Imagine Time Chasers if its plot entailed not time travel but alligator smuggling, if its cast had far less investment in what they were doing, if the chase scenes were even more cheap and stupid, and if it induced Z-grade celebrity actors to somehow embarrass themselves—in this case, Michael Berryman (Captain Rixx from the TNG episode "Conspiracy"), Antonio Fargas (TV's Huggy Bear), and Joe Estevez, who of course is reason I watched this.
My goal in this review is, as much as possible, to make you understand so you don't have to see it. Because whatever else can be said of this movie, it has a certain uniqueness, and unfortunately that can be attractive sometimes.
Be assured that Road House is in fact repellent from start to finish.
I…
That w…
Why d…
I don't know where to begin.
I have a standard operating procedure when confronted with a film so astoundingly, unforgettably inept that it is destined for a special place in my heart. I refer to the likes of Birdemic, The Room, Teen-Age Strangler, or The Beast of Yucca Flats—a film I adore so much I've created a second Twitter account in its honor. That procedure is to ask myself, not in sarcastic bafflement (though there's that, too), "How/why did this get made?" I often feel that I can't fully evaluate a cinematic turd until I've been able to come up with at least a plausible answer to this question.
In the case of the preceding examples, the answers are (in order) "somebody thought he was both Hitchcock and Al Gore"; "somebody wanted to get aspiring naked actress flesh all over him"; "a small town thought they could come together and make a swell picture just as well as Hollywood"; and, well, "I'm Coleman Francis; I don't need a reason."
Imagine a Miami where rival synth-pop bands, vying for the choice gig at a particular club, enlist cocaine-funded motorcycle ninjas and gangs full of Mad Max extras to assault one another seemingly at random.
(Did I have you at "motorcycle ninjas"? Maybe skip to the end, then. Otherwise, stay with me.)
Some years ago I watched the late-era Val Kilmer movie Spartan because I'd always been a fan of Kilmer but I'd seen some online scuttlebutt to the effect of "Hey, hurr hurr, how 'bout that washed-up loser Val Kilmer, huh? Look at these complete shit movies he's makin' now," so after I finished Spartan, I thought, "Well, okay, that wasn't GREAT, but it was far from complete shit, and Kilmer was pretty darn good in it; so, Internet haters? What the hell?"
Well, this. This the hell.
Once in a great while, a motion picture comes along that reminds you of why you watch movies of its type—a transformative cinematic experience that leaves you wondering why it took you so long to get around to seeing it. Such a film is 1978's The Norseman; not since Citizen Kane have I seen a film that left me feeling this way—and that it lacks a Wikipedia page seems a travesty to me now.
Why, you ask?
If anyone's made a really good Lovecraft movie, I'm not yet aware of it. It isn't this very '60s Corman flick, which stars an amazingly young Dean Stockwell as the creepy villain and Sandra Dee as the college girl he enthralls for dark purposes.
Through Netflix I saw a far superior, though still not great, retro-silent indie entitled Call of Cthulhu, but this was many years ago and all I remember was that (1) it was kind of slow initially, making a valiant effort to build suspense despite budget and acting limitations and (2) the big reveal of Cthulhu was disappointing. Of course, there's also Re-Animator, but I view it as more in the Evil Dead league than truly Lovecraftian.
If I didn't know better, I would argue that Lovecraft is inherently unfilmable. The terror of the unknown is so foundational to Lovecraft's good stories that movie versions, dependent as they tend to be on visuals, would seem unable to fully succeed at the task of adaptation.
Among the notable names of the 1960s Italian sword-and-sandal scene was Steve Reeves, who played Hercules in two movies familiar to MST3K fans. I was delighted last week to discover a movie on Netflix Instant—Duel of the Titans—that not only stars Steve Reeves but also Gordon Brown (whom you might remember as the awkwardly-named secret agent Bart Fargo from another MSTed Italian '60s flick, Danger! Death Ray). In Duel of the Titans, they play the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, respectively—and while all the ingredients are there for another baffling, disjointed Hercules Unchained-esque spectacle, it actually turned out to be pretty good.
As stupid sword-and-sorcery movies go, Knives of the Avenger (on Netflix Instant) is less stupid than many, but short on both swords and sorcery. It's also short on story—its simplicity and predictability make the film seem as if it may have been intended for children, except for the rape.
The sorcery is entirely dispensed with early on, after a tediously long opening sequence involving some sort of soothsaying witch. It's her cryptic exposition that clues us in that this is supposed to be a Viking movie. She persuades some Bond-girl-esque queen and her strange-looking son to flee the land, just before the antagonist (Argin? Argyle? something like that) shows up to mock and torment the witch.
Why all this is happening isn't revealed for what feels like an hour, after our hero has finally been introduced. He's played by Cameron Mitchell (Captain Santa Claus in Space Mutiny and head evil guy in Stranded in Space) in a bad dye job. His character's name is Rorik or Rurik or something, but that's technically a spoiler—not that you will care. You'll be too distracted by his terrifying similarity to Zapp Branigan in the hair and skirt departments.
