this up. Wolfman Jack kills all the soldiers, Marcus crashes the helicopter into the prison complex (yet its rotor continues to turn as if it’s still running, stupid movie), and it looks like Kate, despite her Dad-blood upgrade, faces certain defeat, in part because the script says her non-silver bullets don’t hurt the Big Bad Wolf. Suddenly, just when we most expect it, Blast Hardcheese springs back to life and kills Werewolf of London in about 8 seconds flat. Some wolf god he turned out to be. I can see why the whole movie was about how Marcus couldn’t be allowed to let him out. I mean, he was a threat to like half a dozen people for upwards of a few minutes. The movie even gives us a replay of Kate saying Smash Lampjaw is unique and there’s never been a hybrid before. Except of course for Marcus who is currently in the same room, but who’s counting? Marcy-Marc impales Kate through the heart with blade tentacles that spring from his back, but even though he killed Dad this exact same way earlier, Kate doesn’t die and shoves Marcus into the rotors that are inexplicably still spinning. So Dad-blood gave Kate the power to survive a wound that Dad himself couldn’t survive? Whatever, Kate gets some voiceover about hope for the future and we’re out.

Lots of IMdb reviews for Resident Evil: Apocalypse say that if you enjoyed the first movie, you’ll enjoy this sequel. And man, I can’t think of a more damning statement than that.

Red Sky

I hope you enjoyed the spittle-flecked ranting about movies fucking up the military in my last review, because you'll be getting it cranked up to 11 here. Yep, I'm reviewing the finest US-Russian co-produced low-budget airplane porn that sports both godawful CGI and President Lone Starr ever made.

Red Sky is a shitty mash-up of Top Gun (sure) and Iron Eagle II (Jesus, why?) starring New Jack City, Twilight Douchebag, and Jaesa Willsaam. Sadly it's Light Side Jaesa, so those of us (and we know who we are) hoping to see her forget exactly whether she slept with, murdered, or slept with and then murdered a guy she picked up in a bar will have to look elsewhere.

Ditto those of us hoping to see a good movie.

I'm not sure why the filmmakers bothered to hire actual actors who probably ate up budget dollars that should've gone toward making the terrible CGI airplanes slightly less terrible. Okay, New Jack City directed the thing (and so had the clout to give himself the best role), but why hire Jaesa? Why get somebody who can act and then give her an entirely superfluous role where the only time she seems to understand her function in the scene is when she's fawning over the lead actor or having sex with him--wait, objection withdrawn. Fortunately for fans of terrible acting we've got Twilight Douchebag to perform a fucking master class in it, demonstrating every possible way not to give a performance. He overacts, he's wooden, he appears confused and without direction, he portrays the wrong emotion, he portrays no emotion, he projects zero charisma or screen presence--whatever the scene doesn't call for, he provides in spades. Lone Starr looks like he'd rather be anywhere else, and by God I wanted to send him there. The rest of the cast merely exist, playing their one-dimensional roles with all the passion and skill they honed in community theater.

We open on scary, suspenseful music as a group of musclebound knuckleheads move through the darkness and then draw a cat nose and whiskers on a sleeping guy. The k-heads are constantly yammering and shining their flashlights in Guy's face, so he must be passed out drunk not to wake up immediately. Then I cringe as the camera reveals Guy is wearing a flight suit. These guys are the movie's ace pilots? Somebody get Cthulhu on the line so It can go ahead and devour humanity now. Cthulhu fhtagn. And looks like I was right about Guy being passed out drunk. I mean, why else would he be sleeping in bed with his flight suit on? None of the other k-heads is wearing one, so it ain't like they're on alert or anything. Guy suddenly wakes up and yells terrible dialogue at his "friends", but it's okay, they finished drawing the whiskers already. Whew! That was...too close.

Cut to a briefing the next morning, with all the k-heads in attendance, including Guy...with the cat whiskers still on his face! Oh boy, here we go with the ranting. So if you didn't know, guys in the military shave. Every day. At least, every day they have to show up for work. It's the law. Seriously, it's military law that you have to shave. So there's no way Guy wouldn't see the shit on his face. Even if he didn't think he needed to shave that day, he'd check. He'd check his uniform in the mirror to make sure all the doodads were on right and it wasn't wrinkled or stained, especially since officers (which pilots are) are extra scrupulous about their appearance. But I don't know why I'm harping on this so much, since everybody in the briefing room--including the guy in charge, a major(!)--has hair so far out of regs Mr. Strickland would give them all detention. If your budget doesn't extend to getting the actors haircuts, you should probably reconsider making your film.

We're next introduced to all of our characters through the tried-and-true bad movie technique of putting their names up on the screen. Yeah, fuck introducing characters through dialogue. Just digitally flash their names in front of us while they're wearing helmets and strapping oxygen masks over the lower half of their faces, and we'll know them all like our own fathers. Hilariously, the two pilots played by "name" actors (Twilight Douchebag and somebody called "Shane West") get full names; the community theater troupe members only get last names. Wow, way to connect me to these people, movie. (Future Carl: Everybody's full name is listed in the end credits. So they bothered to come up with first names for the other characters but never told the audience? What gives?)

