Last Action Hero

The Cast:
Jack Slate-Arnold Schwarzenegger
Danny Madigan-Austin O'Brien
Benedict-Charles Dance
Art Carney- Frank Slater
Vivaldi-Anthony Quinn
John Practice-F. Murray Abraham
Whitney-Bridgette Wilson
Irene Madigan-Mercedes Ruehl
Death-Ian Fucking McKellan

The Plot
    Danny Madigan is a kid who lives in the totally real and fairly shitty world and has an unhealthy obsession with his favorite action hero Jack Slater, and a totally unquestioned relationship with an elderly projectionist in an irrationally large soon to be abandoned theater.  The theater is scheduled to close but not before it is given the responsibility to run quality control and the film print for the premier of the new Jack Slater movie.  Danny, after being victimized by a home invasion, is offered the chance to view this midnight review by his projectionist friend Nick and opts to do that instead of heading home to his worried mother (he is very single minded). 
    Because they needed a plot device and Nick lacks a final will and testament, Danny is given a ticket Nick received from Houdini that is reportedly magic.  Danny gets sucked into the movie and tries desperately to prove that Jack lives in an action movie.  Meanwhile the chief henchmen of Jack Slater  IV, Benedict, starts to realize something weird is going on with the random preteen that is Jacks new partner and gets his hands on the magic ticket and escapes into the real world. 
    Danny and Jack follow and Jack faces the same existential dread that all the rest of us have just gotten used too, while Benedict realizes he likes a world where murders go unsolved and heroes can be shot. It all comes to a head at the premier for Jack Slater.  In a rain soaked climax, Jack and Danny face off against Benedict and another of of Jacks nemeses and Jack nearly dies.  Enter Oscar winner Ian McKellen as Ingmar Bergmans Death, to Deathus ex Machina a solution and everyone lives happily ever after. 

The Experience
    I remembered liking this movie.  I saw it in a decaying old theater not terribly dissimilar to the one in the movie  and had vague recollections of some of the gags.  So I recently rewatched it (which is why I'm bothering to write about it now) and this movie is a blast.  Arnold Schwarzenegger has always had a flair for action comedy and this is him at the top of his game.  Austin O'Brien starts off painfully irritating but once he's in the world of the movie he takes on a role you don't see a lot from kid side kicks, he ends up basically the straight man, relentlessly driving Jack from plot point to plot point and fully aware that he is doing so. 
    Charles Dance is a delight as Benedict, who is well portrayed as the smartest man in a movie full of idiotic tropes.  His disdain for the foolishness around him and glee at the ability to just be a bad guy without having some hyper masculine hero after him provides the great villain that every worthwhile action movie needs. 
    This movie was meta before meta was a thing, and plays both sides of the issue.  Jacks police station looks like the interior of a mall and is filled with movie cops from every iteration of the cop movie genre, right now to an animated, misogynistic cat detective and whenever the ludicrousness is pointed out Slater misses the point because it's all so damn normal to him.  Then in the real world he, for the first time in his life, has a conversation with a woman and is amazed at how pleasant it is.  Because of course as an action hero he would never have just stopped and talked to a woman.  Then playing the existence of actors against the existence of their characters (including a prescient unhappy relationship between Schwarzenegger and then wife Maria Shriver) produces a consistently entertaining film. 

Big Money Rustla$

Cast

Big Baby- Violent J

Sugar Wolf- Shaggy 2 Dope

Dusty Poot- Monoxide

Dirty Sanchez- Mark Jury

Sign Dude- Scott Foley

Tink- Bridget Powers

The Ghost- Boondox

The Mortician- Blaze ya Dead Homie

Hey Guys,

Back with another installment of everybody's favorite movie blog. Today, we tackle the newest movie from the epic rap duo, the Insane Clown Posse. Many fans of shitty movies may remember their first foray into the world of cinema, “Big Money Hustla$” as the pretty atrocious spoof of the seventies exploitation flicks. For this outing, “Big Money Rustla$”, they have turned their attentions to the Old West.

