Oligarchy of One

Footage Best Left Lost: The Devil Inside

2013-11-01T01:48:00.003-07:00

If you love bad movies, the recent popularity of the "Found Footage" genre is like striking oil while out hunting with your coon hound. We'd depleted the Italian cinema and an infuriating number of DTV movies are turning out to range from "alright" to "actually kind of good", so things were looking pretty grim. But then, enterprising filmmakers created an entire genre where questions like "Can I see what's happening?" and "Don't I need a script?" are completely moot. All you have to do is make a cheap enough movie that will put as many asses in seats in the first couple weekends as possible and you're set. Ed Wood must be rolling over in his grave knowing that his film making techniques have become mainstream money makers.

"Paranormal Activity has made three quarters of a billion dollars worldwide? God damn it"

The Devil Inside is one of these movies, produced for an incredible one million dollars and earning an infuriating gross of over a hundred million because there is no justice in the world. Perhaps that's mean though. Comedy is a hard thing to get right but The Devil Inside succeeds at being absolutely hilarious. Granted its trying to be a horror movie but don't hold that against it. Most exorcism movies turn out to be hilarious.

Satan's muscle from Exorcism of Emily Rose

The movie starts with a 911 call from the protagonists mother in the 1980s saying that she has killed three people. Police come to investigate, stiffly giving exposition about the crime scene to let us know that it was an exorcism gone wrong. While painfully videotaping the detective explain that the victims were holding crosses, they hear a noise from the crawl space of the building and so naturally the camera man goes first. Because in an apparently unsecured crime scene where three healthy people were beaten to death, the man you want on point is the guy with a VHS camcorder.

For people too young to remember VHS Camcorders: They were roughly this size if you had a smaller one.

A boogity boogity jump scare commences as she impossibly pounces on the camera man from the side and it cuts to a news report. The police describe it as being a prayer meeting gone wrong which is either them trying to sweep the fact it was obviously an exorcism under the table or they're too clueless to piece the clues together. Given they began a forensic investigation of the crime scene before it was cleared, probably the latter. The news report also describes the community as having been "leveled" by the tragedy.

Pictured: The Community after the news of the tragedy.

We cut to the modern day and get out Found Footage Excuse framework: A documentary crew is following Isabella, the daughter of Maria the aforementioned possessed lady, as she goes to Rome to visit the Vatican Asylum her mother was sent to after she was found not guilty by reason of insanity. There's a lot of "Science vs Religion" and travelogue filler but the story really gets going when she visits the Exorcism class at the apostolic college at the Vatican where a professor is delivering exposition about demons and possessions.

"There will be a final test on this at the 50 minute mark of the movie"

This is where the movie starts to make shit up as it goes along to justify its own plot and by extension, the point where it becomes hilariously awesome. There are you see, apparently 800 satanic cults in Italy alone and so "we needed more exorcists" which gives me this image of Italy being the Old Detroit of Possessions, with the priests getting hammered out there by all the devils they're having to evict out of everyone. As a consequence, they're training Exorcists en masse to deal with this, enlisting a wide variety of believers and non believers. Isabella meets with a pair of them who tell her she needs to see a real exorcism.

Venkman is too competent to be in this movie sadly

But first she goes to the Vatican Asylum to see her mother. She's told that she reacts violently to all religious iconography or discussions and shown footage of her attacking various people over the years before being left almost totally alone with the person who is at best a violent psychotic and at worst a clown car full of demons. The mother shows signs of ritualistic self mutilation and acts well, crazy and\or possessed before becoming violent and attacking everyone.

WHO COULD HAVE EXPECTED THIS?

Convinced that her mother is actually possessed because she knew about an abortion that Isabella had, she goes to Ben and David, Exorcist Bros to review the footage we just saw so they can explain the obvious shit we already figured out in the name of padding. We find out that the duo has been doing unauthorized exorcisms because they believe the Church isn't doing enough because its mired in bureaucracy. They are you see, Cowboy Cop Exorcists, who probably leap through the air with two crosses and are all shook up about poor Belial's civil rights but they get the job done. And to show her, they're going to take her to see one of their unauthorized exorcisms. Oh and the director and maybe cameraman shows up to confuse you given he's completely off screen for nearly a half hour.

Sir Very Rarely Appearing In This Movie

They explain that all demons have names and a place in the hierarchy of hell that they reveal during exorcisms, which means that the demon trapped inside these people are giving them their name, rank and satanic serial number during the priests interrogation. The demon inside this woman is named Berith, because making up your own demon is hard but going to Wikipedia and finding a demon you like is super easy. They head down to your standard class six creepy exorcism basement and jab her with a syringe full of what sounds like rophenol which well, people are going to ask questions when a Catholic priest buys a case of roofies.

This looks less like a possession and more like a game of Twister gone horribly, horribly wrong.

