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.

This is How You DON'T Play Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition

This is How You Don't Play Mass Effect 3

Okay, I know this isn't the usual fare around here, but the point is to make fun of what's bad and its makers who should also feel bad, right? So here's my epic 2 1/2 hour takedown of DarkSydePhil's unwatchably bad playthrough of Mass Effect 3. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you This is How You Don't Play Mass Effect 3:

Fifty Shades of Gray

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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.

Fire From Below

No, not Fire Down Below. That one is lunkheaded action movie has-been-who-never-shoulda-been pompous religious nutjob Steven Seagal's brain-dead pseudo-environmentalist film. This one is lunkheaded action movie has-been-who-never-shoulda-been pompous religious nutjob Kevin Sorbo's brain-dead pseudo-environmentalist film. Put these two knuckleheads together and the gravity well of anti-acting will warp the very fabric of spacetime.

I recommend Fire From Below for anyone who needs to recalibrate her brain's logic circuits by watching something so preposterous it forces a master reset. This is a Siffy movie about sentient fire that's attracted to water and stalks and murders people like a flying snake monster. Yes, fire. Attracted to water.

Four words that are the harbingers of your doom: directed by Jim Wynorski. The man is such a titanic asshole that he slags people on the Internet who praise his films and is truly one of the world's lamest directors, because he always sucks in the same way and has none of the charming dedication to making artistic films despite an utter lack of artistic talent: your Ed Woods, your Bruno Matteis, your Neil Breens. Still, Sorbo's acting as executive producer makes the film even shittier. Is there nothing this man can't ruin? And since he's executive producer, how the hell did he allow himself to go on camera with his hair like that?

The credits hold moar terrors. Apparently two different people play "the sheriff", as displayed on screen. Either that, or the people who made this movie don't know how credits work. Then we get "Burton Gilliam as 'Bubba'". Yes, "Bubba" is in quotation marks. Now first, there's never been a good movie with a character named Bubba, nor shall there ever be. Second, who the fuck is Burton Gilliam? Or is the character and not the actor being spotlighted? The character with a stupid name, a dirty hat, and a face like a road accident, who exists solely to sexual harass a woman and then take a piss on camera before being blowed up real gud.

So the bad guy in the movie is a sleazy corporate executive type, who develops fire that zeros in on moisture because that somehow makes it specifically target people. Which are the only things you typically encounter that have any moisture in them. We're introduced to him walking up and down the same hallway since dressing a set costs money, along with the worst actor in the movie, and that's saying something. Your old pal Carl Eusebius was genuinely shocked to find that this woman--one Alex Meneses--had been acting for 15 years before this movie and had 47 credits on the IMdb. It must be some kind of achievement to do something professionally for that damn long and still be so fucking bad at it. She can barely recite Wynorski's ridiculous pseudoscientific gobbledygook in her remarkably robotic fashion. She only appears as a human being in scenes where she's being sexually harassed by Bubba or very obviously emoting that she still has a thing for old flame Sorbo, because if there are two attractive women in a Kevin Sorbo movie they both have to be his love interest, even if he never gives Meneses the time of day. I'm sure she pulls off the former because she doesn't have to act, per se; a woman who looks like Meneses undoubtedly has to fend off unwanted come-ons from cretinous lechers all the time. But my God, I hope that's not the same reason she pulls off the latter......

The fire kills a bunch of expendable meat in scenes we don't give a fuck about, including a hilarious attack on a boat in the middle of the lake that has the boat mostly, but in the end not quite, outrunning the fire. One woman in the boat, seeing the fire advancing menacingly on them, asks, "What's that?" What's that? It's fire, you silly bitch! I know the CGI in this movie is fucking awful, but Jesus, it's orange and crackling and hot. I'm glad they establish the fire is attracted to moisture, that way we get why it's going after the people. Who are currently on a lake. Then everyone in the town dies because of, uh, poison gas or something, so I'm glad we were introduced to a few of the townspeople in one scene. That way, the next scene in which they appear (you know, the one where they're all dead), we like care and stuff. Pathos, etc. Then the military shows up, and boy your old pal Carl Eusebius starts to get mad.

See, I really hate it when films and television get the military wrong. I don't know why that's one of my beefs, but it is. When they have military characters say and do things no one in the military would ever say or do, at least not without consequences. It takes me out of the film's world immediately. And it's usually laaaaaaazzzzzzzyyyyyyyy. It's not that hard to get this shit right, if you care. But if there's one thing Jim Wynorski doesn't care about, it's logic, coherence, pacing, tone, artistic integrity, consistency, drama, emotional resonance, avoidance of cliche, and attention to detail.

