Fateful Findings

Neil Breen's Fateful Findings is the greatest movie ever made.

Directed by Neil Breen from a script by Neil Breen, Fateful Findings stars Neil Breen as Dylan Neil Breen, the world's greatest hacker who also has the superpowers of shouting incoherently into cellular phones, phasing through solid objects, and making movies that don't make any fucking sense. Director Breen's interpretation of screenwriter Breen is masterful, matched perfectly by the consummate professional editing of Neil Breen and the haunting soundtrack composed and performed by Neil Breen. Only producer Neil Breen could have assembled such a potent combination of talent to create this singular motion picture. If Neil Breen could see how perfectly Neil Breen has brought Neil Breen's vision from page to screen, Neil Breen would bestow upon Neil Breen the prestigious Neil Breen Award for Being Neil Breen, as voted for by the selection committee made up of Neil Breen.

Given that he has more talent in his bad white guy's Jheri curl combover than is present in the rest of the human race combined, Neil Breen eschews filmmaking conventions like editing scenes such that the audience has any idea how much time has passed, introducing characters by name or ever assigning them last names, having a plot or indeed a connection of any kind between scenes, and not kissing the actresses with all the raw sexual passion of a closeted homosexual trying to dispel tabloid rumors.

The film opens with Neil Breen being hit by a car, which is a wonderful way to open a film no matter how you look at it. We then cut to shots of people's shoes and then to awkward upward-looking shots of people in a completely different location, as we in the audience struggle to figure out where these people came from when in the long shots the street was clearly deserted. These non-actors (chosen by avant-garde director Breen for verisimilitude, no doubt) ask if he's okay approximately 30,000 times while no one bothers to answer the question or attempt to help in any way. My favorite guy emphatically declares that it was the Rolls-Royce that struck Breen down, which he knows because he saw the whole thing. Now, lacking the visionary genius of writer/director/producer/editor/Supreme Overlord of the Milky Way Galaxy Neil Breen, I thought maybe one of the other people there might turn to him and say, "Great Scott! You mean the Rolls-Royce currently idling right in front of us with blood dripping from its grill? I would never have guessed that was our dastardly culprit! It is indeed fortunate, my good sir, that you were somehow able to see the whole thing, despite not actually appearing in the earlier scene, else we might never have solved this conundrum!"

Instead, experimental nonlinear editor Breen intercuts the, er, "action" with shots of Our Breen's vaguely European wife/girlfriend/fuckbuddy/housemaid Emily shouting into her phone, "Dylan? Are you there? Dylan? Dylan, answer! Dylan! Dylan, are you there Dylan? Bueller? Bueller?" Now you might wonder how anyone, even a girl from the same indeterminate Eastern European country that gave us the barely-sentient scientist chick from Werewolf, could possibly still be shouting ineffectually into a cellular phone several minutes after any normal person would assume the connection's been lost. But since Neil Breen has the superpower of never losing his cell phone service, I think we can sympathize with Emily here. We can also sympathize with her because, like every other female character in this movie, visionary filmmaker/creepy pervert Neil Breen refuses to let her wear a bra at any time during the shoot.


So Our Breen is in the hospital, unconscious. His physician, the esteemed Dr. Unnamed, calls in a neurologist, an almost attractive blond who just so happens to be the girl Our Breen fell in love with when they were both eight years old. We know this because she's still wearing the same shitty Lucky Charms bracelet she wore back then, and later her notebook containing the words "It's a Magical Day" falls out of her pocket (open to the exact page with those words on it, no less) for Neil to find. See, she wrote those words in that old notebook (which looks to be in pretty good shape for the 20-odd years she says she's been carrying it with her constantly "for good luck") on the day she and young Neil found a mushroom, which turned into a box, out of which Neil took a magic rock. And then she put, um, something back in the box, and they left, and it turned into a mushroom again. A Magical Day!