So they jab her full of roofies and tie her to the bed-Wow, that's a sentence I just wrote. Thanks movie. Anyway, they tie her up and wheel in a bunch of hospital equipment to monitor her vitals. The demon throws your standard "sucks cocks in hell" dialogue at the priests while thrusting and making obscene gestures at them. It also throws in the delightful addition of the demon spraying period blood at them, because uh...demons are all like, 13 years old I guess.

"Bro, I know she's possessed by a demon, but should I?"

She proceeds to break out of her restraints and kick their asses until they managed to get her restrained and defeat the demon by yelling about St Barnabas at the demon while pinning her in a submission hold, so I guess it probably just tapped. They conclude that they beat the demon, so they should try to take on Isabella's mother. David has reservations because he's a priest and is worried about "losing my job" like he's the by the book partner who tries to hold his partner in line. But he goes along with it and they plan to secretly exorcise her using poorly described mechanisms to get private time with her under the church's nose while also letting them wire the room for video.

Thank God they labeled it "Overhead Cam" or else I might have assumed they bolted her to the ceiling.

And at this point we find out that the Cowboy Exorcists are completely outclassed and maybe there was a reason she was kept permanently sedated by the Church. She starts out the exorcism by falling asleep in the face of their holy water, crosses and vestments. Then, when they're convinced that she's not possessed she hell shrieks at them so loud it blanks out the cameras and then proceeds to laugh off their every attempt to exorcise her. They start throwing holy water at her and she goes "OH NO NOT HOLY WATER" before she starts choking Ben while laughing her ass off and telekinetically hits David with the overhead camera.

All the roofies in the world won't save you this time

Ben tries to use the name of the lord against the demon brigade but it just laughs it off and mocks him by saying that he's not going to win God's favor back after what he did, no matter how many exorcisms he performs. He tries the old "Tell me your name!" trick and the demon force pushes him across the room and says if he gets that close again, it will rip his tongue out and use it to skull fuck Isabella.

"WHY ARE WE SO BAD AT THIS?"

It continues to trash talkwhile absolutely dominating them throughout the exorcism. Ben continues to use old exorcism standbys like "Do you hear me demon?" and it shuts him down at every turn, including replying with "Of course I hear you, all you fucking do is talk!" Isabella goes to her and demands that the demon leave her and her mother returns to normal, seemingly free of demons. Hooray! They take the footage and go over it, learning that there were four demons inside her Mother. Well huh, there were four of them in the room and they all talk about how powerful those demons were, but nobody really thinks about how they had to break a minor ranked demon over a period of weeks but Team Asb'el threw in the towel in a couple minutes. They're also all weird and moody since it happened, but that's probably nothing right? Oh well, David just has to do a baptism at work the next day and nothing could possibly-

Oh Devil Inside No!

Yeah, the rest of the movie is basically a victory lap for the Asb'el, the fallen angels who inhabited her mother. David almost kills a baby during a baptism and then somehow manages to escape back to their apartment where Isabella is telling a camera the sins of the Cameraman's mother. David freaks out upstairs and they grab a camera to go confront him in the dark. Quickly realizing that he's been possessed, they run back downstairs and are confronted by the police. They tell them that David is upstairs but he's possessed by a demon but the police naturally go upstairs to arrest him.

"We're terrible at this"

David shoots himself with the gun and somehow Isabella is hurt and has to be taken to the hospital. I'm guessing the remaining demon went into her, but its hard to tell since its a found footage movie and the scene is filmed with zero light. They take her to the hospital but finally realize that they are totally in over their heads and need to get Isabella to more competent exorcists to remove the demons but before they can, she overpowers a number of hospital staff, killing at least one of them and showing obvious signs of demonic possession because duh. Ben tells the hospital staff that he's a priest and they let him take her away, because my hypothesis of this being a common occurrence in Italy is apparently absolutely correct.

Fucking Mondays, am I right?

And thus begins one of the most insulting endings to a movie of all time: They drag her to the car and speed off towards the Vatican in the hope of getting her exorcised when she begins to wake up in the car. Ben fights her as she reveals that he let his uncle die in some unexplained incident and when he manages to pin her, the demons take control of the driver. He removes his seat belt, accelerates as fast as he can and plows the vehicle into oncoming traffic.And then it fades to black.

THIS IS A THING. THIS HAPPENED.

Yes, the movie fades to black, tells us that the case is unsolved and that we should go to this website to find out more information. Who does this? Who decided it was a good idea? Did they run out of time making the movie and tacked the ending on online?

The world may never know

A movie that was too cheap to actually finish the story made over a hundred million dollars in gross ticket sales. Every shitty director with dreams of getting a piece of that moon money is going to see this shit and rush out to make their own crappy low budget movie with a random ass hook, because the amount of money you can make vs the amount of effort required is so absolutely lopsided that its no wonder the market is and will continue to be saturated with these films.