The movie betrays its love for Iron Eagle by calling its lead character Butch "Cobra" Masters(!!). Really? Iron Eagle? A film series even recovering airplane porn addict Carl Eusebius recognizes as a steaming pile of ass? "Cobra" is a lame call sign that's still too dignified for Twilight Douchebag. I hereby dub him "D-Bag".

D-Bag and Shane West (call sign: "Rodeo"), along with their WSOs, get into their really fucking obviously phony cockpits while stock footage of an aircraft carrier shows us actual F/A-18 Hornets preparing for launch. Then really bad CGI Hornets take off, ripping off the iconic "aileron roll with the carrier in the background" shot from Top Gun, if that shot were hilariously cheap CGI instead of a real aircraft taking off from a real carrier.

And then...oh, the stupid. The stupid, it hurts. The boys get a call from New Jack City on the ground, identifying himself as "Warlord 2". NJC orders them to destroy a building...somewhere. They demand the authorization code (the what now?), which they receive. D-Bag protests that the mission was simply to patrol. Rodeo counters that the code is good, so he tries to shoot the building. His missiles don't work(?), so D-Bag has to do it. He does. It turns out it's an American building, or Americans are there, or something, and a single "soldier" (remember that) is killed. The superweapon (come on, you knew there had to be a superweapon) is gone. Or destroyed? Or maybe it was never there? Who knows? (Well, the audience knows, since we see NJC order his people to go to the ruins and steal it.)

This authorization code business is some shit the writers made up to hide that fact that in the real world their stupid plot would never work. Unless you're under immediate attack, you don't just run over to a fighter plane and take it up in the air. You meet with your superiors, in which they carefully and in excruciating detail explain everything anyone could possibly need to know about the mission, and more besides. This is done in something called a "briefing". You know, that thing we just saw in the previous scene? In which the pilots were presumably told that their mission was to patrol? So there's no way in hell they'd then be told, in the air, in the middle of their mission, to go perform a totally different mission. I mean, they probably wouldn't even have the appropriate weapons to carry it out. Then there's fuel considerations....Look, the target isn't another jet, or a missile, or even a fucking truck, you know, something that moves. It's a building. Last time I checked, buildings don't drive away while you prep and launch a strike using pilots who have been told what the fuck they're supposed to do before they take a pair of $30 million planes in the air.

And remember my chain of command rant? I mean, come on. Fucking nobody, and certainly not elite Navy pilots flying planes carrying actual live weapons, takes orders from some asshole they've never heard of. Orders that contradict the instructions they were given by, you know, their actual commanders. Orders that require them to use their weapons. Against a target, they don't even know what it is. From a guy, they don't even know who he is. No way. Pilots, like everybody else in the military, take orders from their commanders. The ones on, you know, their carrier. The carrier they're in constant radio contact with (if not directly, then through an electronic warfare aircraft that would be coordinating this stuff). Which would allow them to perhaps question these strange orders, by saying something like "Who the fuck is Warlord 2, and where he'd get the cajones to radio me up and change my mission?"

But Tweedledum and Tweedledumber don't think of any of that, and they're all "Sure New Jack City, we'll go blow it up real gud for ya there, eh?" They're court-martialed. And let me make this very clear: They absolutely should be. And they should be found guilty. The movie acts like there being a real Warlord 2 exonerates them, but it doesn't. At all. Whoever Warlord 2 was, he wasn't in their chain of command. So any order from him carries no weight. That means they did violate their orders, they did fire their weapons without authorization, and these actions did result in a friendly fire incident.

In another hilarious bit, the knuckleheads' lawyer objects to a question asked to Rodeo, only for Rodeo to tell the judge that he will answer it(!), which he then proceeds to do(!!). Goddamn it, movie, there's an objection on the floor. The judge has to rule on it before anything else can happen. The witness can't just decide to answer a question that's been objected to. Good grief, forget Law & Order, you could watch an episode of fucking Matlock and know that! And not that it matters--since the knuckleheads are absolutely guilty of the crime they've been accused of--but Lawyer never once raises the question of motive. Why, exactly, would 'Dum and 'Dumber want to blow up an American installation, and why would they come up with such a ridiculous cover story? I know they have the IQ of a brick between the two of them, else they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place, but at least ask why they didn't come up with something more reasonable than "a guy we didn't know told us to".

It doesn't matter though, because it turns out the prosecutor (Lone Starr) doesn't have the "HUD tapes" that contain all the information from their instruments, including radio communications of Warlord 2 giving them the order. Lone Starr remarks that this is convenient for 'Dum and 'Dumber. Err...it is? Isn't it equally convenient for the plot Warlord 2? No one knows what's on the tapes, so how does Lone Starr know they won't corroborate what the knuckleheads said? Anyway, the judge--the worst actor in the movie, which is saying something--says that without the tapes there's no case, and so 'Dum and 'Dumber, and their WSOs, should resign, and if Lone Starr is feeling nice, they'll get general discharges.


....the hell?!

You just said you don't have the evidence to convict them, you asshat! So why would they get general discharges? They can only get those if they did something wrong, and you've just admitted you have no case. You didn't say, "We've got good evidence, just not enough to convict you in a court-martial." You said no case. And what's Lone Starr got to do with it? He's just a lawyer. He doesn't have any say in how their discharge from the Navy would be characterized. Even the judge doesn't have that authority. Only the knuckleheads' commander does. Plus, what's with resigning? The point of resigning is to get somebody out without having to throw her out. But a general discharge is how you throw someone out. You don't need them to resign to do that. So why wouldn't they fight rather than resign, when the result of fighting couldn't be worse? And really, I can't see how they wouldn't win that fight, since it would look like exactly what it is: their commander punishing them even though the court-martial failed to convict.