Now, if you're thinking Dr. Object of Creepy Pedo Lust is here to use her expertise to save Our Neil, well, that's just what director Neil Breen and screenwriter Neil Breen wanted you to think. Our Neil don't need no stinkin' round-the-clock intensive care to treat what his doctor calls severe neurological damage. Instead, he just gets up and leaves the hospital on his own. Has he been in the hospital for a year? A month? A day? 20 minutes? An artiste cares not for these things. It's fortunate for Neil that he's magically healed himself, since there's apparently no one else in the ICU. No other patients, orderlies, receptionists--it's almost as if producer Breen couldn't raise enough money to hire even a single extra to wander through shot. Sure, he could  have slapped a lab coat on a grip and had him walk down the hallway with his back to the camera or something, but it's just that kind of pedestrian "real world" thinking that Neil Breen left behind when he ascended to the plane of existence in the multiverse reserved specifically for Neil Breen. Our Neil goes home and takes a shower, whereupon vaguely European wife-or-whatever Emily gets in with him and stands in the pool of blood collecting at his feet while they turn around in circles and then the scene ends.

Look, if you don't understand the deeper meaning and significance of this scene, I'm certainly not going to explain it to you.

In a manner that would send Tommy Wiseau into either a state of ecstasy or a jealous rage, conversations veer violently from someone confessing her crippling pill addiction to complaints from the same person that she isn't happy in her current career. Being one of exactly two staff in the ICU, Dr. Creepy Pedo Lust discovers Neil's absence and calls the other staff member, Dr. Unnamed, who declares emphatically "I'll check on it", hangs up, and leaves the movie, never to be seen again. After Neil's buddy is murdered by his wife, wifey also elects to no longer appear. Our Neil refuses to believe wifey's claim that buddy committed suicide, but that claim somehow drives Neil's wife-or-whatever Emily to herself commit suicide out of guilt, thus freeing Neil to bang Dr. Creepy Pedo Lust an impossible-to-figure-out amount of time later, since he's been in love with her since they were both eight, need I remind you. By the way, when buddy is murdered, his daughter offscreen teleports to the crime scene despite having been established as lying face down on a bed in a completely different room. This leads to a hilariously awkward scene in which wifey tries to prevent daughter from getting to the body while daughter struggles to get past her in a manner precisely as believable as a pair of angry dudebros being held back from engaging in fisticuffs by their skanky girlfriends in any given dive bar at 1 am on Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Our Neil promises to blow the lid off government and corporate corruption, evidence of which he has obtained throughout the movie using his superior h4xx0r skillz. Are you asking what this has to do with Emily's death? Or Neil's reconnection with Dr. Creepy Pedo Lust? Or the murder of his best buddy? Or the daughter's topless swimming in Neil's pool and bathing in Neil's bathtub in an I-saw-American-Beauty-once attempted jailbait seduction of Neil? Because if you are, then frankly you need to go back to your Kurosawa films and your Christopher Nolan films and your Stanley Kubrick films and other such shallow fluff. You are not prepared for the True Art of a Neil Breen film starring Neil Breen from a screenplay by Neil Breen. The film ends with our hero standing in front of a hilariously bad greenscreen image of the Lincoln Memorial and revealing the incredibly vague but highly damning evidence he has uncovered of the crimes of those dastardly One-Percenters, while various government and corporate fat-cats step up and stand before the same horrendous greenscreen image and confess to crimes that are equally nebulous and ill-defined, followed by a cut to each fat-cat committing suicide somewhere else entirely in his or her own unique way. Then a government/corporate sniper takes aim at our hero, only to be killed...somehow...so Neil can continue a hero-exposes-corruption-through-endless-speechifying scene that would put Steven Seagal to shame. Roll credits.

Neil Breen is the most captivating artist of our time. His artistic creations will be revered and treasured for as long as cinema exists as an art form. Like every film made in France, Fateful Findings is pretentious, purposefully obtuse, and utterly lacking in meaning, coherence, and intelligibility. I shall not look up on its like again.

Wait...there are two moar Neil Breen films? Oh, bliss! Bliss and heaven.....

