Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Silent Hill: Revelation’ (2012)

The movie “Silent Hill” has been a thorn in my side ever since it was released — first because it wasn’t good, and then because people kept citing it as the one video-game-based movie that was good. WHICH IT WASN’T. It may have been the least not-good of the bunch, but to call it “good” is a high compliment, by which I mean a compliment you can only make if you’re high.

I am vindicated by the sequel, “Silent Hill: Revelation.” Everyone agrees that this one is terrible, and according to the Internet’s Law of Retroactive Criticism, that means the original is terrible, too, having been ruined by the sequel through an anomaly in the space-time continuum unfamiliar to scientists but known to fanboys as the George Lucas Principle. So I was right all along, and everyone can eat it.

“Silent Hill: Revelation” picks up the story of “Silent Hill” six years later, or five years and eleven months after we forgot every detail of it. The little girl who was missing in that film, Sharon, is now 18 and named Heather (Adelaide Clemens), and she does not remember anything about her past. One of the things she does not remember, for example, is that a cult from the town of Silent Hill is looking for her so they can sacrifice her or impregnate her or whatever, because she’s the Chosen One or the fulfillment of prophecy or something. Heather and her dad, Harry (Sean Bean), have moved around a lot, and Heather thinks it’s because he killed somebody in self-defense and is running from the law, but the real reason is the cult thing. Heather’s mom (Radha Mitchell) is still trapped in another dimension, but Harry can see her in a mirror sometimes, so that’s nice.

Oh! I forgot to tell you: there are other dimensions in these movies. You can tell you’re in the bad dimension because there’s, say, a guy with a triangle for a head who wants to kill you, or a guy with circular saw blades protruding from his skull who wants to kill you. The way that you pass from our dimension to the bad dimension is by the screenplay just deciding to put you there sometimes. That is also how you travel back.

So anyway, Heather keeps popping back and forth between dimensions. One minute her high school hallway looks normal; the next minute it’s a decrepit cavern with faceless monsters lunging at her, and then also in some ways not a normal high school hallway. (No drugs.) Heather thinks she’s going insane, losing the ability to distinguish between dreams and reality. A classmate named Vincent (Kit Harington) tells her that dreams ARE reality, just different realities from the one you’re used to. This is a super-helpful thing to say to someone who’s afraid she’s losing her mind.

Heather is also afraid she’s being followed by a mysterious man, though this fear turns out to be well founded. The man is a private investigator hired by Silent Hill’s most popular cult to find Heather and tell her the truth about her past. The cult is hoping Heather will come back to Silent Hill on her own once she knows everything, but just to sweeten the pot, they abduct her father and write “COME TO SILENT HILL” on the wall in his blood. The persuasive technique is effective.

Heather heads for Silent Hill, accompanied by Vincent, even though Heather just met him at school today and doesn’t like strangers, or even people in general. (The movie went pretty well out of its way to establish this.) As they travel, Heather combs through the Silent Hill-related notebooks her father left behind and learns the whole story, not to mention a great deal about her father’s excellent penmanship.

Here’s where it gets confusing. By “here” I mean “when you decided to watch this movie.” Years ago, the cult in Silent Hill burned a little girl named Alessa who they thought was a witch, but she didn’t die, she just got really angry and created the hell dimension with the monsters. THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD NOT BURN CHILDREN (or if you do, make sure you finish the job). But before Alessa turned completely into an evil demon, the last innocent part of her soul was transferred to a random newborn infant, who turned out to be Sharon/Heather, and they can’t destroy Alessa until she’s made whole again, which I guess means mushing her and Heather together. And they can’t just abduct Heather and drag her to Silent Hill — she has to go willingly, because the movie said so.

Then it turns out Vincent is a child of the cult who escaped from Silent Hill for the purpose of luring Heather back. But now that he’s met Heather and likes her, he feels bad. Totes sorry. Heather wanders though Silent Hill searching for the other half of a medallion she found in her dad’s stuff, encountering various monsters in the process in a way that is suspiciously similar to a video game. There is no rhyme or reason to when these monsters appear, or what tactics they use to harass Heather, which probably means the answer is “You’d know if you played teh video games!!!1!!” (This is the answer to a lot of questions lately.)

When Heather at last comes face to face with Alessa, she is able to overcome Alessa’s evilness with her own goodness. To be precise, she hugs Alessa very tight, and Alessa disintegrates. Hugging was her kryptonite! Lest you think the movie would end with such an anticlimax, however, Heather then has to face Vincent’s mother, the cult’s priestess, played by Trinity from “The Matrix” in an Edgar Winter wig. The way Heather defeats her is by standing aside and letting the Triangle Head monster destroy her. Heather’s main powers, then, are hugging and getting out of the way. Is that how it is in the video game, too? That doesn’t sound very exciting, but if it isn’t, then I guess the movie is a faithful adaptation.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Adelaide clemens, Eric d. snider, Eric's bad movies, John Snow, Kit harington, Radha Mitchell, Sean bean, Silent Hill, Silent hill: revelation

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Suburban Commando’ (1991)

In 2012, professional wrestler and long-haired bald man Hulk Hogan was embarrassed when a video surfaced of him doing sexies with a lady who wasn’t his wife. I didn’t see the video in question — when it comes to wrestler-based pornography, I prefer the subtlety of Randy Savage’s “Snap Into a Slim Jim” — but it’s hard to imagine it was any more degrading than Hulk’s “Suburban Commando,” which was actually released in movie theaters.

This was Hulk Hogan’s second starring vehicle (after “No Holds Barred”), but it was the first time he’d played something other than a pro wrestler. He is Shep Ramsey, an intergalactic space soldier, possibly a mercenary, who zooms around the universe killing bad guys. He wears a grey unitard, plus silver gauntlets and boots, a bandolier and utility belt, and a codpiece. He looks like a pro wrestler who is going to Comic-Con.

Our introduction to Shep Ramsey comes when he infiltrates the evil Gen. Suitor’s spaceship to rescue a foreign planet’s president, then blows up the ship and saves only himself. For this abject failure he is mildly chewed out by his superior officer, who suggests that maybe Shep is a bit stressed from overwork. “I am NOT stressed out!!” Shep replies angrily. To emphasize how not stressed out he is, he punches his spaceship’s power console, thus destroying it and forcing an emergency landing on Earth, where he’ll have to wait for six weeks while his ship recharges itself. He complains about all of this as though there were a single element of it that is not completely his own fault.

This sounds like the setup for a comedy about an incompetent boob who keeps screwing things up but is rewarded anyway, like “MacGruber” or “Brett Ratner.” But “Suburban Commando” insists that Shep Ramsey is a hero worthy of admiration and praise, accompanying his every action with a valiant musical score. Maybe “Suburban Commando” didn’t see the first few scenes of “Suburban Commando”? In any event, now Shep is in generic American suburbia as the opening credits roll. Since it is 1991, these credits play under an excruciatingly white rap song, which was the style at the time.

So the deal is that Shep Ramsey will have to “blend in” on Earth for a few weeks, and since he is an alien he will misunderstand certain elements of human culture, and these misunderstandings will result in widespread hilarity leading to learning and growth. The only question is whether any of it will be funny or entertaining. The answer is no. It was hardly even a question, but I wanted to be fair.

Shep hides his damaged spaceship and disguises himself in Earthling clothes stolen from a mean man who mistreats his dog and thus deserves to have his clothes stolen. (That’s straight out of Leviticus.) Strolling through whatever town this is, Shep sees a flier on a telephone pole: “Apartment for Rent,” with an arrow pointing to the right. No address or anything, just “Apartment for Rent” and an arrow. This is very, very subtle advertising, but it’s enough for Shep to go directly to the right house a couple streets over. It is also a signifier that the people who made this film were, like Shep Ramsey, alien visitors unfamiliar with the fundamentals of Earth life.

The house belongs to the Wilcox family, headed by wimpy architect dad Charlie (Christopher Lloyd) and gaunt pop-eyed mom Jenny (Shelley Duvall), with a couple of kids who don’t matter. (Whatever other faults this film has, at least it is not about Hulk Hogan befriending children and teaching them valuable life lessons. That’s the next one, “Mr. Nanny.”) They’re renting out what used to be Charlie’s workshop but which Jenny has converted into a homey apartment. She did it all in one day, while Charlie was at work, without telling him first, all of which is impressive on a number of levels.

Charlie is suspicious of this huge, weird stranger with the bright yellow hair and cartoon mustache, but he soon comes to realize Shep’s value, which is that he is big and strong and can intimidate bullies. Yes, despite being a grown man with a good job and a family, Charlie is regularly harassed by other grown men in his neighborhood who park their cars in front of his driveway, mock him, and generally treat him like the wimp he is. His boss mistreats him, too. Charlie is a George McFly type, only instead of being taught to stand up for himself by his time-traveling son, he learns confidence from a tan, oily spaceman.

Interspersed with scenes of Shep being a positive influence on Charlie are scenes of Shep being a dimwitted ox. He assaults the mailman and the paperboy because he thinks they are enemy combatants attacking the Wilcox home. He walks past a video arcade and thinks the games depict actual space battles, and that for some reason children are entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing the galaxy’s military force. He sees a street mime performing the “trapped in a box” thing and tries to free him from his invisible cage. The mime is performing at night on a side street in front of zero people, by the way — again, I think the filmmakers had heard of certain things that occur on planet Earth and wanted to include them in their movie even though they didn’t know the context in which they normally occur. This is what happens when you let pro wrestlers and aliens make movies together.

“Suburban Commando” can be seen on YouTube in its entirety…

Read the previous installment of Eric’s Bad Movies: “Sasquatch”

Categories: Columns

Tags: Christopher Lloyd, Eric d. snider, Eric's bad movies, Hulk Hogan, Shelley Duvall, Suburban commando

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Barney’s Great Adventure’ (1998)

Even the most desensitized aficionados of cinematic perversion cringe at the thought of “Barney’s Great Adventure,” a terrifying drama about three children who foolishly tamper with the dark powers of “imagination” and thereby conjure into existence an anthropomorphic dinosaur whose mirthless playtime revelry leaves them psychologically scarred and unable to cope with the realities of life. Draw near, if you dare, and pay heed as I relate the horrific tale.