But the Plot-o-Matic will not be denied, so the knuckleheads all resign and get general discharges. Rodeo acts like a total ass to everybody and breaks off his engagement with Jaesa because she's too close to D-Bag (though West's and Douchebag's acting gives the distinct impression that Rodeo's jealous of her, if you know what I mean). Then we see a TV news report of the American 'Dum and 'Dumber killed, and he's clearly wearing a Marine uniform and so was not a soldier goddamn it you could read the Wikipedia article on the Marine Corps and know that. Now, journalists may not care much about the difference between a soldier and a Marine, but earlier it was Lone Starr who called the dead guy a soldier, and the military does care about that shit. So Lone Starr would definitely know Dead Guy should not be referred to as a "soldier", since Lone Starr is a pretty high-ranking officer and a lawyer and oh yeah he's in the fucking Navy which the Marines are sorta part of. (They're also sorta independent. It's weird.)

Anyway, flash forward seven years, and the knuckleheads now work together in the private sector, except D-Bag, who lives in a broken-down old plane that's decorated entirely in pictures and drawings and models of planes. Do you get that D-Bag likes airplanes? Because it's really important to the filmmakers that you do. In case the movie is too subtle for you in how it limns this rich characterization, D-Bag likes flying planes and he's sad now that he doesn't fly planes. I really hope that message is coming through. Rodeo disappears suddenly, and D-Bag refuses to help his friends look for him. Then he goes to Russia since a Russian company helped finance this turkey, and he just happens in that tiny city known as Moscow to randomly bump into Jaesa, who sadly doesn't run him through with a double-bladed lightsaber. (Now I'm really missing Dark Side Jaesa.) And yes, despite being young, smart, professionally successful, and adept in the Force, Jaesa even after seven years still carries a torch for D-Bag and isn't married or even involved with anyone. Sure. Forget the airplane stuff, this is the least believable thing in the movie. Then D-Bag goes back to his plane-house, and Lone Starr re-enters the movie to get the plot going. He wants D-Bag to lead the other two knuckleheads, plus some, uh, other guys, to blow up the superweapon in a black ops "we disavow any knowledge of this mission" mission. Their reward? Honorable discharges. No, not money or reinstatement into the Navy or retirement benefits. Just a "you done gud kid" from the Navy. Pretty weak tea to risk your life for, but if D-Bag says no there's no movie, so he agrees. Jaesa does some digging to find out just how super the superweapon is so that she can magically appear in Syria to tell the k-heads how totally dangerous and super it is when it's time to ramp up the tension before the climactic dogfight.

Lone Starr's plan gets cocked up immediately because it turns out NJC is a CIA agent and even after seven years nobody's figured out he works for the bad guys. (I wish I could call bullshit on that, but considering the CIA's track record of discovering double agents.....) Of course in the end it all comes down to a dogfight between the k-heads and their bro Rodeo, who's also been working for the bad guys the whole time. Rodeo is apparently better than anybody else at the whole fighter pilot thing, since not only can he consistently hit with his plane's cannon, he always manages to shoot holes in the other plane's canopy without killing the guys in the cockpit. Yes, on purpose. That's some fucking accurate gunfire right there. But then D-Bag reveals that the superweapon will kill lotsa people, and Rodeo immediately does a face-turn and reveals the location of the superweapon before crashing his own plane to stop the terrorist guy in his back seat from launching it, I guess. D-Bag flies to the location, but it turns out it's not the real location but a trap. NJC's waiting for him with a portable surface-to-air missile launcher, and he shoots the plane down with it. The end.

Then D-Bag appears and shoots NJC. Wait, what? Okay, so I guess D-Bag and his boy bailed out of the plane even though we clearly saw that they didn't, but how the fuck did they get to where NJC is? They'd have been floating back to the ground on parachutes for miles! And since NJC lied to Rodeo about where the superweapon was, where is it? The movie just cuts to Rodeo's funeral, where we're told D-Bag destroyed the superweapon. Uh, how? With what, his pistol? How did he figure out its actual location? NJC sure didn't tell him. Ah well, whatever, let's just end this stupid movie. Blah blah unfunny comic relief, the surviving k-heads get their honorable discharges from Lone Starr, roll credits.

And at no point does anything about a red sky even come up. They should've called this movie Generic Airplane-Related Title.

Cabin Fever: Patient Zero

Cabin Fever: Patient Zero didn't suck seven different kinds of ass. I'd call it maybe a four-ass sucker.

Now I know what you're thinking: This one has forgotten whether its heat-sink is over capacity. You're also thinking, "But Carl Eusebius, a direct-to-video* prequel to an Eli Roth gorefest has to suck at least 6.3 different kinds of ass, according to my highly advanced scienmatifical calculations." But really, the worst part of this movie is that it keeps getting in the way of itself. Any time it starts to build any sort of tension or interest, it goes out of its way to shoot itself down like the Soviet air force on a jetliner full of innocent civilians. Well, and it shamelessly objectifies and abuses women, but I already said "Eli Roth". The thing is, yer old pal Carl Eusebius has seen far worse than this, even in the "stupid people aimlessly wandering around darkened rooms and occasionally shooting zombies" subgenre. I actually paid attention for the whole of this film's expansive 94-minute running time. At this level of filmmaking, that puts this movie in a higher category of suck. But I still hate it, because with just a little more effort, the movie could have ascended the quality mountain to reach the peak of "kind of okay", but the filmmakers just couldn't be bothered to strive for such a Herculean accomplishment.