Hong Kong 97

Hong Kong 97 is the worst John Woo fan film you've never seen. It's got it all--hitman main characters, lots of guys getting shot, lots of slow-mo, guys firing two guns whilst jumping through the air, exaggerated blood bursts, a girl who disapproves of the hero's hitman lifestyle but loves him anyway--and all executed in the most amateur and inept fashion possible.

Naturally, I loved it.

The film is so desperate to be a Woo picture that it's set in Hong Kong itself, and some scenes are even shot there. That's right, Albert Pyun--one of the worst cheapo directors working today--was so determined to make his own version of A Better Tomorrow that he actually got some poor production company to fund location shooting in Hong Kong. Well, exteriors at least. Every time we go inside a building, you can bet we're now in the Philippines, because there it's much cheaper to hire guys to clutch their chests and fall over.

The film opens on a tuxedo-clad T-1000 in a godawful hairdo on the eve of Hong Kong's handover to the fuckin' ugly reds while vaguely "Chinese" music plays. I assumed he was in the tux because it's the night before the handover, but nobody else is dressed up, so I think he's dressed like that just because it looks cool. He's also wearing a duster, since, you know, Chow Yun-fat wore a duster when he shot up the gangsters in A Better Tomorrow. He takes a boat to a Hong Kong restaurant I've been to, though when I had dinner there, I don't recall there being a topless hottie gyrating just inside the front door. That's probably because, as noted, he didn't actually go into the restaurant, instead magically teleporting inside a completely different building somewhere in the Philippines.

The T-1000 acquires his target, a military honcho in full uniform(!), and draws his pistol on the naked gyrating lady(?). She rather graciously moves out of his way so he can shoot the honcho. Good thing she didn't panic and freeze so that he couldn't get a clear shot! He takes out the honcho's two bodyguards (I guess?) in slow-mo with exaggerated blood bursts, and man, Hard Boiled this ain't. He then draws a bead on the honcho's blond female companion, and...leaves. Okay, so he doesn't want to shoot her because she isn't armed? Or because he knows her? Or he doesn't shoot ladies? Or...what? Later dialogue will establish he's a super bad-ass assassin who kills strictly for money and has no compassion. So why didn't he cap the bitch, especially since she was the only one in the place who unquestionably got a clear look at his face? I'm absolutely sure this was unintentional on Pyun's part, but it really comes across as he doesn't want to shoot a fellow member of the Master Race.

Back in Hong Kong, the T-1000 "exits" the restaurant, again making it perfectly clear that what we just saw didn't actually take place therein. (We can see through its windows that the dominant color inside the restaurant is red, while the previous scene was conspicuously blue/green.) He jumps into a boat piloted by (we'll soon see) his lover, and they speed away. Then we see a guy in an office somewhere speaking German while a reporter from Blank Gray Wall News tells us about the murder in the most stilted and robotic fashion possible.

Cut to our second set of breasts in 90 seconds. Being a shitty B movie before the widespread availability of Internet pornography, there's a lot of tits in Hong Kong 97, which is just about the only aspect of the movie not cribbed from John Woo. The T-1000 is railing his girlfriend, who I have to say is a good bit hotter than Ming Na, though I may be a bit biased since the actress playing her is pretty enthusiastic in her simulated sex with the humanoid robot Robert Patrick. (Ha! It is a funny, because Robert Patrick was the T-1000 in Terminator 2!) Anyway, I guess Patrick's a-murderin' got their juices flowing, eh? Eh? Now, Ming Na hasn't appeared yet, but she's 3rd-billed in this stinker and the only actress in the opening credits I've heard of, so she will be Patrick's love interest. That's just how these things work.

Girlfriend notices a group of ninjas(!) about to attack them, so we get another slow-mo John Woo ripoff shoot-out. And this time, yes, Patrick has two guns, though he can't fly through the air since the set isn't big enough and we might see the little Patrick.