The tone is established by the song that plays over the opening credits, in which young listeners are given this dangerous advice:

“If Barney the dinosaur
Comes knocking on your front door
Just go and play with him
Find your way with him
To the world of imagination.”

Having told impressionable viewers that they ought to run off with anyone who comes to their house claiming to be a TV dinosaur, the film begins its grim story in earnest.

It is summertime, and a family is headed to Grandma and Grandpa’s farm in upstate New York, where Mom and Dad will leave the kids for a week while they go off and enjoy some time far, far away from their children. The boy, Cody (Trevor Morgan), is a miserable little bastard who HATES the boring farm and is “too cool” to play along when his younger sister, Abby (Diana Rice), tries to engage him in conversation with her stuffed Barney doll. Cody absolutely despises imagination, creativity, and joy. Cody and Abby have a baby brother who doesn’t matter and I don’t know why he’s in the movie. Also, Abby has brought along her friend, Marcella (Kyla Pratt), who is African American and is in the movie so that the movie wouldn’t only be about white people.

Fun fact: Every person who appears in this movie is now a heroin addict!

As soon as they get to the farm, Cody runs off with the Barney doll and hides it in the bathtub. Has he realized that the doll is a pernicious token of evil? No, he is just being a brat. Abby and Marcella, unable to find the toy, use their imagination — whereupon the shower turns itself on, and suddenly, there in the place where the doll had been stands Barney himself. The girls summoned him, in much the same way that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in the bathroom mirror will make Bloody Mary appear, or the way that mentioning “Star Wars” and hockey while eating Cheetos will conjure Kevin Smith.

Surely this is the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to these children, right? I mean, it’s not even close, right? No matter what trauma or fear the kids might have experienced heretofore, it would be nothing compared to the shock of finding a fictional character standing in their grandparents’ shower.

But Barney, whimsical demon-spawn that he is, just laughs and asks for a towel. Appearing in bathrooms is not unusual for Barney the purple talking dinosaur! Why, sometimes he’ll show up in a child’s dark closet or under its bed in the middle of the night, just for kicks. Nothing delights Barney more than surprising the pee — the very pee — out of the children who love him.

Fun fact: To create the unique sound of Barney’s giggle, audio engineers mixed recordings of geese, donkeys, and the screams of damned souls in Hell!

Abby and Marcella are overjoyed to meet their idol, and instantly agree to do his bidding, whatever it may be, all hail to Barney. Cody remains dedicated to being surly. “Look, pal,” he says. “Real dinosaurs don’t talk.” HE’S GOT YOU THERE, YOU WIDE-BOTTOMED HARBINGER OF SORROW! But Barney replies, “I’m as real as your imagination!” — which 1) isn’t an answer and 2) means he is not real at all, since things that exist in one’s imagination are, by definition, imaginary. (To be fair, Barney is not accustomed to having existential arguments with anyone over the age of 5.)

Cody refuses to believe Barney is real. “If you’re here because of my imagination, then you’re about to disappear!” he exclaims, demonstrating more logical reasoning than anyone else so far. He closes his eyes and says, “I do not believe in you.” But it doesn’t work. Once summoned, Barney cannot be destroyed. “That’s OK, Cody,” the immortal plush reptile says. “I believe in you!”

Fun fact: In ancient Sumerian legend, Barney was a vengeance god who escorted disobedient children to the underworld, where he feasted on their flesh for eternity!

What transpires next, occupying the remainder of the film, is an adventure so nightmarish and surreal it would make Luis Buñuel throw up in his hat. A shooting star passes overhead and delivers a large, basketball-sized egg to the barn. Barney and the kids find the space egg and want to know what’s inside it, and though the movie is very pro-imagination, in this case it is necessary to use actual science. So they take the egg to a kooky lady named Mrs. Goldfinch, who has a house in the woods that serves as both a library and an egg museum. She is the local expert on birds, eggs, and the Dewey decimal system.

Mrs. Goldfinch and Barney and the kids sing a song about the mystery of the egg as they bounce merrily through the place, pulling books off shelves and making guesses. (“Maybe it’s a chimpanzee!” says one of the kids, stupidly.) At last the answer is revealed by one of the books: the egg contains a Dreammaker! Nobody knows what that is, but it sounds nice. It will hatch once the five rings on the shell change color, but only if the kids have returned it to the barn by then. That ought to be a very simple task, and it would be in the real world. In this world, however, all the people responsible for transporting the egg back to the barn are clumsy and butterfingered, and the egg itself is apparently coated with a lubricant, because it is CONSTANTLY getting away from them.

Doh! I dropped the egg and it rolled down the hill into the back of a wagon! Zoing! Now the wagon is driving into town, right in the middle of the Merrivale Apple Day Festival! Yikes! I got a hold of the egg, but then it flew out of my hands and landed in the marching band’s tuba, and the tuba player blasted a really strong note and blew the egg across the street through the open door of that fancy French restaurant! This egg is gigantic, yet invisible to everyone except us and evidently as light as a feather!

Do you like movies where the characters have to keep doing essentially the same thing over and over again? Of course not. Nobody does. The fiends who made “Barney’s Great Adventure,” in addition to disregarding the customary meanings of the words “great” and “adventure,” also intentionally devised a story that cannot be enjoyed. It is a Sisyphean ordeal, if Sisyphus had occasionally paused from his labors to sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” and other songs from the public domain.

Fun fact: Even though it was an American production, “Barney’s Great Adventure” had to be filmed in Canada because of strict anti-obscenity regulations!

Cody gets over his aversion to imagination, at one point imagining an ordinary log into a biplane so that he, the girls, and Barney can catch up with the hot air balloon that now has the space egg. (Don’t ask.) The egg is recovered and taken back to the barn, where it hatches into an ALF-looking thing that shows everybody their dreams. Which seems pretty useless, since people generally already know what their own dreams are. And not to get technical, but if all you do is show people’s dreams, you’re not really a Dream maker, are you? Just one more damnable lie from this grueling, hell-spawned torment masquerading as a children’s movie.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Barney's Great Adventure, Eric's bad movies, WTF

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Mr. Hush’

If all I did was tell you what happens in “Mr. Hush,” you might think it was a profoundly unsettling horror film in which the main character endures awful torment and heartbreak. You might think there was no way you could subject yourself to such a grueling experience. Fortunately, “Mr. Hush” is executed with such comical ineptitude that none of the protagonist’s torment feels authentic, let alone troubling. It’s actually a fairly insulting disservice to all the real people whose wives and girlfriends have been murdered by vampires.

I was initially reluctant to make fun of “Mr. Hush” because I assumed from watching it that it was made by an illiterate child who had never seen a movie before, starring people who were not actors, using a camera that was really just a cardboard box with a lens taped to it. The performances are especially ludicrous. Every line sounds like the actors are reading it for the first time, as if the audio was recorded at the table read. But it turns out most of them ARE actors. They have been in other movies and television shows! And the writer-director, David Lee Madison, is a grown man who can read. So game on.

We meet Holland Price (Brad Loree), his wife, Julie (Jessica Cameron), and their young daughter, Amy (Megan Heckman), at a time of great domestic tranquility. They have pleasant family interactions from a template the filmmaker copied out of a screenwriting textbook, with details inserted to provide exposition. “Are you looking forward to [upcoming event]?” “Yes, I am! It always reminds me of [event from my past].” That sort of thing. The Prices are very happy together, united by their shared inability to recite basic, mundane dialogue in a manner that resembles human speech. The wife, in particular, looks like January Jones yet is somehow a worse actress, even though that is not possible.

On Halloween night, a priest (Edward X. Young) shows up at the Price home asking to use the phone. The priest has the least convincing Irish accent ever recorded, and is clearly not a priest but a psycho killer. Anyone dumb enough to let him into their house deserves to be murdered. Sure enough, the priest slits Julie’s throat right in front of Holland — which should be dreadful but is instead hilarious thanks to the clumsy staging and over-the-top acting. It’s a powerful reminder that the line separating tragedy from comedy is so thin it can be snapped by one actor shrieking “Noooooooooo!” at the top of his lungs.

The killer says “what’s left of” Holland’s daughter is upstairs, so he rushes into her room and cries “Nooooooooo!” again. (Conservative estimates put the number of times he cries “Nooooooooo!” in this movie at approximately 45,000.) Presumably poor li’l Amy is dead, though the movie has the decency not to show her body, just Holland collapsing on her bed in grief. Bonus point for you, movie!

Then it is 10 years later. Holland is now a restaurant dishwasher who lives in a tent in the woods with his buddy Donald (Tim Dougherty). No explanation is given for the unorthodox living situation; we are left to infer that Holland was so devastated by the loss of his family that he can no longer bear to live indoors. He has grown a wig of long, silver hair that hangs over his face. He looks like Alec Baldwin playing a burned-out hippie in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

There is a nice waitress at the restaurant named Debbie (Connie Giordano). It seems possible that Holland and Debbie will have a romance. Holland and Donald have this conversation about it:

DONALD: Maybe some things are just meant to be.
HOLLAND: What’s meant to be?
DONALD: You two bein’ together.
HOLLAND: Hey, s***-for-brains. My wife was murdered. Was that ‘meant to be’?
DONALD: Yeah, I’m sorry. It just breaks my heart seeing you sad and suffering all the time. You know, I had a wife once, too. She was the love of MY life. One night she comes home, tells me she has a headache. Give her a couple aspirin, made her a cup of tea, rubbed her head till she went to sleep. Yeah, she didn’t wake up in the morning. No one stole her from me, but she’s gone just the same.
HOLLAND: (handing him a beer) Sorry, man.