Oh, and the objectifying and abusing women thing.

A shaggy-bearded No, Mr. Frodo! stars as the titular patient zero of the titular cabin fever, a disease that causes you to sprout unconvincing rash make-up and projectile vomit blood, but only if there's somebody close enough for you to spew infected puke all over. No, Mr. Frodo!, who I guess left his acting in his other beard, is being held in a secret cell on a tiny uninhabited island somewhere near the Dominican Republic because the cast and crew wanted a vacation in paradise while they shot their shitty wannabe-exploitation flick. Unfortunately for the people in the original Cabin Fever--that blistering sore on the collective ass of humanity--the scientists studying patient zero (that's scientist-speak for the first documented case of a disease, though in this movie he's inexplicably immune) are the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of our Earth and are totally incapable of preventing an outbreak, let alone actually creating a cure. They have a patient infected with a certain-death, uncurable blood-born pathogen, and not only do they allow him easy access to sharp instruments (he only has to yank a bit at the metal grating that is, of course, on the inside of his cell window rather than the outside), but they give him privacy in his cell so they can't even see him doing this. Good God, if you're going to be dumb enough to give him privacy (there's a reason cells in real prisons lack curtains, y'all), at least don't allow it where the easy-to-remove-and-slice-yourself-open-with metal grating is.

But they do, so the next time the moonsuited scientists come into his cell, No, Mr. Frodo! reaches under the hood of Guy Who Isn't the Main Evil Scientist and gives him a good NHL facewash (the guy's hood isn't even velcroed down or anything), and this causes a lockdown that quarantines the immediate environs of the cell. No, not the whole facility, just the 3 people who have speaking roles were in the area of the cell at the time. Everybody else gets to leave. This is despite the fact that Main Evil Scientist (who's really trying to be Kevin Spacey and sucking hard at it) earlier specifically said it wasn't an airborne pathogen. So why are Hot Blonde Assistant and Mangled English Scientist Lady Who Constantly Reminds Everyone That Patient Zero Is Still a Human Being being quarantined? They weren't even in the cell! Only Guy Who Isn't Main Evil Scientist snorted infected hobbit blood. How the hell is that a "containment breach" that the loudspeaker is bleating about? Nothing's been breached, and they have containment. No, Mr. Frodo! is still in the cell, and so is the one guy he infected. This ain't Captain Trips, here.

Fuck this movie.

Now we get to the significantly less interesting (no, really) part of the movie. As I said, every time this movie does something right or builds any kind of tension or interest at all, it invariably ruins it immediately, usually by cutting away from the interesting part to our merry band of thirtysomethings. (Actually the IMdb says two of the four are under 30, but they sure don't look it.) They're such stock stereotypes that I'm not going to bother giving you their names. Lord knows I never paid attention to whatever their names were. Let's see, we've got Nerd, his brother Jock (who seems to have gotten all the washboard abs in the family), and their best friend Stoner, along with Liara T'Soni as the woman the filmmakers paid enough to appear topless for about 2.5 seconds. I mean, it's so perfunctory you wonder why they even bothered. She's Jock's girlfriend (in the sole believable moment of this tripe, because a woman who looks like Liara isn't going to be with Nerd or Stoner), and she comes along on Nerd's bachelor party, which consists entirely of our foursome alone on the blood-puking plague island. I'm having flashbacks to House of the Dead here, and that ain't a good thing, since House of the Dead sucks donkey balls and Uwe Boll is a crime against humanity. After Nerd gets mad at Stoner and Jock for talking shit about his fiance (um, it's a bachelor party, you dumb asshole, that's what they're supposed to do), Liara follows him back to his cabin in the little ferry they're taking to Blood-Puke Isle and doffs her top right in front of him(!) because they apparently had a fling some summer back. So forget what I said about believable. I know Jock's a complete asshole and a lunkhead (and somehow Nerd's brother, even though they look about as alike as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rob Schneider), but, well, Nerd is kind of an asshole too (must run in the family), and he's got the build of a meth addict and Bon Jovi's hair. I refuse to believe Liara ever embraced eternity with the lovechild of Benedict Cumberbatch and Andy Dick. And now she's topless and coming on to him when her boyfriend/his brother is right outside the flimsy door to this tiny ferry cabin. Such is the raw animal magnetism of Nerd. He rather wisely leaves (probably the only sensible decision any of the characters makes), and that's it, folks. That's the first of the three functions the filmmakers have for Liara in their film. And believe me, showing a flash of nipples to Napoleon Dynamite over here is the classiest of the three.

I hate this movie.