So for those keeping track, in less than 3 minutes, we've already had two naked Asian ladies and two John Faux gun battles. (Yes, the ninjas have guns, though they apparently skipped the part where they learned to aim them.) You can't say Pyun didn't give his audience what they wanted. If only his audience wanted a good movie.

The shoot-out ends when Girlfriend kills the last ninja to enter the room, whereupon both she and Patrick seem to realize the scene is over and walk over to the broken window the ninjas came through (by a total coincidence giving us another look at their bare asses). Hey guys, how do you know there aren't more ninjas coming? Do ninjas always travel in groups of six, so you knew once you got all six, the scene was over? And really, having just been shot at by assassins, should you be parading around naked in front of a window? Having successfully fought off this *cough* deadly attack, the happy couple exchange some truly inspired terrible dialogue.

He: "Are you alright?"
She: "Yeah. But should [sic] get out of here, dis greatly [sic]."
"I'm sorry, I really wasn't expecting any of this."(!)
"Yeah, is it not strange for such a swift attempt at retribution?"

Well, I don't know, your murder was reported on Blank Gray Wall News before you even got home, so this retribution doesn't seem particularly swift for this universe.

Cut to the Hong Kong Club. (You know the one.) Inside is....oh lord. It's Brion James, doing a fucking terrible English accent. Now as anyone who's read my Blade Runner review knows, I love me some Brion James, but a posh Englishman? No. James is a heavy, and he's very good at it. He's not an upper-crust British gentleman. Even his accent agrees with me, since it occasionally abandons him. The German guy from earlier is also there, and apparently these three are former super-spies who are now super assassins. We know this because they openly discuss Patrick's recent murder in the locker room of the tennis club. Okay, I'm being unfair. Any time they notice someone nearby, they look at him suspiciously and stop talking, only resuming their fervent whispering once the person has gotten at least 3 feet away. Clearly these guys are pros.

A fourth man is also there, played by the Dollman himself, Tim Thomerson(!!), who is friends with James and Patrick (but not German guy, I guess, since Herr Walk-on disappears from the movie at the end of this scene). Despite his close friendship with the two, Thomerson apparently doesn't know they're professional assassins. Cut to the three men in the sauna talking about meaningless bullshit. Why is this scene in the movie? I'll give you three guesses, but here's a hint: Each of our three zeroes is supplied with a naked Asian lady to massage him.

The three then go to visit their friend? associate? business partner? acupuncturist? Whatever. They go visit Wong (how original), rolling up to the gate of his home in an SUV. Workmen outside the gate do workmen stuff in a way that absolutely doesn't look suspicious at all and I'm sure is perfectly legitimate and not going to lead to another shitty action sequence. The gate doesn't open, so Patrick gets out and shouts, "Wong! Wong" at the gate. Still no answer. All three guys clamber out of the SUV and discuss how weird it is that Wong doesn't answer. Patrick catches up to the audience (in this case, me) and realizes an ambush is imminent, so he opens the back of the SUV and starts handing everybody guns. Yes, including Thomerson, the guy who isn't an assassin and has never held a gun in his life. Once the three men are well armed (Patrick himself sports an Uzi), the workmen then reveal that, ah-ha! They're bad guys. Shootout ensues. I have to say, it was awfully nice of the bad guys to let Patrick finish distributing the guns right in front of them before they struck. Because otherwise it would've been really unfair.

Long story short (too late!), Patrick has to go on the run, so James takes him to the one place the bad guys--well, the badder guys, I guess--won't look for him: his old fiance's house. Yeah, they'll never suspect a guy on the run might turn to his Ex-Girlfriend Who Still Obviously (and I mean obviously--we're talking Ming Na here) Carries a Torch for Him. She isn't home when he breaks into her apartment, so when she comes home, she immediately starts kicking his ass. Ha! But the joke is, she didn't mistake him for a burglar but knew it was him all along and is kicking his ass because she's mad at him for leaving her. Har fucking har. Okay, she hasn't actually said any of that yet, so I might end up with a lot of egg on my face when I continue the movie...oh, I'm right. Get me a hotline, baby, I'm psychic! They angst a bit about their past relationship, during which Ming Na's quaint old Chinese granddad, sporting his best Charlie Chan "Oh, so solly" phoney-baloney accent, lets us know that he's totally okay with her boyfriend being an assassin-for-hire, because he treats her well.