In other words, “You’re not the only one with a dead wife, JERK!” But Holland remains surly, with a real chip on his shoulder over his family being murdered.

Nonetheless, he starts warming up to Debbie, and he reveals his tragic history to her. “On Halloween night, I opened the door of our house to a lunatic,” he begins. Then he recounts the entire incident. The movie makes us listen to his whole speech, as if having seen the events with our own eyes weren’t enough. (“Remember when this happened??” the movie seems to say. “From 20 minutes ago?? REMEMBER???”) He ends with, “I never spoke of this to anyone,” which we know isn’t true because he told Donald, and presumably the police. David Lee Madison probably heard somebody say “I never spoke of this to anyone” in a movie once and thought it sounded very dramatic, so he included it in his own movie even though it didn’t fit.

Speaking of people not being good at what they do, it is only here that we learn a crucial detail of the earlier incident: li’l Amy wasn’t killed; she was just GONE, taken, missing. Holland has been searching for her ever since. We assumed she was dead because the murderer basically said as much, and because Madison didn’t give us a full view of her bedroom when Holland rushed upstairs to rescue her. Remember how we thought the movie was being tasteful? No, it was just being incompetent. Bonus point revoked.

Holland and Debbie start dating, and what happens next is impossible not to laugh at. I’m sorry, but it is. One night the doorbell rings, Debbie goes to answer it, and the SAME GUY is there to slit her throat, right in front of Holland. It has happened again. Here we are reminded of the old adage: “Slit my wife or girlfriend’s throat in front of me once, shame on you. Slit my wife or girlfriend’s throat in front of me twice, shame on me.”

Obviously, the killer is a vampire who has sworn vengeance on Holland’s bloodline because his grandfather accidentally killed the vampire’s wife in 1930. You know how it goes. The film’s interminable second half has him in full vampire mode (including fake teeth that give the actor a lisp), taunting Holland and Debbie’s teenage daughter, whom he has tied up in his vampire basement. Upstairs, Holland’s daughter Amy is still alive, don’t ask me why. I guess the vampire figured if he REALLY wanted to make Holland suffer, he should abduct his daughter but not kill her, but not tell him she’s still alive either, and never let him see her again, and now that I think about it, I can’t think of a way that it makes sense, so never mind.

Tied to a pillar in the basement, Holland’s primary self-defense tactic is to scream vulgar insults at the vampire. We get the full brunt of this because the film’s sound mix is terrible, and every time Holland yells — which is often — it sounds like he’s screaming directly into a microphone. Do you like a movie that periodically assaults you with deafening roars, and that is amateurish and boring when it’s not causing eardrum damage? Then this is the movie for you, weirdo.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Eric Snider, Eric's bad movies, Mr. Hush

Eric’s Bad Movies: ‘Land of Doom’ (1986)

“Land of Doom” was made in the 1980s, which means there was a 35 percent chance it would take place in a post-apocalyptic future. This sort of movie was very common in the ’80s, partly because of Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation, and partly because movies set in barren wastelands don’t need a lot of expensive sets or costumes. Dress everybody in rags, find a patch of desert, and you’re good to go.

I have omitted details like “screenplay” and “actors” from that business model because so did the people who made “Land of Doom.” “What is our movie about?” the producers asked. “It’s about some people after the apocalypse!” the writer answered. “Can you be more specific?” asked the producers. “No I cannot!” said the writer. Then the director said, “Enough talk, time is money,” yelled “Action!,” and spent the next couple days pointing a camera at whoever walked in front of it.

The careless tone is set by the opening narration, in which a lady says: “I don’t know how the final war began. It doesn’t even matter.” Oh, doesn’t it? Pray tell, what else “doesn’t matter” in your movie? Plot? Characters? Inciting incidents, rising action, climax, and denouement? Yes, I thought so.

The lady who is uninterested in how the final war began is Harmony (Deborah Rennard), a feisty post-apocalyptic gal who just wants to roam the wastelands in peace and quiet without being hassled or murdered by anyone. You’d think it would be fairly easy to find solitude when the population of the entire planet can be expressed in five digits, but Harmony’s always running into marauders and gangs. (Maybe it’s because she keeps wandering through the same single acre of Turkish desert where the movie was filmed.)

One night while seeking refuge from the violent nightmare that society has become, she stumbles into a cave where a fellow named Anderson (Garrick Dowhen) is recuperating from wounds received in an earlier skirmish. In general, the post-apocalyptic men are even less sensitive toward women than the pre-apocalypse men were, but Anderson is decent. He’s too hurt to move, and they’re both stuck in the cave for the night.

“My name is Anderson. What’s yours?” (Silence.) “I just thought, since we’ll be spending the night together–”
“Will you shut up?”
“Whatever you say.”

Then he shoots a snake that was about to slither past her (note: Anderson has a gun.) (Also note: there is a zero-tolerance policy for snakes after the apocalypse.) This thoughtful, violent gesture softens her up.

“Harmony. My name is Harmony.”
“Oh. That’s a very pretty name.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”

So Harmony is not very easy to talk to.

Anderson is looking for a fabled land where peace has been restored. Perhaps Harmony would like to accompany him on his search for this place? Harmony says no: she is a loner.

“Most loners don’t survive.”
“I do.”
“I bet you do.”

OK, now it’s our turn: what’s that supposed to mean? Is “Land of Doom” going to be 85 minutes of two grumpy idiots talking to each other in vague but accusatory tones while nothing happens? Is this the passive-aggressive, post-apocalyptic version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”? Because we do not have the strength for that.

Fortunately, there is more to it. The “villain” in this “story” (under certain limited definitions of those terms) is Slater (Daniel Radell), a blond lunatic who, in keeping with the tradition of insane costumes for villains in cheesy post-apocalyptic flicks, wears a leather “Phantom of the Opera” mask. Slater and Anderson used to be part of the same survivors’ community, but when it came time to organize and rebuild — which Anderson was a proponent of — he was outvoted in favor of anarchy and Slater-ism (which is easier and more fun than organizing and rebuilding). Now Slater is the leader of the most barbaric gang in the land, and his goons are constantly pursuing Anderson so they can kill him.

This, then, is the bulk of the film: Harmony and Anderson trudge endlessly through the desert; Harmony is increasingly grouchy at being dragged into Anderson’s problems; every few minutes a new batch of bedraggled Slater minions pops up; and Harmony and Anderson fight them hand-to-hand in sloppy, underrehearsed bouts choreographed by a crew member who had never seen a fight before.

 

You may ask: Why is Slater so intent on capturing Anderson? Anderson wants to get far, far away and find someplace nicer to live; why not let him? Did Anderson personally injury Slater in some unforgivable way? Is there more to it than a disagreement over leadership styles? I mean, the winners of elections don’t usually send death squads after the losers (though we’d probably have higher voter turnouts if they did). So what is driving Slater to be so passionate on this subject?

If you do ask yourself these questions, congratulations! You’ve given the story more thought than its writer did. Its writer got as far as “SLATER IS HUNTING ANDERSON” and then was distracted by something shiny.

Anyway, this goes on for a while, possibly forever. Harmony and Anderson meet a guy who offers them food that turns out to be human meat, which they decline like ungrateful bastards. Harmony continues to be angry about everyone and everything, even beating an attacker to death with a rock at one point. Anderson says, “Harmony, you can’t change the world by killing everybody,” which isn’t true, because killing everybody would actually be a very effective way of changing the world.

One thing I will say for “Land of Doom” is that the people in it, who are not good actors, are very enthusiastic about acting (which they are not good at). Nearly every performance, especially among the bad guys, is alive with over-the-top cackling lunacy. They don’t act well, but they act a lot. I could see the film being nominated for Most Acting.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Eric's bad movies, Land of Doom, Who's afraid of virginia woolf

Eric’s Bad Movies: Cyborg (1989)

What’s that you say? You’ve got a brutally violent movie called Cyborg that stars famed oily Belgian Jean-Claude Van Damme? Count me in! I’d love to see Van Damme play a cyborg! Oh, he’s not the cyborg? Well, I’d love to see him battle a cyborg! That would be cool too! Come again? The cyborg is neither the hero nor the villain but merely an ancillary character with about 90 seconds of screen time? And her name is Pearl? I politely decline your offer.

Eh, I guess we’re already committed, so here goes. Like 62 percent of all bad movies, Cyborg is set after the apocalypse. An ominous whispery voice tells us in narration that after the collapse of civilization and its attendant anarchy and starvation came the plague, aka The Living Death. The few scientists left alive are working on a cure, but our campy narrator is not in favor of that. “I like the death!” he declares. “I like the misery! I like this world!” Our narrator is a make-lemonade-out-of-lemons kind of guy. He sounds like an intriguing character! Is it Jean-Claude Van Damme??

Ugh, no. It’s a dude named Fender, played by a dude named Vincent Klyn, a professional surfer who somehow wandered into a couple of movies, including this one, sort of. Van Damme isn’t here yet. Fender is the leader of one of those post-apocalyptic gangs that dress in hilarious costumes and kill people for fun. They call themselves “pirates,” but instead of singing jaunty songs and engaging in ribald banter and firing cannonballs at ships, all they do is rape, pillage, and murder. Some “pirates” they are!!

Fender and his merry band of comically outfitted sociopaths are in New York in pursuit of a woman named Pearl (Dayle Haddon), the aforementioned cyborg. She has the cure for plague in her possession and must get to Atlanta, where the country’s only remaining scientists are hanging out, either because they’re all that’s left of the Centers for Disease Control, or because they’re all that’s left of Tyler Perry’s top-secret laboratory that produces full-body fat suits and melodrama. In any event, Fender’s gang captures Pearl and forces her to take them with her to Atlanta so that they can stop the plague from being cured. But if Pearl HAS the cure, couldn’t they just kill her? And if some key components of the cure are in Atlanta, can’t they go to Atlanta on their own? What do they need Pearl for? It’s not hard to get to Atlanta from New York. You take I-95 south until it meets I-85, just outside Richmond, Va., and then take I-85 straight to Atlanta. You can’t miss it.