Its going to be a glorious time for bad movie lovers.

Super Soldier Shenanigans: Universal Soldier Day of Reckoning (Part Two)

2013-02-15T07:03:00.003-08:00

The upcoming car chase is really the defining moment for how far this movie falls below its predecessor. Universal Soldier: Regeneration begins with a high speed chase through a major city while the Next Generation Unisol kills dozens of bodyguards and police in their path. It establishes how unstoppable the NGU is, it gives as an idea of what to expect from the movie and is a good chase scene on top of it. How does the chase scene in Day of Reckoning compare?

The thrilling battle of Plumbing Work Truck vs 1995 Ford Explorer!

A chase scene between two old fords through the outskirts of Baton Rouge. Are you excited yet? Because I certainly am! To the movies credit, the chase scene is extremely proficient from a technical standpoint, its just so conceptually dull. This isn't evocative of a battle between two super soldiers, it looks like random road rage caught on film. Hell, maybe someone just sideswiped Arlovski while he was driving the plumbing truck and they raced after him to get it all on film?

"OH MY GOD SOMEONE CALL AN AMBULANCE!"
"Hahaha, cut! That was perfect, now lets bail before the cops get here!"

After the two vehicles crash, Magnus throws John into a sporting goods store and the movie teases us by delivering an actually great fight scene between them. The fight scenes for UniSols can often be described as "glacial" but they turn that convention on its head, probably due to Scott Adkins having a kick so fast it changes the weather in China. The fight generally goes for Magnus at the start, with John being overpowered by Magnus until he just randomly realizes he's a Unisol.

"Wait a tic, I'm not disabled: I'm a post human killing machine!"

This revelation completely turns the course of the battle, as he's suddenly physically superior to Magnus in every respect. Again, its actually a good fight that plays up how strong and fast these guys are as they start beating on each other with bats and 50lb weights. John brutally beats down Magnus the UniSol Plumber then executes him with a aluminum bat.

Good night sweet Plumber, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

After Magnus gets knocked out of the park, John stops to reflect for a moment on the complexities of life. Well, he only contemplates that his fingers have all fully regrown as good as new but he somehow didn't notice till now. Which begs the question of course, of you know, how the fuck did he not notice that?

"Oh...there they are!"

Ignoring the raging impossibility of that, he gets infuriated at the revelation that he's a super soldier and tears a sink off the wall and throws it. And that's it. Just like absolutely every other revelation that is revealed to him though, he forgets about it 30 seconds later. The guy is like a plot point goldfish, moving forward without a seconds reflection at anything he has learned about himself thus far. How ridiculous a revelation can this guy just blasé his way past?

"Wait, there are two of us? Shit, we're in a Van Damme movie aren't we?"

Yes, when he gets to the cabin, he finds out another version of himself. This is the one that killed Isaac, messed up the mob boss and works for Deveraux. He laments though that he realized that Deveraux was not freeing him from slavery, just exchanging one master for another. He also tells John that he has a tracking chip in the back of his head and that Deveraux is up river.

And then our John kills the original John and he's never talked about again

This is really the fundamental plotting problem with the movie. Lets ignore the character inconsistencies because lets face it, the series has the continuity of a choose your own adventure story with mislabeled pages. No, the main problem is that there is absolutely no point to this entire plot line.. This is a movie about a man who finds out that everything he knows about himself is false, but there is never a moment of realization of his true self. He seems to flat out ignore every single piece of information he acquires, instead opting to blindly proceed forward.

"Arlovski get more development despite no lines"

You could replace every plot point in this movie with a carrot on a stick and it wouldn't change anything. This is a series with government kill bots so prone to introspection, that asking them if they contemplate the complexities of life is a standard diagnostic test. Jean Claude Van Damme has done more with these elements and he's generally only capable of playing himself in his movies with the exception of the ones in which he plays two Van Dammes.

He did this five times. FIVE!

You could argue that its just a direct to video movie so why bother with a decent script? You could also argue that chickens should be required to wear pants and it would be about as correct. Low budget movies can for better or worse be way more creative than blockbuster movies. If I'm making a movie that costs $200m, there is going to be a bunch of uptight men in suits who want me to play it safe. If I make a movie that only costs $10m, I can swing for the fucking fences with either creative directing or bold ideas.

Do you read Sutter Cane?

At this point in the movie, it becomes obvious what the creative process in the movie was. They sat down to write this movie and someone pitched "Total Recall meets Apocalypse Now meets The Sixth Day" and everyone was too busy high fiving each other over their creativity to realize they should have just made a straight Universal Soldier movie. Deveraux becomes Colt Kurtz, Scott becomes the Photojournalist and John is an extremely boring Willard/Quaid/Whatever the fuck his name was in 6th Day. You can easily start to see this as John has the tracking device removed from his neck and kicks Phantasia out of the movie. He wanders around the "jungles" of Louisiana until he gets picked up by boat that will take him "Up the river" to see Deveraux.