Stoner and Nerd go off to smoke marijuana while Jock and Liara snorkel for a bit. The latter two run across the corpses of like 30 fish, causing Liara to freak out and head for the tent. Stoner and Nerd wonder what her problem is, to which Jock responds, "Liara thinks she saw something." Thinks she saw something? You swam past 30 dead fish, you dumb motherfucker! She wasn't alone, you were there! This wasn't a glimpse of a shape in the darkness. You're snorkeling in the Caribbean! The water was clear as day, and there were dozens of dead fish! You couldn't possibly have failed to see them. God, what an asshole. Jock also notices a rash on Liara's arm, which he thinks is sunburn(??). Uh, genius, sunburn on one part of one arm, and nowhere else? Even Jock realizes how stupid he sounds, so he next suggests an averse reaction to salt water(???). Um, Jock? Just stop with the suggestions, alright? She gets sick quickly, complaining of feeling hot, and the "sunburn" rapidly turns into bad make-up effects on her neck and arms. She has another freak-out, but Jock assures her some calamine lotion will fix her right up. As he goes to get it, she notices he has a rash, too, but Jock's still blasé about the whole thing. I'd be a bit more worried that you both turned up with the same rash at the same time after snorkeling with a bunch of fish corpses, ya mook. We then get the second reason Liara is here. It turns out that being infected with a blood-puking plague puts her in the mood, and Jock goes down on her right there in the tent. She lets out a blood-curdling scream that all three men mistake for orgasmic bliss, making it immediately clear that none of them has ever heard a woman orgasm outside of porn before. Proud of his work, Jock looks up so the camera can see his face and chest are covered in blood (I'm beginning to think the filmmakers have issues with women here)--uh, he didn't notice that??--and then she projectile vomits blood into his face. Um, okay, he's already ingested plenty of her blood through his earlier, uh, activity. Plus, she saw the same rash on the back of his leg, so he was already infected. See, this is what I mean about the film screwing up any hope of being any fucking good. In any decent movie, it would be the oral sex that infected him. But no, they have to pile it on by having her puke on him, and oh yeah, he was already infected just by swimming in the water with her, so none of this even matters. He was dead 10 minutes before this scene even started. Did anyone take even a moment to think about this stupid movie before they rolled camera? They're taking "gratuitous gore" to a whole new level, here.

Jock stumbles out of the tent, covered in blood, and deadpans. "I think Liara's sick." Gee, you think? The movie's so scattershot it's hard to tell what's intentionally funny and what's just hilariously bad writing, but I think that's one of three genuinely funny lines in the movie. It's suddenly almost night, and only then, hours after Liara's bloody puking episode, does Nerd decide to wander aimlessly around the island looking for help. Liara and Jock are getting sicker by the minute, though Liara is much worse off, I guess because she's a girl? I don't think infectious diseases work slower on lunkheaded oafs, so why does she get sick faster? Jock goes outside to disinfect his terrible make-up job but only succeeds in hurting himself. Liara comes out of the tent because she's having difficulty breathing, leading to Jock's immortal line, "Get back in the motherfuckin' tent!" I believe--one can never be too sure with this movie--that this is the second intentionally funny line. In the meantime, Main Evil Scientist is determined to continue experimenting on No, Mr. Frodo! even during the 48-hour quarantine, but they only have one moonsuit locked in with them, for the simple reason that if they had more suits the following scene couldn't happen. It turns out that Guy Who Isn't Main Evil Scientist is getting sick a lot faster than earlier cases, meaning there must be a new strain of the disease. Main Evil Scientist asks Hot Blond Assistant if she trusts him, to which she responds, "With my life"(??). So I'm guessing he didn't get her from a temp agency, then. He puts on the moonsuit and injects Guy Who Isn't Him with a potential cure, without strapping the guy down or anything, and HBA doesn't even put on a surgical mask. Guy starts having an episode, screaming and thrashing around, so MES demands that HBA help hold him down. She begs off, since, you know, she doesn't have a suit and the guy might puke blood all over her and infect her with the New and Improved Blood-Puking Plague, but he calls her out about her trust issues, so she comes over and helps. Suddenly, just when we most expect it, Guy pukes blood all over her. I mean, he fucking aims at her. MES is closer and moonsuited, so Guy could've puked on him, but Guy must have a grudge against HBA because he absolutely nails her, with nary a drop hitting MES. There's then a genuinely effective scene as HBA seals MES in the room with Guy (he looks at her like this is some big betrayal, but, um, you're still in the suit, and oh yeah you just got her death-puked, blockhead) and runs horrified to the chemical shower, stripping off her clothes (but on her salary, only down to her bra and panties) and trying in vain to wash the blood off, even though we know and she knows that it's too late and she's doomed to become a blood-puking zombie.

So we immediately cut away to Nerd wandering in the jungle at night bickering with Stoner over Nerd's fling with Liara that one summer. Yes! Because when your two best friends are dying horribly, Stoner, that's the time to start shit with your third best friend over petty drama from years ago!

See what I mean about the movie sabotaging itself? It doesn't know what it wants to be. Sometimes it's an almost kind of okay outbreak movie, then it's a terrible stoner comedy, then it's a (not at all) sex(y) romp, then it's a zombie movie. Each part of the movie is almost entirely self-contained and keeps getting in the way of the others. It's a Frankenstein's monster of a movie, only Frank never got around to actually sewing the parts together.