Meanwhile, remember how Jean-Claude Van Damme is in this movie? Well, he is. He plays Gibson, a mercenary who was Pearl’s bodyguard for about five seconds, until Fender knocked him out and kidnapped her. Instead of responding to his embarrassment honorably by committing ritual seppuku, Gibson pursues the pirates. Along the way, he meets a chesty gal whose name the movie doesn’t mention but IMDb says it’s Nady, so we’ll go with that. Nady (Deborah Richter) politely takes off her clothes and offers to have sex with Gibson, but now that Gibson has already botched his mission once, he’s REALLY focused on it. No sex for him! Nady should consider herself lucky, since doing it with Van Damme is probably like doing it with a seal, all slippery and shiny and inarticulate.

Gibson is tormented by flashbacks to an earlier time, when he settled down in a country house with a hillbilly girl named Mary and her two siblings, only to see Fender kill Mary and one of the kids and take the other one hostage. Basically, what we are learning about Gibson is that he has never successfully protected anyone from anything.

Gibson and Nady run into a lot of bad guys on the way to Atlanta. That means there is a lot of fighting, as fighting is the one thing that the star of this movie is reasonably good at. Gibson has a gun, but he prefers to fight hand-to-hand. And what he mostly likes, really, is kicking people. He LOVES kicking people! It’s his favorite thing. You put him up against a band of villains trained in the martial arts and he will throw down his gun and kick every single one of those S.O.B.’s. until they are unconscious, or at least lying on the ground, kicked.

But his kicking skills fail him when he encounters Fender and — what do you know — loses to him, again, as is his custom. The two things Gibson is best at are kicking people and being humiliated by Fender. Fender should probably just kill Gibson, but what kind of movie villain would he be if he actually did the thing he claimed he wanted to do? No, standard procedure once you’ve captured the hero is to put him into a situation where he’ll probably die, then leave him unattended so that you can be shocked later on when he escapes.

Fender’s choice is to have his men crucify Gibson, a method of punishment fraught with symbolism, as I’m sure you’re aware. Is Gibson meant to be some kind of “Savior” figure? That would be a bit of a stretch for a character whose main attribute so far is being unable to save himself or anyone else. Then again, Gibson does one-up his most famous crucifixion predecessor by escaping from the cross, which he does in a manner befitting the rest of the film, i.e., with a lot of gore and grunting.

It all comes down to an epic battle between Gibson and Fender (who, yes, are both named after guitars, for no reason). Fender has very pale blue eyes that the movie keeps showing in close-up, I guess because the movie thinks they’re … scary? Creepy? Pretty? I don’t know. When we’re not seeing his eyes, we’re seeing him and Gibson kick the crap out of each other, accompanied by much monster-like roaring, the screenwriter having been made aware that neither actor is very handy with actual words.

Eventually, Pearl the cyborg, making a cameo appearance in the movie called Cyborg, gets to Atlanta with the plague cure, accompanied by a finally-somewhat-helpful Gibson. Pearl tells her scientist friends that while she has the serum, “I feel like [Gibson] is the real cure for the world.” The only way this statement makes any sense is if it comes at the end of a different movie, one where the hero has proven to be noble, valiant, or even competent. Rudy, for example. You could argue that the world would be a lot better off if everyone were more like Rudy. Gibson, not so much. And besides, if he’s so awesome and he’s the real cure for the world, why isn’t the movie called Passion of the Gibson or The Last Temptation of Gibson or something? I rest my case.

Tags: cyborg, eric's bad movies, jean-claude van damme

Eric’s Bad Movies: Butterfly (1982)

Give the people what they want! That is Hollywood’s mantra. In 1982, what people wanted was a gross story about a teenage harlot using her feminine wiles to seduce her own father. Goodness knows why the people wanted this, but they did. The people further requested that the girl and her dad be played by Pia Zadora and Stacy Keach. And then the people said they’d like the film to feature cameos by Ed McMahon and Orson Welles. “OK,” Hollywood said, “now we think you’re just messing with us.” But Hollywood called the people’s bluff and made Butterfly, a lubricious cinema fart that meets all of the above criteria and presumably satisfied the people’s craving for incest-based melodramas.

 

The year is 1937. The location is Nevada. The air is dusty. The forecast calls for sleaze with a chance of fondling. A truck driver picks up a hitchhiker, a sultry, pie-faced girl of few words who immediately starts seducing him, only to abruptly ditch him once he has gone out of his way to deliver her to the tiny town that was her destination. We cut to the next scene, where the same girl is sitting on the porch of a small shack, making the same kind of overtures toward the man who lives there. We think: Isn’t this more or less what the first scene was about? Are we stuck in a loop? Will this movie be nothing more than scene after scene of hapless men being sexually aroused and then dismissed by a teenage girl? We hope not, because we’ve already seen that movie, and it was called high school.

The man is Jess Tyler (Stacy Keach). His job is to live in this shack and keep scavengers away from the defunct silver mine behind it. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much of a career, living in a shack so you can babysit a hole in the ground. Really, any occupation that requires you to live in a shack probably will not be very rewarding. But Jess is a simple man with simple needs. Mine-tending and shack-dwelling are the only things he knows.

The girl assails Jess with a never-ending stream of smutty double-entendre. “Is there something you want?” he asks when he first sees her, since he has no idea who she is or what she’s doing here at his shack/place of business. “How can I tell till I know what you got?” is her kittenish and ungrammatical reply. She seems to know a lot about his past, including that he was married to a floozy who ran off with another man 10 years ago and took their two daughters with her. The girl says, “Don’t it get lonely out here? Or is just milking that cow enough for you?” I should point out that Jess had just finished literally milking an actual cow when the girl said this, though knowing the context only makes it slightly less filthy.

After several minutes of flirting with Jess and indicating that she wishes to make sexytimes with him, the girl finally reveals that her name is Kady and she’s his daughter. Yes, his daughter. That’s obviously not a very good pick-up line, so you can see why she saved it for last. She was only 7 when she left, and she’s a busty 17 now, which is why Jess didn’t recognize her. First hot chick he’s met in years who wanted to sleep with him, and wouldn’t you know it…!

Kady further reveals that her mom’s still a floozy, that she picked up her floozy ways, and that Kady had a baby of her own a month ago. The child’s father is the son of the rich people who own the very silver mine now being guarded by Jess and his shack, the Gillespies. Remember that detail, because it will be important in the next sentence. Kady figures that even though the mine is defunct, it still has SOME silver left in it, and since the Gillespies won’t let their son marry her, she’s entitled to take some of their silver. The law probably isn’t on her side, but that’s OK. She’ll just have sex with the law until the law changes its mind.

Daddy, being a man of scruples and integrity, doesn’t cotton to Kady’s plan to steal from his employer. Nor does he cotton to Kady’s habit of undressing seductively in front of him, or hopping into the bath basin all nude-like when he’s sitting in the same room. Actually, Jess does cotton to all of this, but he wishes he didn’t. A man ain’t supposed to cotton to his own daughter! Nor is a daughter supposed to intentionally arouse her father’s cottonings!

During the bath scene, Kady begs Jess to come over and rub her sore shoulders. He does. Then she guides his hands to her breasts. “You’re my daughter, Kady!” he protests. “I’m a woman, too!” she answers, guiding his hand in a south-southwesterly direction. Pia Zadora passes for 17 here, but don’t worry, she was actually 27 when the film was made. Nonetheless, this is the point in the movie where you start feeling like you need a hot, scalding shower. The feeling will increase over the course of the film, and subside only after you are dead.

Jess manages to resist his daughter’s sexual advances, but he relents on the stealing-silver-from-the-mine thing. Meanwhile, Kady tries to make Daddy jealous by foolin’ around with every available man in the depressed mining town. Jess and the townsfolk keeping pointing out that Kady’s mom was also notoriously trampy, so, you know, whaddaya gonna do? Kady’s mom, named Belle (of course), frequently referenced but so far unseen, starts to become a mythical, larger-than-life figure to us. And on this point, the movie delivers. Belle (played by Lois Nettleton) toddles into town after a while, on the arm of her oily new husband, and she’s as hilariously boozy and cheap as we’d hoped, with clown-like makeup and a hacking cough. No sooner has she arrived than she tries to kill her husband with a knitting needle and then dies of tuberculosis. Amazing comedy-sketch drunken whore mom, we hardly knew you.

My, but there’s a lot of plot in this movie! A lot of films would be content to dump a pile of skeevy incest on the screen and call it a day, but not Butterfly! Butterfly takes its five-pound plot bag and crams it with ten pounds of plot. I haven’t even mentioned the Gillespie kid showing up, and our introduction to his parents, who are played by Ed McMahon and June Lockhart. Nor am I going to mention it! Because the more important thing is that Jess learns he’s not actually Kady’s father, which means having sex with her will not be illegal but will merely be very creepy! So they do it! Uh, with Kady still under the illusion that Jess is her father. You know that thing where it’s kind of hot to do it with a girl who thinks she’s committing incest? It’s like that.

Just when you think they couldn’t stuff any more ridiculous plot twists into this thing, Jess and Kady get caught and are put on trial for incest, and the judge is Orson Welles. And why wouldn’t the judge be Orson Welles? You give me one good reason why the judge in a trashy soap opera starring a nude Pia Zadora wouldn’t be played by one of history’s greatest filmmakers! It’s like when Ingmar Bergman did a cameo in Showgirls.

Orson Welles’ greatest contribution to the film is when it becomes crucial to know whether a tertiary character named Ed Lamey has a particular
birthmark on his stomach, and the Honorable Judge Citizen Kane issues this command: “Let the court see your stomach, Lamey!”