The Plot

The Old West town of Mudbug is being held hostage by a gang of hoodlums led by the infamous Big Baby. He runs the town with an iron fist and a lead slug. The nebbish sheriff is no match for the gangster, and the town is circling the drain.

In rides Sugar Wolf on a visit to his mom, who is the top whore in the town. She reveals to Sugar that his father and his brothers were all former sheriffs who fell to the six-shooter of Big Baby. Sugar vows to clean up the town and names himself sheriff. He sends the old sheriff out on foot to get some chili from New York and names Jason Mewes and a local Mexican named Dirty Sanchez as deputies. After thwarting a group of assassins featuring a dead guy, a dude with a weird foot, and a trans midget named Tank, the feud comes to a head in a shootout between Big Baby and Sugar Wolf himself.

The Experience

Some of you may have seen the previous outing of ICP in Big Money Hustla$. It was sophomoric, cheezy and worst of all, boring. This movie is only two of those. I watched this movie while falling asleep at 2 AM and could not take my eyes off of it.

The movie is so replete with sight gags that it could have been made by a mentally disturbed Zucker brother. From the very first scene where a drunken Mexican hand changes the population figures on the sign outside town as people enter and ultimately die; To the last scene where that same Mexican after being shot uses his last ounce of strength to change the sign to 0 and then grab his hooch as he dies; To the romantic montage of perversions that Sugar and his lady love Tink (Bridget Powers aka Bridget the Midget) engage is to sweet music this movie is rife with one liners and a sense of humor that strives to rise to lowest common denominator.

I don't want to make it seem as though this movie is without flaws; it very much is not. There are long, drawn-out scenes of the Psychopathic boys trying desperately to string together something that resembles a plot. The gags get a bit redundant, and the stereotyping gets old. Like its predecessor, this movie seems to be the subject of drunken brainstorming gone awry. Unlike its predecessor, it is ultimately worth a view.

My recommendations for this movie are as follows. If you have never been a juggalo, skip it. The humor is not enough to get you to care about anything more than the time you are wasting. If you are now or were once a Juggalo, get well buzzed, keep the drinks coming, and pop this fucker up on Netflix. The nostalgia will bring you in, and the gags will keep you watching.

DragonBall: Evolution

Cast

Goku-Justin Chatwin

Gohan- Randall Duk-Kim

Chi-Chi: Jamie Chung

Bulma: Emmy Rossum

Master Roshi: Chow Yun-Fat

Yamcha: Joon Park

Lord Piccolo: James Marsters, please swoon now ladies

Hey guys. Today on Your Movie Sucks we go back a few years to one of my personal favorites: DragonBall: Evolution. The 2009 film starring Justin Chatwin and Emmy Rossum of Shameless fame and the great martial arts master Chow Yun-Fat of pretty much any Kung-Fu movie that didn't star Jackie Chan or Jet Li. For those of you who haven't seen it here is a quick synopsis.

Goku is a teen who is something of a loser despite being pretty good looking and a bad ass. He lives with his inexplicably Asian grandfather Gohan, who teaches him to defy any and all of the laws of physics using the powers of martial arts. One day while Goku is off at a party getting the hot chick in school, Chi-Chi, to dump her jock boyfriend for him; an evil, recently freed demon named Piccolo (I guess trombone was taken) comes to Goku's house and drops it on Gramps, in search of one of the seven mystical Dragon Balls. Grandpa, as he dies, tells Goku to find Master Roshi to finish his training, blah blah blah, Bulma, Yamcha (from the cartoon) and for no apparent reason Chi-Chi come along and a raccous amount of trying to stuff anime into live action ensues. The whole gang end up in a face-off with Piccolo (played by James Marsters, please swoon now ladies) and Goku becomes a giant evil gorilla, until he gets better and learns the valuable lesson that it's okay to sometimes turn into a giant evil gorilla.

The Experience

This is essentially exactly what a modern B movie should be. Good enough to be shown in theaters, but not good enough or big budget enough for anyone to notice. The performances turned in by the cast are so heartfelt and earnest that you can't help but love it, regardless of how cheap the cgi, hackneyed the script, or confusing the plot.