I have to go back to Battlestar Galactica again, because it fucking owns. That's getting the military right. One of my favorite scenes has Lee Adama, a member of Galactica's crew, being told by a member of the Pegasus crew that Galactica must follow one of Pegasus's policies. Lee responds that Galactica has its own commander and that that is who he takes his orders from. This is an excellent example of something called "chain of command", which the military takes very fucking seriously. It means that even though Pegasus's commander is an admiral, and thus outranks Galactica's commander, the Pegasus commander can't give orders directly to the crew of Galactica. What she could do is order Galactica's commander to tell his crew to do what she wants, but she can't issue those orders directly to them, despite her superior rank. Having a high rank doesn't automatically give you authority over everyone you encounter. The military has spent a very long time figuring out why chain of command is a good idea, which is why pretty much every large organization has adopted it.

Incidentally, it's one thing that bugged the shit out of me on Star Trek. Despite the fact that the original show was made by veterans and portrayed an essentially military organization, it ignored military policies that would prevent some of the absurd situations the crew of the Enterprise found themselves in. An even better example is The Next Generation episode "Disaster", in which there are only 3 people on the bridge at the time the titular catastrophe shuts down all communication and nearly all movement on the ship. Those 3 people? The navigation officer, the psychotherapist, and a high ranking enlisted man. Much is made of the fact that, because of this emergency, the psychotherapist is now in command of the ship, despite her having absolutely no experience or training of any kind that is any way relevant, simply because her rank is higher than the navigation officer's. This is stupid, of course, because in any 20th century military, the navigator would be in charge, because she's what's known as a line officer (as in, in line to command) and so has (get this) training in how to command. It's almost as if the military considered, or has even experienced, such situations and formulated specific policies to prevent such a ludicrous situation as the goddamned shrink being in charge of the ship.

This movie? This movie has a general (that's a high rank, folks, meaning he's been in the Army a long time) walking around outside without his cover on. ("Cover" is military-speak for "hat".) It has a colonel meeting the general and not saluting him (no) or even greeting him at all (no no no) and immediately walking next to him to his right (no no no no no no no, inferiors walk on their superiors' left). It has an army major wearing a mustache (no, only the Air Force allows mustaches, and by tradition officers don't wear them anyway), and he looks like he's 70 years old, which puts him a good 20 years older than any major could still be in the Army. And he's supposed to be some kind of bigwig power player who gets calls from US senators. (Major is way too low a rank to be chatting up people in Congress.) At one point the general orders his man to "Call the Navy". Call the Navy! Yeah, just phone "the Navy" right up. The Navy, you know, that tiny office of the American government consisting of some 320,000 people. And the guy replies, "Done." Done? Who the fuck are you gonna call? This isn't the Ghostbusters office, son. The US Navy is just a tad bigger. You might want to narrow that down a bit.

God, I wished they'd filmed that scene: "Hello and thank you for calling the Navy. If you need the services of an aircraft carrier, please press 1. If your nuclear ballistic missile submarine is defective, press 2...."

Then the colonel introduces to world-renowned geologist Seagal Sorbo two majors...who are both wearing lieutenant colonel's insignia you dickheads, you horrible dickheads! And these lieutenant colonels majors keep calling Sorbo "Sir!" like they're just out of boot. Sorbo's all, "Just call me whatever the hell my name is in this movie" and they're all, "Yessir! I mean....whatever your name is." Haha, I get it, it's cute, army guys are dumb and can't stop calling people sir. Fuck you, Wynorski. Look, enlisted guys wouldn't do that anyway, because the people we trust to go to the desert and shoot brown people in the name of freedom normally have a few brain cells to rub together and so actually know who is to be addressed as "sir" and who isn't. But these guys are officers. That means they graduated from college. In fact they're lieutenant colonels majors, meaning most of the people they meet in their professional lives call them sir. And Sorbo isn't even in the military. Our fine Imperial stormtroopers are perfectly capable of applying military ways of doing things to military people and not applying those ways to people who aren't. Please stop portraying them as so dumb and single-minded that they can't tell the difference, Jim Wynorski, you fucking wanker.

So the colonel, Sorbo, Love Interest, Cranky White Dude, and Black Guy Who Will Die First find the source of the sentient fire. There's an explosion, killing Black Guy Who Dies First before he even gets any lines, while the palefaces run away. Blah blah stuff happens, then it's time to go back to the source of the fire and blow it up real gud. Yes, you defeat the fire by blowing it up with bombs, very scienmatifical. This is where the two lieutenant colonels majors show up, and so they and Sorbo head down into the caves to do what men do. Love Interest demands to accompany Sorbo to make sure he doesn't cock up the whole business, but he talks her down: "Honey, which one of us is the man, here? I do the hero stuff, you stand around looking concerned." Cranky White Dude dies entirely due to his own idiocy, but everyone else makes it out just in time, roll credits, I hate this movie.

