2103: The Deadly Wake (1997)

2103: The Deadly Wake (1997)

Directed by: Philip Jackson

Starring: Malcom McDowell, Michael Pare, Heidi von Palleske

You know, I like Malcom McDowell. Sometimes he can eat up scenery like it’s delicious cake, but sometimes he can also turn in a really good performance. And yet, he hasn’t been in a good film since the 70’s. At least the creepy shaky voice should count for something, shouldn’t it?

2103: The Deadly Wake is very surprisingly about the crew of a ship in the future. Not a spaceship. A water ship. Isn’t that bizarre? Who does that? McDowell plays a burnt-out drunkard who gets recruited for the captaincy of a boat sent to ship medical supplies to an ex-war zone. Of course, that would be boring, so it turns out that the cargo is actually incredibly deadly poison and there are bombs on board designed to take the ship down and spread the virus across the entire ocean.

It’s actually a pretty okay movie for the first half, with some interesting ideas and a nice, well-flowing plot that gets you interested in the movie. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a killer cyborg woman who looks like she came for a Judas Priest concert and who dances around as she kills people and the first mate all of a sudden uses bad special effects magic and smites the robot with lightning… I don’t know, usually you can kinda tell when a writer doesn’t have an ending for their movie, but 2103 goes way overboard. It’s like the writer had a stroke halfway through and decided to turn it into a completely different and far stupider movie. The ending is some artsy thing where McDowell dances through the burning ship with his first mate… and then all of a sudden it’s a hundred years in the future and the first mate is the captain of a ship who’s telling a legend about the movie… what the hell? Seriously, I was enjoying the low-budget sci-fi thing until the end just exploded stupid all over the place.

I kinda liked this movie, but I would never recommend it, and there is one reason for that: The computer and navigation system of the boat is a creepy baby puppet suspended in a jar in the middle of the bridge. Fuck. That. Baby.

Blue Justice (1990)

Blue Justice (1990)

Directed by: Ramon Grae Caballero

Starring: Ron Alexander, Michael Ford, James Randolph Edmonds

Okay, so this isn’t a real movie poster or box cover or anything, it’s just something I made in half a minute in photoshop. Why? Because this movie apparently doesn’t exist. There’s no IMDb listing for it, not even the director appears to exist there… After a lot of digging, I finally found a Spanish Yahoo! movies page with basically no information about it, but it at least reassured me that I didn’t just invent this terrible thing. I almost hate to introduce Blue Justice to the internet as it’s lived such a nice, happy life without it, and talking about it will certainly destroy the entire internet as we know it… Eh, what harm could it do.

Blue Justice is very possibly the worst movie I have ever seen, and I’ve seen Return of the Ghostbusters. Blue Justice makes Plan 9 From Outer Space look like an epic masterpiece. It makes Red Zone Cuba seem linear and sensical. THIS IS A VERY BAD MOVIE THAT I WATCHED. And… I have no idea how I got it. However, I’m pretty sure I’m damned to hell automatically just for having watched this thing, just to make sure I don’t blow up heaven by telling anyone about it or thinking about Blue Justice. And I will think about it. PTSD is very real.

Blue Justice is about a woman who has designed a new kind of computer chip which is fused with animal brain cells, making it immune to all computer viruses because it can think and it knows if there’s something that’s not supposed to be there. Because of this, there are a couple of mobsters who want to steal the chip, and a couple of… other guys who want to stop them. These two other guys never really seem to have an alignment, but as far as this movie is concerned, they’re the “good guys.”

There are some face meltings and an off-screen death of the main mob boss (“It was weird how we found his body… just his clothes laid out, as if he had just disappeared in them.”), oh, and one of the mob guys dies by CHOKING ON A HARMONICA. A harmonica that he keeps playing, despite not being able to play it (how can you not play a harmonica? It’s a step up from a kazoo, for fuck’s sake, you should be able to at least fake your way through SOMETHING), and he just accidentally swallows it. That is not even close to how you play a harmonica, silly mob guy. After all this and the good guys recover the chip, there is a bizarre little montage of weird colors and an old guy dissecting the chip to an 80’s techno dance song sorta thing… and then the movie doesn’t even have the decency to END after all that, instead going on for another fifteen minutes with some subplot about a guy who’s the estranged son of the woman who invented the chip out to kill his half-sister… THIS WAS A VERY, VERY BAD MOVIE.

Just that synopsis by itself isn’t enough to convey how stupid of a film Blue Justice is. I don’t have the words to do it justice. The biggest flaw of this movie was that there were no actors, just a bunch of guys who sat around and said lines at a camera. There’s even a scene where a guy is VERY OBVIOUSLY reading his lines off of a sheet of paper on his desk. What the hell? I know, I know, hiring actors costs money, more money than just finding some chick who will get naked on film. But still, I’ve seen pornos with better acting. A LOT OF THEM. Not that… I go around watching a lot of porn. Or… anything. Okay, well, that’s all for this review. God, I hope nobody else ever accidentally runs across this movie anywhere. They’ll be joining me in the penalty box set aside for viewers of Blue Justice in hell. Where we do nothing but watch Blue Justice.