It turns out granddad is an enemy of the Communists, so he and Ming Na are making sure to get out before the handover. After some endlessly tedious dialogue that I'll spare you, she asks Patrick to come with. He notes that "the tanks roll in a midnight", but she retorts that it's only 8:00, so he has plenty of time before their flight out of Hong Kong "in a few hours"(!!!). Uh, last time I checked, a few is "three or four", meaning she can't possibly mean a flight leaving earlier than 11:00. That's cutting it just a bit close, don't you think?

Shots ring out, to which Ming Na doesn't react so Patrick can tackle her to the floor. Gun drawn, he--um, genius, the slide's locked. That means no bang-bang. (This guy's a pro?) False alarm, though. It's just two revelers on the street randomly firing pistols in the air. Where do these guys think they are? Detroit?

Patrick goes...somewhere, and there's moar tits (come on, now) and another shootout. A white hitman puts a pistol to Patrick's head and says there's a huge bounty on him. Then he lets him go because of the professional code of the assassin(!). Okay, whatever, dude. I guess "paid assassin" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Again, it really just comes across as white people, who in this movie mow down Asian guys by the dozen, not wanting to kill each other. Patrick gets picked up by his buddies while Thomerson bitches about not being told that Patrick was a hitman. James finally shuts him up by revealing Patrick's Secret Pain while Patrick meanders around outside the car, getting back in at the precise moment James finishes the story. It's almost as if he read the script and knew when James would finish talking. James speculates on how the bad guys found out about Patrick, since he'd never left a trail before. Patrick gets indignant. "I didn't leave a trail this time."

Didn't leave a trail this time, you say? Now, I've only seen the movie once, so I might be wrong here, but I do believe he left something of a clue this time. What was it? Give me a second here to remember.....Oh, yeah. It was the blond woman you left alive after she got a clear look at your face, you asshat!

It turns out Patrick has agreed to run away with Ming Na and granddad. Um, what about the girl you were railing like 24 hours ago? The one who piloted your escape boat and saved your ass from the ninjas when you ran out of bullets? Nevermind that, we've got another shitty action sequence to get to. Cut to the three boarding the plane. Since the movie's only half over, we know he's not getting on that plane. Hmm, let's see...Thomerson and James are also there, and Thomerson can't fight, and this is a John Woo rip-off, so...can anyone not see where this is going? Do I need to draw a diagram for you?

Suddenly, just when we most expect it, the bad guys attack! Patrick, being the pro, immediately leads Ming Na and granddad away from the plane and over to James's car. Um, you were standing right outside the door of a fucking plane. Just get on the plane and leave, you asshole. Thomerson grabs two pistols and runs towards them. Gee, I hope the elderly untrained bureaucrat won't--oh, there he goes. Pathos, etc.

Our remaining murderous hitmen heroes seek another way to escape, never mind they voluntarily left the fucking airplane waiting to take them to safety. They meet up with Girlfriend from the opening scene. Turns out she's both Patrick's fuckbuddy and his student in a-murderin'. She greets him with a kiss, as Ming Na reacts with (I think--we're talking Ming Na here) a look of jealousy. Hey, remember what I said about Ming Na's billing in the credits? I hope Girlfriend has been keeping up with her life insurance premiums.

Moar bad guys attack as they flee to a boat. Girlfriend stays behind to cover their escape, because she "has another way out of the city". Oh noez, I really and truly hope she doesn't die tragically saving the others--oh, she does. Pathos, etc.