Let's speed this up. Since Liara is dying back in the motherfuckin' tent, Stoner has to play the "girl" part in the final, 28 Days Later rip-off part of the film (i.e., he has to be panicky and generally useless and as a result cause the very situation from which the hero has to rescue him). He and Nerd break into the research facility. They see some blood, leading to the movie's third and last intentionally funny line ("Don't touch it!" "Why the fuck would I touch it?"). Stoner immediately panics and gets them trapped inside. Meanwhile, Jock hears from Main Evil Scientist on his radio that he can help with the cure if Jock comes to the facility, so Jock tries to help Liara to her feet but instead tears all the skin off her arms. I hate it when that happens. He flees alone to the facility and meets up with the others, and they find that all the scientists outside the quarantine zone are blood-puking zombies who want to murder them, because that's just what zombies do. (So, the 3 people closest to No, Mr. Frodo! and quarantined with him weren't infected, and everyone farther away and not quarantined was?**) One of them tries to shoot Stoner, but when he fires his gun, it blows off his hand and sends it rocketing into his own head, killing him. My God, I laughed for a solid minute at that one. I think it's supposed to be funny, but it's still so dumb that I was laughing at the movie rather than with it. The zombie's gun turns his own hand into a deadly projectile, to himself. And where did the bullet go? Anyway, they fight their way through the zombified staff and reach the quarantined area, where Hot Blond Assistant tries to trick them into telling her where their boat is. They're dumb enough to start to tell her, even though her clothes are bloody and she's talking to them through a surgical mask, but then Mangled English Lady Scientist appears and shouts at her to "show them your skin". No, she's not trying to get HBA naked. She just wants her to take off the mask. HBA hems and haws about taking off her mask, and really, what's the point here? Even these two dumbasses have the brainpower to figure out something ain't right since she's being so squirrelly about taking her mask off. But the movie needs a stupid "scare" reveal, so she finally does it and we see that she is now Return of the Living Dead Rip-Off Zombie. Seriously, the make-up fucking blows. The guys act all shocked, but uh, didn't you just fight like a dozen plague zombies? What's so shocking about this one?

Anyway, Rip-Off Zombie escapes and makes for the raft. Just as she reaches it, Liara emerges from the tent, looking less human than she did when she was blue and had scalp crests, ready for her third function in the movie, the *sigh* inevitable cat fight. Since deception went so well for Rip-Off Zombie last time, she tries to bluff her way past Liara, but Liara got her doctorate before she was even 100 years old, so no dice. Rip-Off Zombie then doffs her surgical mask in the traditional "show my scary-ass face" ritual of challenge to estrogen-fueled combat, and the fight to the death between two characters who are both about to die from a horrible flesh-eating virus begins! Liara seems to be getting the better of it, despite not having any skin on her arms and never once hitting Rip-Off with a Singularity, but then Rip-Off hulks up, calls Liara a pureblood bitch, and starts whaling on her, pushing her inside the tent and choking her, even though Rip-Off got puked on by Guy Who Isn't Main Evil Scientist, whose version of the plague the movie earlier said was way more fast-acting, so I don't get why she isn't a hell of a lot weaker than Liara. In fact, given how fast GWIMES died and how much time has passed, I don't know why Rip-Off isn't dead already. But then the movie once again almost, almost redeems itself, as Liara reaches desperately for the giant black dildo that Stoner and Jock gave Nerd as his bachelor party present. I went from shouting, "Goddamn it Liara, put the skinny bitch in Stasis!" to "Yes! Yes, beat her to death with a massive ebony phallus! Do it!" But she doesn't do it. Well, she does, but again, the movie torpedoes itself with Trumpian skill. Instead of the classic "Grab the giant black dong and smack the zombie bitch in the face with it before she chokes you to death or you die of blood-puke syndrome" (man, if I had a dollar for every time I've seen that old gambit), she just gives up reaching for the dildo and instead grabs Rip-Off's elbows and breaks her forearms in half. Okay, how did Liara know she could do that? And how can Rip-Off exert enough force to choke a bitch when her bones are so brittle they break in half when Liara squeezes them? I don't think this movie understands how muscles work. Then Liara gets on top of her and grabs the dildo and beats her to death with it and no, movie, I'm sorry, the moment has passed. You had it, and you blew it. You had me hot and bothered and ready to go down on you, and then your phone rang and you fucking stopped to answer it, leaving me to just put my clothes back on and leave. Nope, too late, you have to beat a zombie bitch to death with a huge rubber phallus as soon as you get the chance. No trying to go back to it later.

Then of course Liara immediately dies. Goddamn this movie.

Blah blah, only No, Mr. Frodo!, Nerd, and Mangled English survive and get back to the ferry. Why yes, there is a slow-motion shot of them walking away from the facility as it explodes, thank you for asking! But the movie keeps going, so you know some kind of stupid fuck-you-to-the-audience twist is coming. Sure enough, No, Mr. Frodo! brings Nerd and Mangled English two bottles of water, which they immediately start swigging from. Now I know blood-born pathogens aren't easily transmitted, and people who suffer from them already face a stigma because of people's fear of disease and abject ignorance of even the most basic science, but really, given what these two have been through, I think it's reasonable for them to refuse to chug down something handed to them by Mr. I Started the Whole Blood-Puking Death Plague. But they gulp it down without a second thought just so Mangled English can intuit No, Mr. Frodo!'s betrayal, and we now see the water is tinted red, which it clearly wasn't in the earlier shots. Oh, and No, Mr. Frodo! just pistol-murders the ferry pilot instead of infecting him too because, um....The film leaves Nerd's state ambiguous, pointedly not revealing whether he has a rash or not. But my money's on he's dead, since he doesn't appear in Cabin Fever and oh yeah the disease kills everyone except hobbits. And no, there's absolutely no indication at any point in the film of why No, Mr. Frodo! murders everybody in the end. He was angry because he was locked up by the scientists and his wife and son are dead, yes, but Nerd wasn't even involved in any of that except to break him out of the facility, and Mangled English was the only one in the facility who gave a damn about him and tried to help him. No Mr. Frodo! specifically told her that her "compassion makes [her] different from the others". Not different enough for him not to murder her, I guess.