Game Over, Man

RIP Private Hudson. You finally got out of this chickenshit outfit.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer

In The Crow: Wicked Prayer, John Connor comes back from the dead as the world's lamest mime in an attempt to stop Angel from having sex with Tara "New-FOUND-land" Reid in order to become Satan, while Dennis Hopper speaks in offensive gangsta patois in his most embarrassing performance of the last five minutes.

Now the original Crow really wasn't that good. I'll pause for a moment while all the goths in the audience immediately cut themselves in rage. (That's why I don't mind insulting goths. They'll hurt themselves instead of me.) Okay, now calm down, turn down the Robert Smith record, and listen to your old pal Carl Eusebius while contemplating the meaninglessness of it all as you crawl in your skin or whatever. The Crow was carried past its weak script and threadbare characters by a charismatic lead. It's got great visuals, fine performances by genre veterans Winston Zeddemore, Kurn, and Luther, and an effective pop soundtrack for its time. It's about a gang of criminals that murder Bruce Lee's Son and his girlfriend. Lee Jr. is so badass that he is resurrected a year later by the titular avian to bring the pain to those responsible. (Girlfriend, despite being raped and dying more slowly and painfully than Lee Jr., lacks the requisite penis necessary for being spectrally reanimated by a bird.) Not complicated or deep, but artistically shot and skillfully done, the film was anchored by an intense if not especially accomplished central performance. All in all, not a bad way to spend 100 minutes.

And Bai Ling doesn't even have to take her clothes off.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer is the third (yes, third) sequel to a film that died along with its star. Lacking any identity of its own, it alternately shamelessly apes the original film and totally undercuts it. Wisely, the filmmakers elected to steal the weakest elements of the original while jettisoning all the artistry and charisma that made it work. So the movie takes place in the American southwest instead of an unnamed Rust Belt city where it's constantly night and almost always raining. (Why yes, the original Crow was directed by Alex Proyas. How did you know?) That's right, a revenant dressed entirely in black and wearing white face-paint is wandering around the goddamn desert in the full light of day. Oh, and instead of Bruce Lee's Son, they got the charisma-free John Connor, who somehow became a worse actor as he grew up. I'm beginning to doubt that he's going to save us from the machine overlords.

This movie does not have fine performances. Instead, it has Bunny Lebowski showing everyone that she's just as terrible playing a brain-dead hillbilly slut as she was playing a brilliant archeologist, and also that she's not anywhere near as weirdly exotic and sexy as Bai Ling. When you make a clothed Bai Ling's acting look good by comparison, you need to re-think your career choice. It also has Angel doing the worst over-the-top Jack Nicholson impersonation this side of Christian Slater. I guess the default setting for your typical bad actor who's getting no direction and playing a character with no backstory, motivation, or recognizably human emotion is to "do Jack", when what they really oughtta do is to do Cage.

The plot of Wicked Prayer is...well, it's the same as the plot of The Crow, really, only dumber and immensely moar confusing. We start with Angel breaking out of his prison chain gang. In his quest to become Satan (incidentally, the career my guidance counselor suggested for me in high school), Angel gets his old gang together: Bunny Lebowski, Tank, Washed-Up MMA Champion, and That Guy I've Seen Somewhere. Being the worst Satanists ever, they capture a Catholic priest and douse him with gasoline and then just leave, without telling him his mother sucks cocks in Hell or anything. They go to the podunk town that John Connor and his hot Quebecois girlfriend are just about to leave on account of some Indian-white miner tension that never has any impact on the events to come. The gang gets one look at JC's godawful hairstyle and hangs both him and his French-Canadian squeeze, but not before Bunny cuts out the latter's (obviously fake plastic) eyeballs and sticks them into her own noggin. (Needless to say, the movie can't afford a shot of Bunny putting these clearly bogus orbs into her face, so you'll just have to trust the movie that this happens.) So now she can see the future, or the past, or something, and yes, Bunny Lebowski has the creepy witch/villain's girlfriend role that Bai Ling had in the original, though they drop the whole incest angle because, hey, that was bizarre and memorable and we'll have none of that in this movie, thank you very much. JC tries in vain to emote impotent rage and crushing sadness after Bunny stabs his Quebecois Indian girlfriend, and he's so bad at it that Angel kills him.

After Tank and W-UMMAC colossally fail at their simple task of "take the corpses into the desert and burn them", JC comes back to life, this time without waiting 3 days. After dragging his girlfriend's corpse back to her bed, he's horrified at his reflection (even though he was hanged so he doesn't even have a mark on his face) and tries to shoot himself, to find that he's now an indestructible zombie. So of course he paints his face in a terrible imitation of Bruce Lee's Son.