"I wanted a leading role and for my sins they gave me one"

He arrives at a hole in the ground bunker and gets escorted to the doctor in charge of the UniSols and who is obviously supposed to be the doctor from the previous movie despite him getting an impromptu eye exam courtesy of Sgt Scott's thumbs in the last movie. He tells John that the equipment he was supposed to bring to them was the missing tech required to mass produce UniSols...from their bunker in Louisiana. I know some people are upset about that whole "War of Northern Aggression" thing still but this is taking things too far guys! He then starts operating on John to stop his pain by removing his memories.

Literally.

He actually uses a drill press on John's skull, then proceeds to reach in with a pair of forceps to yank the memories out of John's head. This is a thing that happens in the movie. He goes knuckle deep while John starts to have all his implanted memories flash before his eyes. The memories get stuck inside Johns head though and the doctor is unable to pull them out.

Again, literally.

John snaps when he feels the guy tugging at his cherished fake memories and breaks free of his restraints and just starts to kill everyone. Does this make any sense from any kind of plot perspective? Absolutely not. Is the scene completely fucking awesome? Hell yeah it is. The movie utterly shines when it drops its retarded plot and just starts shooting dicks off and kicking faces in. Its like the movie remembered it was an action movie and not a drama.

You should have been doing this a god damn hour ago.

John kills all the grunt UniSols in the directors signature faux oner style and its honestly a great action scene. Its dynamic, its creative, its the directors core competency. This is a guy who knows how to do action scenes and decided to do as few of them as possible, with only a total of probably 25 minutes of action in a two hour movie. Its like Usain Bolt dropping running and taking up curling: What the hell are you even thinking?

Arlovski killed more people in the opening of Regeneration than die in this entire movie.

After easily dispatching the regular UniSols, John fights Sgt Scott in the armory. Again, its a great scene because the director understands low budget action. Scott is actually the incredibly hard to kill juggernaut he is supposed to be and the scene is dynamic as hell, with the two of them grabbing weapons off the shelves lots of melee gun-fighting between the two as John shoots, stabs, impales, shoots again and machete's Scott.

THIS IS THE WAY A REAL UNISOL DIES

From here, John proceeds to an odd chapel where he confronts Deveraux, who wants to know just what the fuck John's deal is. John tells him that he killed his family, to which Deveraux points out that not only did he not kill them, they're not even real but John refuses to accept this explanation.

I want an explanation of why the hell he did this.

This starts easily the best fight in the movie as Deveraux and John actually act like super soldiers and hack each other to pieces. The centerpiece of this fight is a machete that the two of them battle for control over, up to and including using their own bodies to block their opponents strikes with it. After a great deal of back and forth between the two, John gets the upper hand and kills Deveraux after he gives John the generic "You'll only know war if you kill me" speech.

Its not an effective tactic to use against a worshipper of Khorne

Wrapping things up: John finds out he has control over the remaining UniSols...somehow and he meets up with Agent Gorman who we find out is also a Unisol because the movie wants to throw in as many final act plot twists as it can. He gives yet another info dump about how John is special because he has such strong memories and then immediately tells him they're going to wipe those memories. Predictably John doesn't take that very well.

Not one bit.

And then another Agent Gorman steps out of the van, heads over to the dead Gormans car then just stares at John for a while before driving away. And then the movie ends with them driving the blood soaked van away while John turns on the windshield wipers. And that's it. That is the ending of this whole mess. Nothing is resolved and the twist is so awkwardly jammed in it might as well be them flipping through a series of hastily scrawled cue cards. What kind of incompetent writer thinks that an utter non sequitur is a good ending for something?

Fuck it, right?

Super Soldier Shenanigans: Universal Soldier Day of Reckoning (Part One)

2013-02-07T03:47:00.000-08:00

I think the fact that the Universal Soldier franchise absolutely refuses to accept its death is oddly appropriate for a series about undead super soldiers. This is a series that has so many retcons that its only a matter of time before Luc Deveraux wakes up to find Sgt Scott in the shower, alive and well.

For those of you not in the know, Universal Soldier is a franchise where the government creates super soldiers out of the reanimated corpses of dead soldiers and generally manages to completely lose control of them approximately 120% of the time. The details of how they work, what limitations they have and how crazy they go varies from movie to movie because consistency is not in the series repertoire. The one consistent element is that they're basically a Toyota Hilux that walks like a man and require ludicrous amounts of firepower to put down.

So a movie that has dozens of them should be absolutely god damn amazing right? I mean, a single sixth generation UniSol can tank gunfire all damn day and fight on like it was nothing, so a guy fighting an entire army of them should be amazing right? Also, mass producing Metal Gear Ray should provide an absolutely unstoppable force, the more ninjas the better and if the recipe says 250 degrees, I can cook it at 500 degrees in half the time right? The last one is the most appropriate because this confused mess of a movie is almost certainly a result of too much baking, if you catch my drift.