Oh, and over the closing credits Pia Zadora sings a song called “It’s Wrong for Me to Love You” — which is exactly the title I’d have come up with on my own if you’d asked me to provide a satiric example of what a wrong-headed incest movie’s theme song might be. Sometimes truth is stranger than satire!

Eric’s Bad Movies: Magic in the Water (1995)

Every year, Hollywood produces several hundred family-oriented movies about workaholic fathers who vow not to neglect their children anymore after something zany happens, often involving an animal. These are among Hollywood’s most vital exports. But did you know that Canada, which is a country located directly north of America, also makes movies like this? It is true! They don’t just involve moose and penguins, either. Magic in the Water is about a Loch Ness monster!

This movie was filmed in a scenic “province” (their version of a state) called “British Columbia” (their version of Washington). It stars Mark Harmon as a brusque and unhelpful psychiatrist who hosts a radio call-in show on which he verbally abuses anyone desperate enough to seek his guidance. His character is named Jack Black, which is unfortunate. Jack Black is divorced and does not have custody of his children, so he compensates for this by being distant and inattentive whenever he’s with them.

Such is the case this particular summer, when he takes the kids to a charming lakeside town where the lake, legend has it, is home to a sea monster called Orky. Jack’s young daughter, Ashley (Sarah Wayne), believes in the legend, because kids are dumb like that. Jack’s 16-year-old son, Josh (a pre-Dawson’s Creek Joshua Jackson), scoffs at his gullible sister. I should point out, however, that the legend comes from a local Indian tribe, represented by a Wise & Mysterious Old Indian character who sits quietly and observes everything, so the chances of the legend being true start rapidly approaching 100 percent.

Also, the movie poster has a picture of Ashley sitting on the head of a sea monster.

Jack Black is here on “vacation” with the kids, but all he does is take work-related calls on his cell phones. Yes, plural. He has two cell phones that we see, and a third one chirping away in his luggage. The screenplay template said, “Insert details establishing that Father character is too busy for his children,” and this particular screenwriter, unable to come up with numerous details, simply multiplied the one detail he could think of.

Dad’s cell phone addiction leaves Ashley and Josh to sit around, bored in a quaint village that has been made all the quainter by being in Canada. One lazy day Ashley is on the pier at the lake when she thinks she sees something in the water and starts talking to it, as one does. She’s pretty sure it’s Orky. When it’s time to go, she leaves six Oreos on the pier as a treat. (Ashley always has a bag of Oreos with her, I don’t know why. I mean, I know why; Nabisco paid for product placement. But I don’t know why in the story.) The next day, the Oreos are still there — except the filling has been taken out!! Somehow Orky the giant lake monster carefully pulled the cookies apart, licked out the middles, and put them back together, despite being a giant lake monster without opposable thumbs! There must be magic in the water, because I can’t even pull an Oreo apart without one of the halves breaking.

Meanwhile, there’s a psychiatrist in town named Wanda Bell (Harley Jane Kozak) who runs a group therapy for people who believe they have not only seen Orky but been temporarily possessed by its spirit. Apparently that is something that Orky does, if it exists (which it does)! But Dr. Wanda figures it’s a hallucination, a psychosis that all her patients have acquired simultaneously. Such mass outbreaks of mental illness are not unprecedented. For example, many residents of Boston have been convinced for several years that the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, even though science proves that this is impossible.

One night Ashley overhears her dad complaining on the phone about how he doesn’t have time to be a father AND talk on his multiple cell phones. Her feelings hurt, Ashley half-heartedly runs away, though all she really does is wander away from the lake house over to another part of the lake. She climbs a rickety rope ladder up the face of a cliff, only to be imperiled when the rungs start snapping under her weight. (Josh climbed it earlier in the movie without incident, but whatever.) Jack goes looking for Ashley and winds up under the ladder just in time to break her fall when she plummets. Ashley is uninjured; Jack has a concussion. Also, at some point in all that he got possessed by Orky. When he wakes up, he is cheerful and merry and eager to play and romp with his children.

Jack now has a psychic connection to Orky and starts to get sick when Orky does. And why is Orky getting sick? Because of the steady diet of Oreo filling? Certainly not! It’s because some bad guys in town keep dumping toxic waste in the lake. It’s unclear where this hazardous material is coming from, as the town’s chief industry is Orky-related tourism, which is rather “green,” ecologically speaking. Maybe the bad guys are making plastic Orky masks out of deadly chemicals, then dumping the extra stuff into the lake, thus slowly poisoning the very thing that ensures their financial stability. Look, I didn’t say their business plan made any sense. Maybe capitalism works differently in Canada, because of the metric system.

Actually, in their defense, the bad guys do not believe that Orky actually exists. In fact, they have decorated a submarine to look like Orky (I do not know where they got a submarine), and they drive it around the lake now and then to ensure continued Orky “sightings” and drum up business. Somehow, Ashley and Josh get trapped in this Orky-submarine, and the submarine starts leaking, and they’re going to drown because I guess they can’t open the hatch and get out, maybe? And for some reason a Japanese boy is with them. And then Orky shows up — a mere 80 minutes into the film, I might add — and saves them, then is healed by the Wise & Mysterious Old Indian, who does some chanting and dancing around a totem pole in the forest, and everyone lives happily ever after.

As far as lame, nonsensical children’s movies borrowed from E.T. go, Magic in the Water is probably the most Canadian, except for Gooby. That’s the quote they can use on the DVD if they want.

Eric’s Bad Movies: Furry Vengeance (2010)

Tragically, Furry Vengeance is not a movie in which people who derive sexual pleasure from dressing up as animals execute deadly revenge on their oppressors. I think we can all agree that such a movie would have been fantastic, or at least disturbing. Instead, Furry Vengeance is a movie about a squad of super-intelligent forest animals that conduct a war against Brendan Fraser, focusing primarily on his sanity and genitals. It is a family movie, obviously.

Here is a comedy so painfully stupid that one assumes it is only by accident that it doesn’t star Martin Lawrence. The premise is that some greedy land developers (there is no other kind of land developer in movies) plan to turn a forest into a suburb, and the woodland creatures band together to stop it like the filthy socialists they are. Though this sounds like the plot description of a cartoon, and though the movie obviously wishes it were a cartoon, Furry Vengeance is live-action, with real animals, and real actors, and Brooke Shields. The animals have CGI facial expressions, though, to remind everyone that the movie is really bummed about not being a cartoon. It’s like when a man gives his daughter a boy’s name because he really wanted a son.

Anyway, the tone is set in the opening scene. Rob Riggle drives down a picturesque road through a wooded area and says, apropos of nothing, “I do as I please!” Then he has a phone conversation with his boss about how easy it will be to turn all this land into a housing development, and then he throws his cigar out the window — after saying, “Give a hoot, don’t pollute? Whatever!” Having established this complicated, nuanced character, the movie gives him his comeuppance by having a raccoon give the signal to a mink to activate an elaborate system of pulleys and counterweights that sends a boulder rolling onto the road, knocking the man’s car into a ravine.

You may have noticed that the preceding paragraph is filled with utter nonsense. And yet everything happens just as I said it does. The woodland creatures have built an impressive defense system, and they await the command of their leader, a raccoon, to deploy it. You might worry that animals capable of such destruction would be dangerous, but you can relax, because nobody lifts a paw until the raccoon says so. There are checks and balances. These are real animals, remember. Real animals that understand human speech and are capable of executing complex strategies.

That’s more than can be said for the movie’s hero, Dan Sanders, a wide-eyed doofus played by wide-eyed doofus Brendan Fraser. Dan works for Lyman Enterprises, the company that’s developing Rocky Springs, and has moved here with his wife, Tammy (Brooke Shields), and teenage son, Tyler (Matt Prokop), to live in the model home while he supervises construction of the other houses. Dan believes that Lyman Enterprises is only going to build about a dozen houses and leave the rest of the forest untouched. In fact, however, his evil boss, Neal Lyman, intends to level every tree in the region and cover the land in tract homes and shopping malls, out of evilness.

Lyman, incidentally, is played by Ken Jeong. Remember when you’d occasionally see a movie that didn’t have Ken Jeong in it? Those were simpler times.

The raccoon learns about Lyman’s dastardly plans the same time Dan does, because the raccoon stowed away in Dan’s car when he drove to his meeting with Lyman. The raccoon could probably be a character on The Wire. The raccoon returns to the forest to alert the other animals, who all bow in obeisance to him, the mighty raccoon, and they commence Operation: Torment & Humiliate Dan Sanders.

It starts out simple but quickly escalates. The raccoon repositions Dan’s lawn sprinkler so that when he turns it on it sprays him right in the crotch. (The animals are obsessed with Dan’s crotch. They can’t get enough of it!) Other small animals startle him and make him spill his coffee in his lap. A crow taps on his bedroom window while he’s trying to sleep, leading him to chase the bird out onto the roof, whereupon he slips and cracks his nards on the ridge, then falls off the roof. They mess with his treadmill and make him crash. They put an acorn in his breakfast cereal. Skunks hide in his car and spray him simultaneously, turning the vehicle into a mobilized gas chamber. I wish to note, by the way, that Dan gets sprayed by skunks in this manner not once, not twice, but three times over the course of the film. Having the skunks spray their target in a confined space is the animal kingdom’s version of sending in the Navy SEALs. It’s predictable, but it never fails.

You’d think a movie centered on the deliberate and systematic torture of Brendan Fraser would be fun. But no, he ruins it by being very easily exasperated and by screaming a lot in a high-pitched voice. There’s no “slow burn,” no gradual frustration, no increasing levels of comical annoyance. The animals do something, he is immediately at wit’s end, and he shrieks. Someone should make a YouTube compilation of all the times Brendan Fraser screams in this movie. It would be 72 minutes long and would be removed from YouTube for violating the Geneva Convention.