Now I know what you're thinking: Did he fire six shots, or only five? I mean, you're thinking, "Gee Carl Eusebius, you sexy beast you, this sure sounds an awful lot like a shitty rehash of the original." And you'd be right, of course. I am damn sexy. But now the movie introduces its original elements, which are even more terrible than its rip-offs. JC, you see, doesn't wanna be a warrior. He hates his powers, doesn't seem to desire revenge, and spends much of the movie whining about being brought back to life. "I'm afraid of what I've become." Uh...why? We're 45 minutes into the film's expansive 99- minute running time, and you've done jack shit! What exactly have you become? At one point he even says, "I wanna die." What the fuck kind of undead avenger is this guy? I kept waiting for the Crow to take its power back. Caw! God, what a pussy! Caw! Go back to the grave, shitnugget! Caw!

Finally, almost halfway through the film, JC confronts Guy I've Seen Somewhere, who understandably is less than intimidated by JC's bad make-up and petulant-teenager glare. When Bruce Lee's Son looked at his killers before he brought the pain, he was genuinely disturbing. The rage was seething and intense, but also cold and distant, as if the horrors that awaited these men were inevitable. John Connor looks like Mom just told him he can't go out on Friday night. I can't stress enough how terrible JC is in this movie. The film never really had a chance to work, but he absolutely torpedoes it with Costnerian finesse, alternately wildly overacting and grumbling out his lines like he's annoyed with the director for pointing the camera at him. He doesn't project anywhere near the emotion, charisma, and badassery necessary to pull off a man so hungry for vengeance that even death itself can't stop him. And he's done no favors by being a foot shorter and proportionally smaller than all of his enemies, especially Angel, which the director doesn't even attempt to hide. If you're going to be a short guy kicking everybody's ass on film, you either have to be the scrappy underdog who wins through guile rather than brute force, or Joe Pesci. Because otherwise, it looks ridiculous onscreen.

The movie then rushes to get through the rest of its "plot". JC somewhat implausibly defeats W-UMMAC in a martial arts fight after W-UMMAC starts bashing up a party with a baseball bat (along with the film's continuity, as the mask he's wearing alternately appears and disappears between shots). Bunny somehow knows the Crow is JC's weakness, despite none of the villains even knowing he was back from the grave until this scene, so they kill the Crow, making our whiny hero even more pathetic and ineffective and so Angel kicks his ass. Then they just leave again, because if they kill him while he's powerless, then the bad guys would win and the movie would be over. They reach the main Satanic temple run by Dennis Hopper, who marries the unholy couple and then gets stabbed by Bunny for reasons that are explained in a flashback that absolutely no one on Earth cares about at this point. Angel becomes Satan, but he has to boink Bunny to make it permanent, because otherwise the bad guys would win and the movie would be over. JC shows up, but he still sucks so Angel kicks his ass again, while a bunch of JC's Indian friends kill Tank in a scene so filled with boredom you'll glance over at the screen and sigh wearily. For his part, Angel, instead of taking Bunny right then and there in the Satanic temple and making himself permanently Satan--I mean, it's a Satanic temple, isn't it?--decides he and Bunny have to drive somewhere else entirely in order to do the deed. Because if they just did it right now the bad guys would--well, you get the picture.

JC, despite being crucified by SatAngel (he's playing "Jimmy Cuervo" in this movie, so the ham-handed Christ allegory is the movie's, not mine) is Only Resting, so he jumps in his stolen car and gives pursuit. (Things a reanimated spirit should never do: drive a car.) He catches up to Angel and gets his ass kicked yet again, because he's powerless without the Crow and Angel is Satan. (Ignore the fact that JC got pretty thrashed by W-UMMAC when he still had the Crow's power, at least until the script said it was time for him to win.) Then Danny Trejo joins the illustrious ranks of Hispanic Guys Playing American Indians Because Who'll Know the Difference, Right? when he leads an embarrassing "Indian" dance to bring the Crow back to life, even though the movie earlier claimed that the Crow's power comes from the Christian God. Okay, the original film's mythology was pretty vague, but it was pretty clearly not Judeo-Christian. We're a long way from the original's "Stop me if you've heard this one: Jesus Christ walks into a hotel. He hands the innkeeper three nails and asks, 'Can you put me up for the night?'" Okay, movie, just go back to aping the first film. Yes, you suck at that, too, but it's far better than your attempts at being original.

Blah blah, the Crow's back, JC starts no-selling Angel's attacks and kills him, and the Sun comes up, which I guess makes Bunny blind since now her plastic eyeballs don't work anymore(?). The End.

The Crow: Wicked Prayer is a shitty cash-in on the tragic death of a break-out movie star that showcases the worst of everyone involved in making it, including people that we know are capable of better and Tara Reid. Fuck this movie with seventeen crow beaks.