I'm saying something like this was involved.

The movie begins with the as yet unnamed protagonist being woken up by his daughter who says that there are monsters in the kitchen and asks him to check it out. He tells there is no such thing as monsters but she insists she saw some in the kitchen. He slowly but surely checks out the entire house while humoring her the entire time by calling out where he is in the house. This sequence is actually somewhat effective because its the singular good use of all the movies gimmicks. Its in first person view the entire time, with absolutely no soundtrack save for his beating heart and filmed with a minimum of light with a slight strobing effect applied to simulate his blinking and weariness. And as he slowly investigates the entire house, it really builds up a great feeling of tension because you know something is going to happen when he gets to the kitchen but it lets it build. So when that door to the kitchen door opens...

"Dark Brotherhood, we've got a work order to destroy everything you love. We let ourselves in. "

The main character is then beaten with a crowbar for a solid minute of screen time as he probably wonders how the hell his daughter could not realize they were robbers, before they drag his family out of the bedroom. One of them pulls off his ski mask to reveal that he's Luc Deveraux before staring into his eyes for a good thirty seconds so he (and the audience) gets a good look that its Deveraux, before executing his family without saying a word. Which is supposed to be intriguing but its basically a flag thrown out on the field informing you that there will be a twist or some serious character assassination ahead.

Spoiler: Its both.

He then wakes up in a "hospital" which is clearly an office space they wheeled machines that go ping into, staffed by some of the worst actors to ever deliver exposition. The doctor informs him that he's been in a coma for 9 months but it "feels like I'm meeting you for the first time". Well yeah, since this is the first time he's been conscious in 9 months, you were just watching someone sleep and I think 9/10 restraining orders agree that's not considered meeting someone. He then introduces him to an FBI agent named Gorman, who informs him that his wife did not survive and begins asking our hero, identified as John, some questions.

"We have to hurry, the Asylum wants to film some hospital scenes here too"

He asks him if he can think of a reason why Deveraux murdered his own family but John apparantly has almost total memory loss, able to only remember the night his family was killed and a few bits and pieces of memories of his family. He's informed by Gorman that Deveraux is a highly decorated soldier who deserted and is now a wanted criminal. The doctor tells him that's enough exposition for right now and Gorman makes a call telling someone to "Put the plumber to work".

"But Arlovski do not know plumbing"
"Just play around with it for a bit man!"
"Arlovski out of element"

Here we meet Magnus, the UniSol Plumber. He gets activated by a strobing effect out of nowhere while working on a woman's sink. He looks stunned as hell for a bit then proceeds to get up, puke in the sink, wipe his mouth and walk out the door to peel out in his truck while the woman yells at him to finish the job. To be honest, this is basically in line with every single plumber I've ever hired and all that's missing is him showing up three days later with a bag of washers and a bill.

"Arlvoski often contemplate complexities of life. "

We go back to the "hospital" where they're discharging the amnesiac coma patient hours after he wakes up. I can't decide if this is a clue to the obvious twist in the story or just incredibly dumb. The living uncanny valley of a nurse hands him a form with his address on it and a manila envelope full of plot devices and memory triggers. The one that triggers the most memories is the bracelet given to him by his daughter on his first person birthday. Unfortunately, the actor playing John has the acting range of a store mannequin on muscle relaxers.

"I am a vessel of infinite sadness and despair"

After he hallucinates for a while at home to try to build up pathos, the movie cuts to the scummiest brothel possible in a moment of absolute mood whiplash. We go from a kid with a gunshot wound through her eye to a brothel that makes the one from Taken look like Studio 54. The UniSols are partying it up to the Drums From the Deep pretty hard though. There's lots of T&A, angry sex, neon lights, an old lady playing solitaire and the classic sex game of having a hooker nail your hand to a table with a claw hammer.

Hot.

We see that Sgt Scott is back, minus any previous characterization as he boozes it up with a prostitute in a room that looks like some kind of attempt at a neon tanning booth while music that sounds like a bad Casio rhythm setting hooked up to a subwoofer blares out. Its at this point that our buddy Magnus The UniSol Plumber shows up with a tool bag full of guns and proceeds to kill the old lady and starts in on the UniSol Johns. We're in for a badass action scene given how hard they are to kill and given he's only got a shotgun.Maybe with the close quarters we'll get a real badass-

I...what?

The first guy doesn't even get 3 steps from the bed before he and the prostitute he was with get gunned down, his dong sadly flopping everywhere. It only takes three shotgun rounds to kill him, which in UniSol terms is like if you stubbed your toe and your head exploded. It gets worse from there as he casually guns down two more guys and their prostitutes. I came here for a UniSol fight and I get dudes who go down like total bitches. Hell, one of the prostitutes dies harder than the fucking super soldiers by getting a couple rounds off with a pistol before being blasted across the room.