In an interlude, Ming Na asks Patrick to tell her about Girlfriend. Oh, you mean the one you just stole him away from? The one who just died to save your candy ass? You want him to tell you about her, as if you give a shit? Because you will end up with Patrick when this piece of shit is over, never mind that this woman who meant so much to him (he gets all emotional talking about her--well, as emotional as Robert Patrick can manage) just got kacked like an hour ago. The Plot-o-Matic 3000 will have it no other way.

Out for blood, Patrick and James go to take down the bad guys once and for all. (James got a hacker to figure out who they were earlier in the picture.) Ming Na is also there, even though she's also completely untrained. Blah blah shooting, blood bursts, Filipino guys clutching their chests and falling over, the blonde woman from the opening sequence appears.....and is immediately gunned down by Patrick. Pyun gives us a flashback we don't need so we'll remember who blondie is, a flashback that is longer than she's onscreen before Patrick kacks her. Well, that was some payoff.

But, there's a traitor! Can you guess who it is? Seriously, I want you to guess. Ha! You'll never get it. It's the German guy who had like four lines and disappeared 3 minutes into the--oh, you guessed that. Oh. Ohh. Ohhhhhhh--

This prompts James to turn on Patrick as well. I would like you to know that I totally believed this and in no way expected that James was faking and was in fact getting Herr Traitor to lower his guard so he and Patrick could shoot everybody. So I was completely stunned when that's exactly what happened, let me tell you.

The film ends with everybody shot in the arm. Seriously, Patrick, James, and Ming Na all take gunshots to the arm. Then they ride off into the sunrise on the boat, as Patrick and Ming Na kiss. Aw, they've reconciled, what must be hours after Girlfriend rather conveniently sacrificed herself for their True Love. Excuse me, I think I'm getting a bit misty....

Is Hong Kong 97 terrible? Well, I already said it's directed by Albert Pyun, so we know the answer to that question. But if you're like me--and God help you if you are--and love bottomlessly awful John Woo ripoffs, you'll enjoy. I give it the Official Carl Eusebius Shit Seal of Approval.

Your Movie Is Meh And You Should Time Out

Your old pal Carl Eusebius has seen a lot of crap, but most of it doesn’t make the cut for this blog. For something to end up here, it has to be bad. Real bad. Like, Lady Gaga’s latest outfit bad. Rob Ford apology bad. Keanu Reeves emoting bad. 95% of the garbage I see just don’t rate.

But there are a few bad movies that are so infamous that they deserve a brief mention, if not a full-on review. (At least, not yet.) So behold: single-sentence capsule reviews of some of the word shit ever put on film.

88 Minutes—A strictly-in-it-for-the-money Al Pacino runs around Vancouver while on the phone with a Ray Liotta fangirl for 88 fucking minutes.

After Last Season—A psycho killer’s ghost doesn’t do much while people blow their lines repeatedly and/or get their heads examined in an MRI machine patently made of papier-mâché.

Air Collision—A passenger airline collides with Air Force One. Hilarity ensues.

Alien vs. Predator—Aliens and Predators run around Vancouver and occasionally kill people and/or each other.

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem—Aliens and Predators run around Vancouver and occasionally kill people and/or each other, only this time it’s filmed so dark you can’t see a goddamned thing.

Alone in the Dark—World-famous Jack Nicholson impersonator Christian Slater stars as a self-proclaimed paranormal investigator who teams up with Tara Reid as the least credible professor this side of Denise Richards and Stephen Dorff as that guy who came this close to having a career to battle hordes of demons that you can’t see unless you look at them. Also, at no point is anyone ever alone in the dark. (Uwe Boll Count: 1)

The Apple—A highly ‘70s musical about the temptation of hippy Adam and Eve by the corrupt pop music industry, man.

Birdemic: Shock and Terror—Still drawings of birds menace people who couldn’t act surprised at their own birthday parties.

Bloodrayne—Michelle Rodriguez and the Terminatrix have a hot lesbian fling and then go on set to shoot scenes for this movie, while a villainous Ben Kingsley goes Full Costner. (Uwe Boll Count: 2)

Body of Evidence—Willem Dafoe defends a stone-faced Anna Nicole Smith Madonna from the charge that she humped an old man to death for his money.