Crimewave (1985)

Crimewave (1985)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Reed Birney, Sheree J. Wilson, Bruce Campbell

Well, here you go, a movie directed by Sam Raimi, co-written by the Coen Brothers, and with Bruce Campbell in a supporting role. And yet, given all those factors, this is one incredibly bad, unfunny movie. What can you say, they were all still pretty new at this point. This was between Evil Dead and Evil Dead II for Raimi, and between Blood Simple and Raising Arizona for the Coen bros. This half-hearted slapstick comedy is very much a testing ground for all these now-big names… and sometimes tests fail.

Crimewave gets the ball rolling when a partner of a security firm finds out that his partner is about to sell the firm to Bruce Campbell, who intends to turn it into a strip club. Of course, this makes the jilted partner hire a couple of exterminators to break into the office that night and kill the traitor with a machine that electrocutes him. Or, wait, not “of course.” Anyway, these two exterminators (who have unnecessarily dubbed voices to make them sound like cartoon characters) go on a “crime wave,” if you will, and kill a bunch of people. Meanwhile, our hero… whatever his name was, manages to eventually fight them in a car chase and he almost gets the chair and nuns save him from being executed, etc etc.

The idea behind the movie is that it’s just a wacky slapstick escapade with dance numbers and such and so on, but it just manages to drain all the funny right out of everything it tries. It’s really weird to think about, but the same techniques are used in Evil Dead II, and pulled off much better. Maybe it’s just that in the context of a comedy it’s too cliche and groan-inducing, but when it’s a horror film it’s surprising and funny? I’m not sure, but I certainly never want to see Crimewave again, I’ll tell you that much. Just makes me sad.

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Destroy All Monsters (1968)

Directed by: Ishiro Honda

Starring: Akira Kubo, Jun Tazaki, Yukiko Kobayashi

Destroy All Monsters is not only the greatest misleading movie title ever, but the greatest Godzilla film ever. Well, in my opinion. But seriously, what else are people going to say is their favorite? One that doesn’t have a dozen monsters fighting each other? If so, that person is a nerd of some sort, and therefore their opinion need not matter.

Destroy All Monsters was supposed to be a last grab at the Godzilla franchise, a desperate measure to end the series on a big rubbery bang (ew), but it turned out to be so successful that they kept on making Godzilla movies for the next… well, I think the latest one came out in ’05 or ’06 or something. For sure, Destroy All Monsters is significantly better in every respect than the last film in the series, Son of Godzilla, which was just godawful. It is outstanding in the late 60’s/early 70’s era of Godzilla films that it actually deals with a good amount of monster fighting instead of the monsters just kinda playing around and saving kittens from trees and that sorta crap. Godzilla from this era is much more of a nice guy, hell, he’s a father who takes care of his ugly paunchy son. I… think I may have given away the fact that I know way too much about these movies. Moving on.

At the start of Destroy All Monsters, the nations of the world have created a safe place for all the vicious city-destroying monsters to live without bothering anybody called Monster Land! Whee! Sounds fun! (They didn’t start calling it “Monster Island,” a somewhat more dignified name until the next film) Unfortunately, things are not all fun and games at Monster Land (contrary to it’s slogan, “Things are all fun ‘n games at Monster Land!” Or at least, that’s what the slogan would be if I ran a theme park named Monster Land. I am WAY off tangent this review), and suddenly a thick yellow gas fills the island, knocking the staff out cold and allowing the monsters to escape! They immediately go on a rampage across the major cities of the world, as monsters are oft wont to do.

Japan decides to recall the team they have stationed on the moon to deal with the Monster Island situation (because the moon is the closest place, I guess), and they find the attending personnel brainwashed by aliens from the asteroid belt. In the Godzilla universe, aliens are always depicted as women in shiny leotards with matching caps. They’re very scary. Not only are the aliens controlling the people who ran Monster Island, they’re also controlling the monsters. And they’re making them destroy the great cities of the world so they can… have peace with mankind? Okay. Sure. Of course, our intrepid spacemen don’t buy it and just try to shoot the alien lady, but she has an alien forcefield and it’s only like twenty minutes into the movie anyway, so you can’t really kill the aliens yet.

Skipping ahead a bit, the people of earth manage to fight off the aliens a little bit and get their hands on the control device they’re using to control the monsters. They then use the monsters to attack the hidden base of the aliens, but the aliens have a little protection in the way of Ghidorah, the three-headed space monster who is also the coolest Godzilla monster of them all. There’s just something in the way the strings that hold his heads up make his necks wobble that’s just great. Some stuff happens and Godzilla’s stupid kid blows his stupid smoke rings and everything works out in the end. But hey, what a great ride.

Like I’ve said, this is my favorite Godzilla flick. It’s always disappointing to see a lot of non-monsters on the screen in these sorts of things, but even the non-monster segments of Destroy All Monsters are just as goofy and and cheesy as the monster parts, and that’s what really makes this enjoyable. If you don’t like cheesy, goofy movies, then what the hell are you doing even looking at Godzilla movies? Go away.