God Speed Whore #4

Magnus and Scott get into a pretty decent fight scene but Magnus in a reversal of the previous movie's dynamic is absolutely inferior to Sgt Scott, who easily incapacitates him. Scott waxes on about how despite Magnus came to kill him, he's about to set him free and jams a needle into his neck. He informs Magnus that he's no longer a slave of the government and that he'll seek vengeance on his oppressors. And then the movie absolutely loses its shit.

"Prepare to swallow your tongue, insect"

See, this movie decided that shaky cam was old and busted and that rapid pulsating strobes was the new hotness in annoying cinematic techniques. Oh yes, this movie to the sound of cicadas proceeds to strobe flash for a full two minutes. Its such a visually assaulting strobe effect that despite not being epileptic I was absolutely unable to even look at the screen and had to just keep hammering the screenshot button to even see what happens during this sequence. Had I actually been prone to seizures I imagine I would have not just swallowed my tongue but swallowed my entire face in the grand mal this would have produced. Its seriously that fucking bad and I don't know what the hell they were thinking.

"Where's my check?"

Moving on from that, we see John at home eating cereal when he gets a call from a panicked guy named Isaac telling him he doesn't feel safe and babbling about a shipment. Rather than explaining he doesn't have any kind of memory of what happened and asking the guy to explain the entire thing, he looks at the running time so far of only 24 minutes and says he'll be right over, just stay there and give me the address while you're at it. I have high hopes for this characters survival!

"God damn it, we can just kiss that deposit goodbye now!"

He rifles through some stuff, grabbing an exposition recorder, a matchbook for a strip club and looks at a picture of what the guy looked like with a face and heads down the strip club. He listens to the exposition recorder tell him that they have the Unisol cloning process down to below 9 months and that they're still working on memory implantation. He heads down to the club to get information from a random prostitute about what the guy was working on but gets blown off so he heads to the bathroom. Magnus stabs him with the same needle that Scott used on him. The movie is going to waffle on this for another half hour but its fucking obvious at this point: John is a UniSol. It was obvious from the beginning but the movie thinks its more clever than it is by holding onto this forever.

"I'm sorry sir but you have all the symptoms: Rapid recovery from injury, uncontrollable flashbacks, wooden acting..."

Instead we get treated to another minute of that cicada\strobe combo while Deveraux tries to mind control him but his memory of his family being killed is too strong. Before he can attack Magnus, he's thrown out of the club by the bouncers. He decides to pursue his investigation by ambushing the stripper outside her home, dragging her inside and overpowering her while yelling at her the whole time to calm down before telling her that he's going to hurt her if she doesn't stop screaming for help. Because that's the way to get answers: Simulate a rape.

"WHY ARE YOU TAKING THIS SO POORLY!"

This is such a terrible idea from both a character and writing perspective. Its seriously plays out just like he was going to rape her and that's a terrible thing to have your main character do. She calms down though and asks him why he came back but before anyone can expand on that, Magnus the UniSol Plumber comes in with an ax for a plot interrupt.

"Arlovski hear rape, come to make citizen arrest"

What follows is another actually good fight scene with a lot of ebb and flow to it as Magnus smashes through the scenery with that ax like it owes him money as John tries to survive. It has a low moment where the stripper knocks him out with a toilet tank lid but its still a fun action scene. During the course of the scene, John loses four fingers on one hand and Magnus loses half his foot in an ax strike before John and the stripper.

Don't worry, it happened in a bathroom so I think we can swing a good workman's comp claim for it.

Unfortunately, the plot escapes from the bathroom that it was locked in and we cut to Magnus being led to a speech by Scott in a secret underground bunker about how UniSols will infiltrate society and take over the world. Meanwhile we get an info dump from the stripper named Phantasia, in which he finds out that he's a truck driver who has a shack by the river. She also tells a story about how he beat a guy almost to death for looking at her and how he loves Whiskey, which was clumsily established as the official drink of UniSols earlier in the movie. He has a dream where Deveraux tries to take control of his mind but once again, the memory of his daughter snaps him out of it.

"What have they done to my chaaaaraaaactorrrr..."

He wakes up in a panic and calls the FBI agent who shows up at the hotel to deliver yet more exposition about how they believe Deveraux has a mind control serum before dismissing John's missing fingers and the fact that he's being hunted by a psychotic plumber from Belarus before leaving, having accomplished absolutely nothing as a character.

Also Arlovski has a fight scene with zero plot relevance to pad things out.