When Dan tells Tammy and Tyler that the animals are out to get him, they assume that he is insane, as it is not rational to think that the birds and mammals of the forest are collaborating to destroy you, even though that is, in fact, what they are doing. It must be frustrating for Dan to be in this situation — it must be frustrating for someone as stupid as Dan to be in any situation, really — but it’s his own fault. It’s not like the animals are being subtle, pulling pranks that could be ascribed to accident or coincidence. At one point they hot-wire his car and start to drive away in it, the raccoon steering while the others operate the pedals. Dan sees it happening. All he has to do is say to the person with whom he is conversing, “Say, could you turn around and look out that window? If you do, you’ll see that my car is being driven by a raccoon, a mink, and a skunk.” Instead, he just does that “homina homina homina” thing that Costello would do when he saw a ghost standing behind Abbott. Well, you’ve made your choice, Dan. You can do comedy routines, or you can prove that you’re not insane, but you can’t do both.

Then there is the time Dan goes outside in the middle of the night to investigate a noise and is startled by a bear. Yes, the bears are involved! This goes all the way to the top, people. Instead of running back into the house, Dan runs into the construction site’s porta-potty, which the bear knocks over and jumps on. (“Nobody s***s in the woods except me!” is what I imagine the bear saying.) Next morning, Tammy and the construction workers find the outhouse lodged in the upper branches of a tree, Dan still trapped inside. The movie makes no attempt to explain how the porta-potty got up there, nor do the characters ask Dan what happened. But the most baffling question is how a movie like this made it almost an HOUR before covering the main character in poop. That is generally an Act 1 scenario.

Tyler, the teenage son, finally stumbles across some local folklore suggesting that every time humans have tried to develop these woods throughout history, they have been thwarted. Tyler suggests that perhaps that is what’s happening here. Dan scoffs. It’s rational to believe that the animals are out to get him, but the idea that they have a specific reason for it — well, that’s just silly. Nonetheless, he comes to accept that perhaps his efforts to destroy the animals’ habitat MAY HAVE BEEN A FACTOR in those animals being upset with him.

Obviously, the only recourse now is to capture all the animals and relocate them. Every creature in the forest is rounded up and caged (with no food or water, by the way), and the crates are stacked in a clearing to await transport. No one questions the wisdom, legality, or feasibility of catching every single animal in the vast forest, but it is accomplished anyway, and rather quickly. When Dan stumbles upon the terrible sight of woodland creatures sitting forlornly in wooden crates, stacked up like the artifacts at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, then — and only then — does it occur to him that leveling the entire forest might have a negative effect. He frees the animals from their cages and joins forces with them, presumably swearing allegiance to the raccoon just like everyone else.

Since Dan is a huge dolt, he didn’t have his big epiphany until the very last minute, when it’s almost too late. Evil Lyman and the company are sponsoring a Forest Festival for the local community (which is evidently populated by people gullible enough to believe that a development corporation has the forest’s best interests at heart), and the highlight of this event will be when a wealthy investor from India signs the contract to fund the project. As you know, when people go to a festival, they enjoy the carnival games and the pony rides and the face-painting booths, but what they really look forward to is seeing a foreign man write his name on a piece of paper. Luckily, change-of-heart Dan and his wife and son use a bullhorn to tell everyone what’s really going on, and the animals rampage through the festival spraying everybody and pooping on things, and Lyman’s nefarious scheme is thwarted. Dan becomes a forest ranger after that and establishes a truce with the raccoon, which is for his own good, since the raccoon is smarter than he is.

Eric’s Bad Movies: Lost in Space (1998)

Remember your favorite science-fiction TV show from the 1960s? No, not Star Trek or The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits or The Time Tunnel or My Favorite Martian or The Jetsons or It’s About Time or Land of the Giants or Dr. Who or The Invaders or The Prisoner or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or The Wild Wild West. The other one. Lost in Space! Back in the 1990s, when Hollywood was rummaging around in its attic looking for old TV shows to turn into movies, somebody found Lost in Space lying under a pile of I Dream of Jeannie and said, “Hey, I bet we could spend a lot of money to make this into a sharp-looking but very stupid movie!”

And it was so. The Lost in Space movie is now best-known for being the film that dislodged Titanic from the top spot at the box office after 15 weeks at No. 1. In the realm of trivia, Lost in Space is the Nancy Zerg to Titanic‘s Ken Jennings.

The film is set in 2058, at a time when the inhabitants of Earth have just about figured out how to colonize other planets. The problem is that it takes 10 years of space travel to get to the nearest habitable planet, plus you have to be at the airport like three hours early. To alleviate this problem, scientists are building a hypergate, which is like a regular gate only really, really excited. You’ll enter the hypergate just above Earth, and come out of it a second later at the corresponding hypergate at the new planet, because of Science.

But first someone has to take that 10-year trip and oversee the building of the other hypergate. Thus begins our story (finally)! Brilliant scientist Prof. John Robinson (William Hurt) has volunteered to make the journey, on the condition that he be allowed to take his wife and kids with him, which it seems like would defeat the purpose of taking a 10-year work trip, but whatever. His wife, Maureen (Mimi Rogers), is also a brilliant scientist, and so is their oldest daughter, Judy (Heather Graham). Their little boy, Will (Jack Johnson, but not the singer) is a budding science nerd in his own right. That leaves only teenage Penny (Lacey Chabert), the middle child, to disappoint everyone by being uninterested in space exploration. In fact, old party-pooper Penny doesn’t even WANT to spend 10 years of her youth stuck with her family in cryogenic sleep on a spaceship, never to see Earth again. Ugh, what is she, a communist?

Their space vessel, the Jupiter, will make the trip mostly on autopilot, just like the movie, but the Robinsons need a human pilot for the early stages, but they get Matt LeBlanc instead. His character is a fighter pilot named Maj. Don West, and he’s one of those mouthy, arrogant, alpha-male types who says Top Gun-ish things like, “OK, last one to kill the bad guys has to buy the beer!” These glib one-liners would sound a lot more badass if they weren’t coming out of Matt LeBlanc, but what could you do? It was 1998.

Maj. West doesn’t want to be on this boring journey on this boring ship, but he does want to make sexytimes with Judy Robinson, even though she’s the boss’s daughter. Judy thinks he’s a doofus, so they engage in ceaseless wry banter like this:

MAJOR WEST: [before doing something dangerous] I’m thinking this is your “kiss for luck” situation.
JUDY ROBINSON: Thinking. Not your strong point, is it?

It is just like watching a screwball comedy from the 1930s, if instead of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn it starred Matt LeBlanc and Heather Graham and was written by people fired from the writing staff of Yes, Dear.

Meanwhile, the medical adviser for the journey is Dr. Smith (possibly an alias), played by Gary Oldman, who at the time was still Gary Relativelyyoungman. Dr. Smith has taken a bribe from some bad guys to sabotage the Jupiter mission, as this will enable a rival space-exploration alliance to build the hypergate first. His plan is to program the ship’s robot, named Robot, to wait until the Jupiter is in space, kill everybody onboard, then blow up the ship. Unfortunately for Dr. Smith, he isn’t able to disembark before the ship launches, and is therefore stuck on a vessel that is now scheduled to have all its inhabitants murdered in a few hours. You can tell Dr. Smith does not have a lot of experience planning terrorist attacks.

The Robinsons and Maj. West are all in their cryogenic sleep chambers when Robot starts barging around proclaiming, “Destroy Robinson family!” (Robot is the type of robot who announces everything he’s going to do before he does it.) Dr. Smith wakes everybody up from sleepytime so they can help him disable Robot and save all their lives. They accomplish this, but then they’re faced with the awkward fact that they’re now stuck on a spaceship with a non-functional robot and a madman who tried to kill them. Imagine taking a family vacation and discovering halfway there that a deranged hobo has been hiding in the backseat the whole time, and now you’re stuck with him until you get to Branson. It’s like that. Oh, and then they have to jump into hyperdrive to avoid being pulled into the Sun, and so now they’re lost. IN SPACE. With a dead robot and a would-be murderer-doctor.

Well, this all sounds like a scenario for some thrilling action! Thrilling action is what you’d be expecting, though, and Hollywood likes to keep you on your toes by giving you the opposite of what you expect, so instead it’s lukewarm and dull and brimming with lame adventures, and Matt LeBlanc never stops saying dumb, glib things. It’s like they wanted to make an adventure movie with some comic elements, but instead made a boring movie with some annoying elements. You know there’s no hope for success when the Robinsons encounter an abandoned spaceship populated by alien spiders and a CGI space monkey, which they adopt as a pet. The words “CGI space monkey” alone should have been a red flag to the studio executives. “Not a lot of good movies with CGI space monkeys, are there?” someone should have said. “Does the CGI space monkey affect the story in any way?” someone else should have said. You have to ask tough questions when it comes to CGI space monkeys, and it seems like nobody is willing to ask those questions anymore, and that is why we are losing the space race to the Chinese.

Eric’s Bad Movies: Freejack (1992)

Remember Emilio Estevez? Where has that guy been? If Freejack is any indication, he may have disappeared because he went to the future to have Anthony Hopkins’ brain put in him! (That is probably not what happened, though.)

Freejack begins in 1991, which was the present when the film was made. Estevez plays Alex Furlong, a race-car driver on the verge of breaking into the big-time. He has an ambitious manager, eager new sponsors, and a hot fiancee named Julie, played by Rene Russo. (Remember Rene Russo? Where has that lady been?) Alex and Julie say a lot of sickening lovey-dovey things to each other in the early scenes of the movie to establish that their love is undying. “Nibble my ear,” he tells her before the Big Race. “For luck!” This is gross, the end.

The lucky ear-nibbling doesn’t work, though, because the Big Race ends with Alex’s car smashing into a wall and exploding. Light petting with your girlfriend is no substitute for safe driving, kids. While this is happening, the movie keeps cutting to a different scene somewhere else, in a place where Mick Jagger is bossing people around and monitoring what happens to Alex. At the very moment of impact, Alex is transported from his death car to wherever Mick Jagger is, a lateral move at best.