Cool As Ice—Some black people stand in the background behind Eminem Vanilla Ice so we know he’s "down with it" while he steals a 30-year-old high school student away from her 1950s preppie boyfriend. Yep, yep. Word to ya mutha. Drop that zero and get with the hero!

DOA: Dead or Alive—Animated plastic muppet Devon Aoki and a merry band of nobodies battle an unstoppable Eric Roberts until they remember that his powers are entirely due to his magic sunglasses and knock them off his face, ensuring his defeat.

Dragonball: Evolution—A villainous alien named “Piccolo” with hilariously bad make-up battles weaboos.

Flesh Wounds—Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: Hercules leads a team of elite Imperial commandos on a mission to rescue some of our people only to find out they weren’t told the real story just as they realize they’re being picked off one by one by a technologically-advanced hunter who detects them by means of their body heat and and uses an invisibility screen to blend into the jungle--oh, you’ve heard this one.

Gigli—Ben Lopez and Jennifer Affleck are tough-as-nails mobsters who kidnap a sub-Rain Man performance and encounter first the Walken and then Pacino at approximately Devil’s Advocate-level overacting.

The Happening—Mark Wahlberg and that guppy-faced woman are menaced by murderous wind.

House of the Dead—Heavily-armed ravers fight off hordes of zombies and editing mistakes. (Uwe Boll Count:3 )

The Howling 2: Stirba, Werewolf Bitch—Saruman the White and Yor, Hunter From the Future go to Transylvania to stake through the heart dozens of vampires werewolves extras with crepe fur hastily pasted to their bodies while Sybil Danning reveals her ample talents.

In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale—A not very Statham-y Jason Statham joins up with Hellboy to defend the titular king, a nearly-catatonic Burt Reynolds(!), from a scenery-chewing Ray Liotta and the king’s treacherous nephew Matthew Lillard(!!), while John Rys-Davis, Leelee Sobieski, and Will Sanderson collect paychecks. (Uwe Boll Count: 4)

Jumper—Androgyn Crywhiner stars as a punk nobody who undeservedly lucks into success himself, trying to elude the completely understandable attempts of Samuel L. Jackson’s bad hairstyle to kill him.

The King of Fighters—Maggie Q and a few other non-Japanese Japanese run around Vancouver after Darth Maul crashes the Chan Centre to steal a magic sword that will allow him to take over the world. Canadians are apathetic about this.

The Last Sentinel—Dragon "The Don" Fancypants McWilson mows down so many dozens of robots/androids/soldiers/whatevers that he almost changes his expression. Starbuck guest-stars as a woman guest-starring in The Last Sentinel.

Legion—Rogue angels lay siege to a gas station to prevent the birth of John Connor of Nazareth.

Rollerball (2002)—When his NHL career doesn’t pan out, extreeeeeme sports enthusiast Flavor of the Month joins Washed-Up-Rapper-Turned-Actor and Mystique to play a slightly beefed-up version of roller derby crossed with the WWE that’s actually less violent and dangerous than the NHL.

The Room—A creepy, indeterminately European man is devastated when his air-headed gold-digging girlfriend cheats on him with—oh hai, Mark.

Street Fighter—Mealy-mouthed Jean-Claude Van Damme gets blown off the screen by a villainous and terribly charismatic Raul Julia.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li—A young Chinese girl grows up to become the emphatically not Chinese Kristin Kreuk, who runs around her hometown of Vancouver while things happen that absolutely no one gives a shit about.

Zardoz!—A giant floating stone head intones that "The Gun is Good, The Penis is Evil", prompting Sean Connery in a bright red diaper to do righteous battle against immortal hippies.

So, I ask you, my legion of loyal fans, is there any among these that you would see as the next review? Leave your request in the comments. I won’t actually pay any attention, but at least you can feel a sense of accomplishment pretending that I read your comment.

I’m kidding about that, of course. I don’t have any fans.

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!