John heads down to his old trucking job to get information on a container he was supposed to deliver but never did. He asks to see his old boss, the leader of the local crime syndicate who "controls the river". He tries to get information but the man is a disabled mess of scar tissue and John is apparently the one who is responsible thanks to an unexplained incident. The mobster reveals that they got curious about his friend Isaac and planted camera's in his apartment. He plays the footage revealing that it was John who killed Isaac.

"Ain't that a fucking twist?"

John freaks out about this and drives off with Phantasia. He tells her that they need to find the cabin that he lived in but she can't remember exactly where its located. They're arguing about this when they forget about one critical detail:

"IT ARLOVSKI TURN TO DRIVE!"

The second half of the movie is about to start and shit is about to get real (and also unreal)

Continue to Part Two.

It Came From Netflix: SWAT Firefight Pt 2

2012-03-30T01:36:00.000-07:00

When we last left off, the city of Detroit was being menaced by a complete lunatic who brought nothing but ruin to everyone who crosses his path. And then he made an enemy of Robert Patrick's character who has declared a vendetta against him. After the...*sigh*...Google Earth conversation, the captain hands him a ticket home for the next day. This is either incredibly cliche and unlikely screenwriting or the captain had a ticket home already prepared for Omega Douche and was simply waiting for the first opportunity to use it. I would like to think the latter scenario is the canon one.

"My feelings are hurt Captain!"

Omega Douche will have none of that though! As they pull the 3lbs of C4 from his car, he swears that nothing is going to stop him from doing his job as a SWAT officer as he only cares for the publics well being! Its not like someone who could get 3lbs of C4 on short notice and hack his records to lead you into a trap could be even remotely a threat to you! The captain for whatever reason backs off. After a filler scene where they try to explain that Walter is a "high functioning bipolar, borderline personality" while showing a scene of Walter smoking and reading in a simultaneously dimly lit yet impossibly bright room in slow motion while a cheap knock off of 'Mind Heist' plays.

Syndicate called, they want you to tone down the bloom a bit

After a filler scene where literally nothing happens, they get called up to deal with a hostage situation. Robbers armed with automatic weapons had stormed in, shooting a man who didn't open up the safe for them and the police arrived soon after that. So now they have barricaded themselves inside with a dozen hostages and are threatening to kill them if their demands are not met. The place they robbed? A convenience store. The mastermind behind this well thought out plan? Tony Yayo.

"I want a Cubic Zirconia covered Skull or I kill all the hostages!"

The first movie started with an escalated version of the North Hollywood shootout, this movie has Tony Yayo knocking over a liquor store. We get to see more of ODs amazing negotiating skills in action as Tony Yayo demands $50k and a moderately priced car in exchange for the hostages. Not missing a beat, OD says that the car is going to take a while, so Yayo and his crew should drink a whole bunch of beer. After a pause, Tony Yayo replies with "Are you trying to make fun of me asshole?". Well OD, you just lost a battle of wits to Tony Yayo.

"Man, I am terrible at this"

Charlie team arrives with an incredibly and inexplicably submissive Kellogg who gets tasked with catching the hostage that Yayo is willing to release. A hostage tries to make a break for it and rather than trying to defuse the situation, OD basically writes them off and orders a full dynamic entry through the rear of the store. But suddenly, they lose their direct phone connection as the landline phone inside the store starts ringing.

"Amal?"

Yaio answers and its Walter telling him to exit out the back of the store to get his car. Yayo tells him to bring the car out front and Walter yells back "WELL THEN BLOW THE BITCHES BRAINS OUT" and hangs up. Yayo drags the woman to the front of the store and threatens to shoot her before throwing her to the ground and opening fire at the ceiling. OD tells Lori to take the shot and she shoots him in the head.

Psh, Fiddy does this all the time to him and he's fine

The team that was stacked at the door enters through the back and in an amazing example of how weak the movies flashbangs are, all this does is actually get their attention.

"Holy shit I didn't know you were even here till you did that"

They swing around to face the SWAT officers as they pile in and the biggest gun battle of the movie begins inside the convenience store.

Catered to the people who watched the opening car chase from Quantum of Solace and said "Man, I can see too much of what's going on!"

The SWAT officers take cover behind some chest high Scott Toilet Paper, bottles of water, and Ziploc bags. Seeing them get into cover, one of the gang members roadie runs behind a chest high stack of Charmin toilet paper while his compatriot charges from his chest high cover of Bud Light at the officers while firing a shotgun. This movie just turned into Gears of Store.

Only with a camera that fucking hates you

While the man with the assault rifle pins down the team, the shotgun toting gang member rushes at them, firing wildly but luckily Scott Toilet Paper is bulletproof! He dies in a hail of inaccurate bullets continually drawing pistols to no avail.

No seriously, the movie has them take cover behind TP and it stops bullets.

Meanwhile, the man with the AK has run out of ammunition and decides to charge in with his pistol but he too is soon gunned down by wildly firing SWAT officers. With all the gangsters dead, they declare an all clear. The movie then immediately jumps to them outside fist bumping while heavy metal guitars play then they all pose as a team while walking away in slow motion.