Turns out Mick Jagger is in The Future! He’s in the far-off year of 2009. Alex materializes on a table in a medical laboratory, surrounded by science-y doctor guys, and you can tell it’s The Future because their lab suits are made out of tinfoil. You can tell it’s a dark, dystopian future because 1) the future is always dark and dystopian in movies and 2) Mick Jagger is in charge.

So here’s the deal. In 2009, scientists have figured out how to help rich people live forever, just as God always intended for rich people. When you die, they can save your mind/soul/essence/Facebook page on a computer and then download it into a young, healthy body. The only problem is that there are few suitable body donors in 2009 because pretty much everyone is sick and impoverished and addicted to drugs. To overcome this obstacle, scientists figured out a way to help people be healthier. No, just kidding, they invented time travel so they could steal healthy bodies from the past. They find a moment in history when somebody young and healthy died suddenly, and bring them to the future a split-second before it happens. This process is called “bonejacking,” presumably because 13-year-old boys wrote the movie. Mick Jagger, whose name is Victor Vacendak, is a professional bonejacker (tee hee!) who was contracted to find a new body for an anonymous rich guy.

But something has gone awry in the bonejacking process. Instead of arriving in 2009 with his brain wiped clean and ready to be replaced with some rich person’s, Alex has arrived with his mental faculties still intact, such as they were. He escapes from Victor and the tinfoil guys and is now a wanted fugitive called a “freejack.” (Evidently, unwilling body donors from the past escape custody so often that they had to come up with a word for them.)

Alex doesn’t yet realize that it’s the future, though, the tinfoil lab suits and the ascendency of Mick Jagger notwithstanding. But once he’s on the loose in New York City, he sees more filth and degradation than he remembered New York City having, and more cars that are “futuristic,” i.e., that look like big, slow steel caterpillars. He’s starting to catch on. Then he sees a video display with the date: November 23, 2009. “Hmm,” he seems to think. “’2009' doesn’t sound right.” So he looks at his wristband, which says “Grand Prix Championships 1991,” and now seems to think: “Aha! I knew it! It was 1991 when I got up this morning!”

(By the way, I have no personal experience with professional auto racing and am unaware of the protocols, but do they really give each participant a wristband, like the kind you get at a club after the bouncer checks your ID? Is this to let security personnel know that you’re actually in the race? Wouldn’t they be able to tell when they see you driving a car really fast around the track? Has auto racing been plagued by amateurs sneaking into races and passing themselves off as drivers?)

Having double-checked that 2009 is indeed different from 1991, Alex stumbles into a church and asks a nun for help. This nun (played by Amanda Plummer), realizing Alex is a freejack, takes pity on him and uses her highly advanced computer to look up the names of his old associates, to see if they’re still living in New York. (In The Future, computers can do magical things like search the White Pages for people’s addresses!!!) This leads to a lot of chasing and running and escaping, and eventually it leads to Alex finding his old fiancee, still played by Rene Russo with no attempt to make her appear 18 years older. Julie now works for the McCandless Corporation, an evil conglomerate that owns everything in The Future and actually oversees a lot of bonejacking projects. Her boss is Ian McCandless, a ruthless old billionaire. Since he’s played by Anthony Hopkins, speaks in a British accent, and only appears in a couple scenes, I think we’ve figured out who our bad guy is. Don’t tell the movie, though, because the movie was really hoping it would be a surprise and will be disappointed if it knows we guessed early.

Julie assumes that Alex is really just Alex’s bonejacked body with a new brain installed, and he has a hard time convincing her otherwise, even when he shows her the necklace she gave him.

“You gave this to me just before the race!” he says. “Don’t you remember? Julie, that was yesterday! What’s happened to us?”

Well, what happened was that you died in a fiery wreck, there was no body, and then 18 years passed and here you are again. That type of thing has been known to interfere with a relationship.

He succeeds in convincing her that he’s still himself, but not before there’s a lot more chasing and running and escaping from Victor Vacendak and his goons, who are eager to capture the freejack and collect their bounty. They’re in a hurry because time’s a-wastin’ for whichever rich guy ordered the body, because the computers that hold dead people’s minds can only do so for a few days. It seems the scientists who invented time travel and soul transplants couldn’t master the finer points of data storage.

Anyway, Julie has a friend who might be able to help Alex somehow, so they go to meet him at a hip nightclub, which is where all clandestine meetings in movies take place. Since he’s a freejack, Alex’s face is all over TV now, with a $10 million reward for capturing him unharmed. He’ll need to keep a low profile. To that end, he immediately gets drunk at the club, goes on-camera with a TV news reporter who identifies him as the fugitive freejack, and taunts Victor Vadendak. This leads to — that’s right! — more chasing and running and escaping.

Alex is very keen on finding out who paid for his body, as if that will help the situation. Maybe he plans to go to this person and talk him out of it? No, that can’t be it, because the bonejacking doesn’t take place until the buyer has died, and Alex knows this. Maybe Alex is just nosy? At any rate, no one will tell him because it’s supposed to be confidential, and then, big surprise, it’s Ian McCandless, who secretly died a couple days ago and has been pretending to be alive via holograms or some crap, because The Future, or whatever.

To be honest, I’m not convinced that the stakes are very high here. The scientists from 2009 are courteous enough to only steal people from the past who were about to die anyway. They could just pluck people at random, you know! So being bonejacked is basically the same as donating your body to science. You’re dead; what do you care what they do with you afterward, or whose consciousness gets downloaded into your corpse? I guess the fact that it’s not voluntary raises some ethical questions, but I have a hard time getting worked up over matters of principle, especially when those matters are hypothetical and involve an Estevez. I think Alex is just being stubborn. “Oh, how DARE you put someone else’s soul into my body after I’m dead, blah blah blah!” Whatever. Your body can’t have been THAT sacred to you, you raced cars for a living.

Note: Certain elements of this film must be fictional. I lived through 2009 and don’t remember seeing Emilio Estevez anywhere.

Eric’s Bad Movies: Hawk the Slayer (1980)

Hawk the Slayer begins with the following title card:

“This is a story of Heroic Deeds and the bitter struggle for the triumph of Good over Evil and of a wondrous Sword wielded by a mighty Hero when the Legions of Darkness stalk the land.”

This is in accordance with federal regulations requiring movies that feature magic swords and/or randomly capitalized Nouns to declare such beforehand, lest the audience be taken unawares.

It is indeed the type of movie of which there was an abundance in the early 1980s, with swords and magic and loincloths and witches and cheesy synthesizer music. Even by the hilariously relaxed standards of the genre, though, Hawk the Slayer is quite special. Its actors are especially hammy, its music unusually goofy, its special effects particularly cheap. Perhaps it was this movie that inspired so many other people to make fantasy films in the early ’80s, since it is natural to conclude, upon watching it, that fantasy films do not require a lot of effort.

Our story takes place in Olden Tymes. An elderly king has two sons, the evil Voltan (Jack Palance) and the heroic Hawk (John Terry). You name your kids Voltan and Hawk, you probably shouldn’t be surprised when they turn out evil and heroic, respectively. Voltan kicks things off by demanding that his father give him the key to the Ancient Power, then stabbing him in the chest when he refuses to do so, which is probably the sort of behavior that made King Dad reluctant to give it to him. Voltan stomps off in a huff, whereupon Hawk enters the room and finds King Dad in his death throes. Before he dies, he gives Hawk some very elaborate instructions about how to use the Mind Sword, a weapon that responds to the user’s mental commands (as long as the commands are “Fly up off the ground into my hand, please”).

Hawk vows to avenge his father’s death and destroy Voltan. His brother’s been a pain the neck for a while now, but killing Dad was the LAST STRAW. Meanwhile, Voltan steps up his evilness and starts slaughtering entire villages, just to be a jerk. Then he barges into a convent, kidnaps the head nun, and demands 2,000 gold pieces in ransom. Voltan needs money, apparently, and it has not occurred to him to take it from the people he murders, or (if necessary) to murder people who have more money.

Well, the nuns don’t have a lot of cash lying around, being nuns and all, so they send their pal Ranulf (Morgan Sheppard) to talk to the High Abbot (Harry Andrews), who has that title because he’s the most important abbot, not because he is high. Although he may also be high. That would be coincidental, though. Anyway, the High Abbot says sure, the church has plenty of money — but the church also has a very strict “no ransom” policy. I guess people were always kidnapping nuns in Olden Tymes, and the church was going bankrupt paying the ransoms, so they had to take a hardline stance. This will be something of an embarrassment for Voltan’s organization, which ought to have known about the church’s no-ransom-for-nuns position before the abduction.

The High Abbot wants to help save the nun (just not enough to spend money on it), so he tells Ranulf to go find this dude Hawk, aka Hawk the Slayer, who is a mighty warrior, not to mention Voltan’s indignant brother. Surely Hawk can either rescue the nun or come up with the ransom, nun-saving and fund-raising being among his most renowned skills.

Ranulf finds Hawk through the tried-and-true narrative method of stumbling upon him randomly through no effort of his own. They consult a blind sorceress (Patricia Quinn), who reveals that Hawk and Ranulf need to recruit three other guys to help in their quest. And what is their quest? To defeat Voltan, rescue the nun, come up with 2,000 gold pieces, or some combination of those. It’s rather ill-defined, really, as far as quests go. And now they have this pre-quest of finding these three other guys to help them with the main quest. This part is easy, though, because Blindy McSorceress teleports Hawk to where the guys are, thus saving on transportation costs.

A few words on these three extra guys. They are a giant, a dwarf, and an elf. The giant is played by an actor who is 6’7?, and the dwarf is maybe 5’6?. This is what passes for “giant” and “dwarf” in movies that lack the money or willpower to execute special effects. And you think, well, if they can’t do anything to convince us that these actors are supernaturally tall or tiny, why refer to them as a “giant” and a “dwarf”? Why not just have them be regular dudes with magic powers or something? The answer is again provided by federal regulations, which require that all movies featuring wondrous Swords and Legions of Darkness also contain at least two (2) mythical humanoid creatures such as (but not limited to) giants, dwarfs, elves, fairies, hobbits, etc. It is only by exploiting a loophole in the statute that Hawk the Slayer was able to get out of having a dragon.