And you know what? There's not a single cabin anywhere in this movie.

Cabin Fever: Patient Zero, get back in the motherfuckin' tent!

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* Yeah, it got limited release in theaters, but "limited release" for a flick like this is code for "dump it somewhere cheap and dirty so we can technically say it wasn't direct-to-video". Sorry, hack filmmakers, but Carl Eusebius is not bound by The Man's technicalities. This movie doesn't deserve to be screened alongside such worthies as Transformers: Oh God Another One and Rise of the Dawn of the Day of the Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

** Hot Blond Assistant infected a lab mouse with the virus as part of the experiments (I guess?) but then dropped it on the floor, so it escaped quarantine and infected the people outside. (Yes, she was holding the thing in her hand, and while it was awake, yet.) And she doesn't even tell anybody about it! Whoops, death-mouse got away, oh well. That's how Mangled English figures out the big twist. When Nerd tells her that the people outside traced their infection to a mouse, she remembers that No, Mr. Frodo! sang "Three Blind Mice" at her one time when he was raving about being experimented on. But, but...No, Mr. Frodo! had nothing to do with the mouse escaping! He couldn't even have seen it happen, since it was him being shocked by cattle prods that startled HBA into dropping the mouse in the first place. And Mangled English knows that, because she was standing right next to her. Stupid movie.

Revisit: Ninja III: The Domination

When your ol' pal Carl Eusebius was but a wee tot, he loved him some Japan. My age being in but single digits (my IQ of course was already immeasurable due to my godlike intellect), I loved four things: He-Man, Godzilla, Voltron, and ninjas.

Now you may have noticed that three of those things are Japanese, and all of them are completely fictional. Yes, in the early '80s Japan was still a mystical wonderland full of inscrutable little folk and their quirky habits, like taking their shoes off indoors and brutally subjugating neighboring countries. It was a more innocent time, before hentai, weeaboos, Pikachu and DESU. Ninjas were kind of like Batman before regular people liked Batman. They dressed in cool costumes, moved in the shadows, carried all kinds of gadgets like grappling hooks and caltrops, and kung fu-ed the shit out of guys. And they had fake-ass mythical weaponry that looked awesome despite having not a chance in hell of being actually effective in combat. Xena: Warrior Princess had her chakram, Batman had his batarangs, and ninjas had shuriken. That's a fancy Japanese word for a star-shaped knife ninjas threw at people to one-shot one-kill them. That's right, no matter where the "ninja star" hit you and penetrated up to one-quarter of an inch through your skin, you immediately keeled over dead. And if the ninja felt like getting closer, he had the ninja-to (that's Japanese for "ninja sword" desu), a shittier version of the katana that was cheaper to make since ninjas historically probably weren't magical superhuman assassins but were peasant bandits who resisted samurai rule by murdering samurai in ambushes, at least when they weren't waylaying and robbing upper-class people.

But we're talking movie ninjas here. The ones who could throw ninja stars and disappear in a cloud of smoke and scale walls barehanded and take off their masks and breathe fucking fire out of their fleshless undead skulls. And in the early '80s, your movie ninja was Sho Kosugi. For those few years that ninjas were king of young white boys' screens, Sho made a half dozen kickass ninja movies. Enter the Ninja. Revenge of the Ninja. Pray for Death. Nine Deaths of the Ninja. Rage of Honor. In the pre-Jackie Chan Rumble in the Bronx years, this was the best martial arts you were gonna get. While mainstream America had its Chuck Norrises and its Jean-Claude Van Dammes, we young lads who could actually find Japan on a map had Sho. He may not have been any better an actor than The Non-Presence That Kicks or the Muscles from Brussels, but as a martial arts performer, he was the best thing the Empire had until we discovered a little known place called Hong Kong....

But all good things must come to an end, and the ninja craze ended quickly indeed. By 1984, the genre was already played out, and so of course schlock auteurs Golan and Globus chose this moment to ensure its final destruction by making a ninja movie of their very own. Take ninjas, mix in some aerobics, garnish with a dash of The Exorcist, and you have the death knell of the ninja film, or as I call it, Ninja III: The Domination.

What can you say about a movie that begins with, to quote a random IMDb person, "the greatest golf course ninja motorcycle helicopter massacre ever put on film." Yes, this movie begins with Evil Ninja murdering, uh, someone, in the middle of a public golf course in broad daylight. (You can see why these cunning assassins were so feared.) Our Evil Ninja proceeds to slaughter approximately 7000 cops who attempt to arrest him, using all of his ninja skills: throwing stars, swords, punching through steel, and editing the film so that motorcycle cops who have already been killed magically appear back on their bikes just in time to crash spectacularly into a river. Two cops in a helicopter, seeing about a dozen cops wiped out by this guy, radio their buddies to "proceed with caution". Proceed with caution?! How about calling in "Officer down!", ya mooks. These two guys politely ignore Evil Ninja as he climbs up a tree directly in front of them and then even more kindly fly very close to the top of the tree so he can climb up the skids and kill them.