The real magic of this movie is that regardless of how bad it was, at no point did I feel like making fun of it. It was just too much damn fun the way it was. I must admit that when I was a young-un I myself was a fan of the cartoon show. The nods that this movie gives to the source material are plentiful. Goku's hair is a gravity defying spiky nod to modern art, as it should be. Bulma has a bunch of inventions that make limited amounts of sense, but are incredibly useful in the present situation (have you ever wanted a motorcycle that can fit in your pocket).

The plot of the movie moves along at a fairly quick place, often leaving little time to ask whats going on and requiring that you just accept it. This is in stark contrast to the cartoon (or at least the DragonBall Z cartoon) which will often spend several episodes with characters staring at each other and screaming, all while looking like they are trying very hard to expunge last nights dinner of Chinese take out. Once again the thing is you WANT to go along with the movie so you just hop on for the ride.

The cast of this movie is the key it. It is Chatwin's incredibly guileless performance as Goku, Chow Yun-Fats lecherous Roshi and Marsters suprisingly weighty Piccolo that keep you with the movie. The actors in this movie understand that they are representing a classic. Dragonball has been a part of Japanese culture for over three decades. Every one involved in the movie respects the source material and clearly dedicated themselves to it no matter how ridiculous. What this results in is a movie where it is clear that the cast is simultaneously taking this very seriously, while having a blast. That type of enthusiasm begs the audience to be swept up in it. I for one was not going to turn it down.

The Three Musketeers

So here's the deal with this blog, guys. I review movies that are already established to be crap for watchability and over all fun.

The Three Musketeers

Cast:

Logan Lerman

Matthew McFayden

Ray Stevenson

Luke Evans

Milla Jovovich

Christoph Waltz

Orlando Bloom

Mads Mickelson

Plot:

Three ex-members of the kings personal guard and a young man, seeking to join their ranks, uncover a secret plot by a power hungry Cardinal and his wicked henchwoman to start a war with England....oh... and...There are flying machines...we'll get to that later.

The Experience

So, if you didn't see this movie, Congratulations. You happened to be looking the other way for the approximately thirteen seconds it spent in theaters. I myself caught it at a buck fifty second run theater (a glorious addition to any community) and for that reason I felt that the experience was well worth the money. Now some of you may have read the heading and though “Wow, Alexander Dumas' classic swashbuckling tale of adventure and intrigue has been brought to the big screen with a slew of talented actors and a budget necessary to do it justice. Thank God.” This statement would have been true. Some of you may also have said “Well at least they couldn't get further away from the story than that piece of crap Disney made in the 90's.” That statement would have been false.

It would seem that despite a cast of actors largely accepted to be talented and one of the greatest source materials of all time, the people responsible for this little slice of celluloid, sat down at a table, put on their thinking caps, and thought, “How can we truly make Alexander Dumas roll over in his grave”. The answer, flying ships. The central focus of this movie has moved away from an attempt to frame the Queen for an affair, to an attempt to frame the Queen for an affair to start a war with flying boats. Basically take every major scene from the novel and add a flying boat. The death of DeWinter (it's a classic novel and a shitty movie, if this is a spoiler screw you) happens off of a flying boat (oh and she doesn't die so...that's dumb). The climax is a aerial naval battle that is won by the side that figures out “WAIT! The sky is three dimensional”. The major reveal of Athos' relationship with DeWinter is revealed in the beginning as they are stealing plans for a flying ship.

So this should give you some clue as to what was running through the head of those making the films (hint: it's a river of crap). That all being said this movie was a BLAST. I went to it with my girlfriend and our mutual best friend. The glory of movies like this is that if you are at all clever you can MST3K the shit out them, and with a movie this bad the whole theater gets in on the game. Watch this movie with friends. Watch it with a fair amount of beer. Watch it with out any expectations that it will entertain you without some work on your part. It is one of the most enjoyable piles of crap I've seen in a theater. Unfortunately I cannot remember any of the higher quality quips (in the future I will try to remember a few) I think that the highlight of the night was when the couple sitting off of my right shoulder started whispering back and forth and I realized that they were mocking the movie too.

Till next time folks, and if you see a shitty movie, mock the HELL out of it.