The elf is elfin enough, I guess, in that he has pointy Spock ears and talks in a squeaky voice.

The elf (Ray Charleson) is an expert archer. The giant (Bernard Bresslaw) is strong-ish. The dwarf (Peter O’Farrell) does not have any special powers to speak of, and indeed his only contribution to this Fellowship of the Rinky-dink is to provide unfunny comic relief and play practical jokes on the giant. In other words, the dwarf character is 1) not a dwarf and 2) not useful as a character. You have to admire the courage of the filmmakers, though, using the rough draft of their screenplay as the shooting script.

Since you were wondering why Voltan is evil and hates his brother so much, the movie lets Hawk have flashbacks. Years ago, Hawk married the young lady Voltan had his eye on. Voltan responded by picking a fight with Hawk, during which Hawk accidentally burned Voltan’s face and Voltan accidentally killed the girl. This skirmish could hardly have gone any worse for Voltan, but he nonetheless decided to spend the rest of his days picking more fights with Hawk.

(By the way, Jack Palance was 60 when the movie was shot. John Terry, playing his brother, was 29. The actor playing their father was 63. Voltan has brown hair in the flashback scenes, though, to indicate that he was very young and spry when those things happened.)

Hawk and his four compatriots get the ransom money by robbing and killing a slave trader, on the grounds that slave traders are bad and robbing and killing them is OK. Problem solved, right? Not so fast! Hawk knows his evil brother quite well, and he suspects Voltan will not actually return the nun when he gets the ransom money. Voltan is the kind of guy who will take the money, kill the nun, and then kill all the other nuns, too, as a dramatic flourish. Voltan is the kind of guy who would have killed the slave trader AND the slaves.

So Hawk and friends try to skip the whole ransom process entirely and just rescue the nun by themselves. They are thwarted in this by Voltan’s son, Drogo (Shane Briant), who looks to be about the same age as his Uncle Hawk. Drogo wants to prove that he can be even more evil than Voltan, a notion Voltan scoffs at. But if evil is measured in terms of over-the-top scenery-chewing — and you could make the case that it is — then Drogo definitely gives the old man a run for his money. He snivels and whines and pouts to a degree so annoying it’s breathtaking. And he’s acting alongside Jack Palance, for heaven’s sake, who is no slouch when it comes to being a big ol’ goofy ham. Jack Palance is like the version of Clint Eastwood that fell off the back of a horse and got his head stepped on.

Anyway, when Hawk tells Drogo to tell Voltan that his days are numbered, Drogo replies: “I am no messenger. But I will give YOU a message — the message of death!!” The only thing that could have made this threat more delightfully stupid is if Drogo had been dressed as Skeletor when he said it.

There is eventually a siege at the convent. Most of the bad guys are killed; then again, so are a few nuns; then again, so is dumb non-dwarf that I didn’t like anyway. For some reason that blind sorceress shows up, too, and fires a gun that covers a bad guy in Silly String, and somehow this incapacitates him. It’s seriously like a bunch of kids got together to make a movie, and just used whatever they had lying around: a friend who’s kind of tall, pointy rubber ears, Jack Palance, etc.

Eric’s Bad Movies: Teen Wolf Too (1987)

Do you remember how you felt in the summer of 1985? I can tell you. You had Michael J. Fox Fever! (Unless you were not alive.) He was the breakout star of Family Ties, a top-10 TV show about a dog named Ubu who was learning to sit. Back to the Future, released in July, was on its way to becoming the highest-grossing film of the year. And at the end of August came Teen Wolf, a modest hit that capitalized on Fox’s popularity and America’s longstanding interest in seeing its favorite TV stars buried under embarrassing makeup.

The people responsible for Teen Wolf were probably very disappointed when Fox declined to return for a sequel, especially since he DID agree to make two more Back to the Futures. “What are we, chopped liver?” the Teen Wolf people might have asked, mostly rhetorically. But they didn’t let it get them down! Young sitcom stars desirous of movie careers were plentiful in Hollywood. All the Teen Wolf people had to do was poke their heads into the studio where Mr. Belvedere or The Hogan Family or Growing Pains or Head of the Class was being taped, and grab whichever teen actor was closest. In short, they took the lemons life had handed them and used Jason Bateman to turn them into a big batch of fresh-squeezed Teen Wolf Too.

In case you missed the Teen Wolf unit in your film studies class, it was about a mediocre high school basketball player named Scott Howard who learned he had an alter ego, that of a werewolf who was really good at basketball. The sequel is about Scott’s cousin, Todd Howard, who doesn’t play sports at all and is hoping he will not inherit the Howard family trait of being a werewolf. Being a werewolf brought his cousin nothing but popularity and success, and Todd wants no part in that.

Todd is a freshman at Hamilton University, where he intends to study science and become a veterinarian (GET IT?? BECAUSE WOLVES) but is here on an athletic scholarship. Wait, didn’t I just tell you he’s not an athlete? Then why does he have an athletic scholarship? Well, it’s because the man who coached Scott’s basketball team, Coach Finstock (Paul Sand), is now the coach of Hamilton University’s boxing team — which is totally a thing, I swear — and he’s counting on Todd to exhibit the same kind of werewolf-athlete abilities as his cousin. This, in turn, will propel Hamilton’s boxing team — again, a real thing, I promise — to the regional and ultimately national championship. Hamilton probably has football and basketball, too, but those don’t matter, because everyone knows a university is only as good as its boxing team. Moreover, Coach Finstock’s reasoning is perfectly sound, as all of your major werewolf legends make it clear that the cousin of a basketball-playing werewolf is always a good boxer. As long as they’re first cousins, that is. The second cousin of a basketball-playing werewolf can’t box for crap.

Todd definitely finds it a little strange that he, a non-athlete, has been given an athletic scholarship, but not strange enough to ask any questions. For example, one of the questions he does not ask is, “What sport will I be expected to play?” He is thus quite alarmed when he learns that he must join the boxing team. (“We have a boxing team? That’s a thing?” is something else he does not ask.) This is after he’s already been alarmed to learn he’s sharing a dorm room with Stiles (Stuart Fratkin), the fun-loving, entrepreneurial doofus who was his cousin Scott’s friend in the first movie. What are the odds that Stiles would end up at Hamilton, too?? And not just Stiles but Chubby (Mark Holton), another guy from the first movie, whose legal first name is actually Chubby, I guess! Everybody’s here!

Todd is annoyed that he has to participate in athletics JUST because he accepted an athletic scholarship. UGH. All he wants to do is be science-y. To make matters worse, Stiles has changed all of Todd’s classes from science courses to fun electives, because I guess at Hamilton University you can just walk into the registrar’s office and change your roommate’s classes around, for comedy. Todd goes in to deal with it and is told that nobody is allowed to change classes after registering. That can’t be true, obviously, because Stiles just did it, but the movie forgot that part, even though it only happened 30 seconds earlier. This movie is so boring it won’t even pay attention to itself. Anyway, Todd gets frustrated with the registrar, and his eyes turn red and werewolf-y, and the registrar is terrified into letting him change his classes back. This is in accordance with classical werewolf lore, which states that the first signs of lycanthropy often appear when the subject is confronted with a plot hole.

Then Todd is at a fancy luncheon for new students, which exists as further evidence that the people who made the movie had never actually been to college or met anyone who had. While dancing with one of the school’s slutty girls, Todd gets a little “hot under the collar,” as it were, and totally wolfs out: claws, fur, fangs, the whole nine yards. He is mortified! As for his fellow students, their reaction to learning that a werewolf lives among them is not panic or fear, nor do they seek counsel from religious leaders or government officials, nor do they band together and slay the beast before it can kill them. No, their response to Todd’s werewolfism is to make fun of it. They tease him mercilessly over the next several days, as if this were junior high school and Todd had worn a girl’s shirt.

All of that changes, however, when Todd goes full-wolf during a boxing match and defeats his opponent. Now everyone loves Todd, and werewolves are awesome! Young people have fickle tastes. Todd, who you’ll recall hated the idea of inheriting the family curse, instantly embraces it now, leading to an exuberant party scene in which he sings “Do You Love Me? (Now That I Can Dance),” wherein “dance” is a euphemism for “turn into a monster and beat people up,” and to which the answer is YES.

At this point, the story requires Todd to get a big ego over his newfound fame, to win one boxing match after another, to skip classes in favor of partying, and to neglect the nerdy girl from his biology class in favor of the campus slutty girls. The movie, getting bored with itself again and seeking to hurry things along, conveys all of this in a series of montages. We see that Todd is the wolf most of the time, rarely converting back to human form. The only way the movie could be any lazier is if it just had a narrator say, “And then Todd got very popular, became a jerk, spent all his time being a wolf, and forgot his friends.”

Something probably happens to make Todd take stock of his situation and realize he’s been misbehaving, but I don’t remember what it is. Actually, it’s entirely possible that no such event occurs, and that Todd has a change of heart simply because the script said: “TODD: [has change of heart].” At any rate, he has a frank conversation with his uncle Harold (James Hampton), who loves being a werewolf but doesn’t use it to get ahead in life, because it is wrong to use one’s talents or skills for personal gain. Todd doesn’t like that he spent an entire semester — i.e., three montages — being a jerk. He repents of his misdeeds and boxes in the big match against the school’s big rivals as himself, not as the wolf. Because it was WRONG for him to be a wolf when he was boxing. Not that he should be ashamed of being a wolf, though. Heaven forbid! Todd should accept himself for who he is. He just shouldn’t flaunt it. Or use it to help himself. Or to help others. But he shouldn’t be ashamed of it, either. He should be proud of his family’s heritage! Proud in secret, though. Not in public. I’m sure you understand.