Evil Ninja kills a few more guys until the script finally says the cops can tag him with their guns. They shoot him about 900 times but then foolishly creep slowly up on him to see if he's dead, causing him to immediately pop up and kill another dozen of them. The cops then shoot him approximately 185,000 more times, and this time, finally, he...throws a smoke ball and disappears. I don't know why he bothered to leave, really, since he's proven as vulnerable to gunfire as fucking Superman. While the voices of guys saying things like "Where'd he go?" are dubbed over the scene, the cops disperse to find Our Ninja, whereupon he pops up out of the ground(!). The cops being several entire yards away at this point, he slips away unnoticed.

Thus ends, ladies and gentlemen, one of the dumbest and most inept action scenes in film history. It's right up there with Future War's epic battle between Not Jean-Claude Van Damme and Cyborg Ron Jeremy, as they push empty cardboard boxes at each other.

It turns out Our Ninja is indeed kacked, though sadly not before he happens upon telephone linewoman and aerobics instructor Lucinda Dickey, a true thespian and star of both Breakin' AND Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. He makes her grab his sword (his ninja sword, you pervs) while he mutters in Japanese, and so our Flashdance-Exorcist-Nine Deaths of the Ninja "plot" begins.

Every time Lucinda sees one of the cops who shot Evil Ninja to death, we see a flashback of Evil Ninja being shot over 9000 times, and in the next scene Possessed Lucinda murders said cop in some baroque ninja way. Somehow no one ever notices Lucinda's presence at each murder scene shortly before someone turns up dead, nor does anyone see her vehicle (a huge fucking telephone van, mind you) speeding either toward or away from the murder scene. At no point do the police make any connection between the guys getting kacked and the shooting of Evil Ninja, including a cop with moar body hair than fucking Sasquatch who stalks and harasses Lucinda until she agrees to become his mistress and seduces him by pouring V8 all over her breasts. Hairy Cop doesn't bat an eye when Lucinda complains of lost memories, missing time, and unexplained injuries even as his friends on the police force are being systematically murdered by what is clearly a professional assassin. He doesn't think it might be suspicious that she suddenly has a ninja sword that she really doesn't want him to examine. It isn't until he takes her to a Chinese Japanese medium (played by consummate professional Hannibal Chew), who causes her to talk all reverb-y and then transform into one of the worst dummies you've ever seen, that he finally gets a clue. Now convinced (I guess?) she's possessed, Lucinda tries to aerobics her way out of Evil Ninja's next possession attempt, crying "No, not again!" even though she earlier claimed not to remember the possession episodes, but Evil Ninja's sword-wobbling-on-a-string-in-a-laughable-attempt-to-appear-to-be-floating will not be denied, and Lucinda is possessed again in a scene that is absolutely not a complete rip-off of Sigourney Weaver's possession in Ghostbusters. (God, even mentioning that film on this blog gives me the heebie-jeebies.)

Fortunately, Sho, looking rather badass in his eyepatch, has been tracking Evil Ninja, who is revealed in a flashback to be the guy who killed Sho's daddy and took his eye. Being rather faster on the uptake than Hairy Cop, Sho realizes that Evil Ninja's spirit is loose and figures out where he'll strike next. Sho intercepts Possessed Lucinda--decked out in the Evil Ninja's spare set of ninja duds that he apparently kept in his secret cave and luckily fit her perfectly--after she caps another of the cops. Sho kung fus her into submission, but of course lets her go when he finds out she's, like, a girl. The cops arrive and arrest Sho as the culprit, even though he's currently nowhere near the crime scene and is dressed nothing like Possessed Lucinda and is wearing a large eyepatch that Lucinda clearly wasn't wearing and he has no weapons and is much taller and proportionally bigger than Lucinda. Other than that, though, it's an airtight case. Hairy Cop gets in the back of the police cruiser with Sho, who tells him to bring Lucinda and Evil Ninja's sword to "the old temple on the hill" (you know the one). Having seen this man exactly twice, one of which is when he's being arrested by his fellow officers, Hairy Cop immediately agrees to do this. He goes home and points his gun at his new squeeze, ordering her to go to the temple. You know, the old one. On the hill. That one.

Everyone arrives at the climax of the movie. Sho has Evil Ninja's body, so that way the white people can step aside while the Asian guys show their stuff. The last ten minutes of the movie are nonstop fighting, pretty decent ninja fighting for the time, as Sho fights first the monks of the temple (mind-mojoed by the Evil Ninja) and then duels with the Evil Ninja himself. Sho ends up sticking a knife through the top of EN's head (ew!), and Hairy Cop and Lucinda love each other, and the movie just sort of stops.

Ninja III: The Domination is unquestionably the dumbest movie combining aerobics and ninjas ever made. Fortunately, Sho went on to make Pray for Death, probably the best of the ninja movies. And, the year after Ninja III came out, the Schengen Agreement was signed, creating a passport-free zone in the precursor to the European Union. At least this movie did nothing to prevent that.