Poses as a team because shit just got real!

Back at the station, they determined that Walter hacked into their direct connections and overrode the phone line into the store being cut. OD demands all the footage from every camera in ten blocks (!) but the tech tells him they already checked that (!!) and he doesn't appear anywhere on them and that he's "a ghost'. The movie then cuts to OD on the firing range where he gets a call from Walter who is at a different firing range who taunts him that "First you let a hostage die, then you break into the wrong house, now you kill a man who was trying to give up"

"Jokes on you Walter, I was already going to kill a man who was trying to give up!"

This begins probably one of the weirdest moments in the film. OD tries to bullshit Walter about tracing his explosives but Walter calls him on it and says that he's "lost my trust and that's the biggest mistake a negotiator can make". OD responds to this by angrily yelling that he's he's going to shoot Walter in the face and fires at his target. Walter basically plays mind games with him, calling him on how terrible he is at being a negotiator.

"Also holy shit, I am actually properly blocked and in focus!"

While doing so, he's firing his fifty cal while taunting him that he can kill him at any time from a mile away. This actually works thanks to a tiny ray of decent writing and the acting chops of a probably short on cash Robert Patrick. But then in response, OD yells "COME AND GET ME WALTER" before opening fire on his target. The movie then rapidly cuts between them firing at their targets while still on the phone with each other before they run dry. OD then does this perplexing little "fuck yeah" move when he's done accompanied by a triumphant musical sting. No movie, don't try to say that Gabriel Macht beat Robert Patrick in a verbal battle, nobody is going to buy that shit.

"No seriously, why does the rest of the movie not look like this? Its like the movie put its contacts in"

The movie cuts to OD leaving his house an unknown amount of time later and sees two figures in suits behind him and obviously spooked by the amazing Robert Patrick, he whirls around and points his pistol at their faces while yelling "Don't Move!". Oh yeah, he's really not letting Walter get to him at all!

And we're back in Blurry Town

They cut to the station where they explain that they're from the State Department and that Walter is an "asset". They say they're trying to find him because they have work for him to do and OD says that's going to be impossible as Walter is a ghost. So in walks Walter with a dozen roses for the love interest and OD loses his shit and charges down the hall to punch him in the face. The other officers restrain him while Walter says that he's going to be pressing assault charges.

"LET ME SEE YOUR TROLL FACE!"

The Feds take him away while the Captain tells OD he has one day to get SWAT certified and then he's going to be kicked out of Detroit. After a bit of scenery chewing by Macht about how Walter is still a threat to the love interest we cut back to Walter and the Feds. Apparently his relationship with Rose was keeping him from being a full blown psycho killer, so the Feds naturally intervened and were in fact the reason that she was scared of him. So Walter executes the two of them and leaves that plot cul-de-sac behind.

"Want some of this delicious filler?"

While OD is at the scene of the murder the next day, Walter kills the man that OD had guarding the love interest and writes "I have her" on the door in her blood. Back at the station, they find that despite there being a live satellite feed watching him specifically, Walter managed to escape undetected. Though given the fact that they've obviously just gray scaled the Google Earth coverage of Detroit, that's not exactly hard.

A better lead would be taking that camera crew hiding behind him in for questioning

OD gets kicked off the team by the Captain and the team gets a sudden call up asking for them specifically, saying there is a jumper that needs to be rescued. They arrive and find that there are no first responders, witnesses or just plain anyone at the scene. They shrug this off and after leaving one guy in the van for no reason, they all split up and enter the spooky abandoned warehouse. They even ignore the fact that when they call in asking where the backup is, dispatch tells them there was no call from that location. Shaggy and Scooby would be yelling "ITS A TRAP YOU FUCKING MORONS" at this point.

Pictured: Natural fucking selection

Waters is Tasered by the fake jumper and thrown off the roof, knocking him unconscious. Lori is strangled and sedated by Walter after a brief fight. A man the movie informs me before his death is Stockton, hits the most improbably placed claymore that was at the specific point on a railing he was climbing and is killed in the explosion. Murphy is killed by the gang capturing him and shooting him to death with shotguns.

Sorry, that last one was RoboCop.

OD gets a call from Walter saying that he has the love interest and his team captive. He tells OD that he will start killing them in 30 minutes and that he'll be waiting at the abandoned projects. OD stops by the police station to steal some weapons but is confronted by Kellogg. He lets OD take weapons from the armory and tells him he's going with him to stop Walter. OD tells him that he has to do this alone because he doesn't want Kellogg to get in trouble at the job he tried to fire him from as he takes a duffel bag full of weapons and Kellogg's cruiser. He arrives at the projects to see Waters has been crucified.

"Contemplate this on the flagpole of woe: Crucify him!"

He cuts him down and we see that Waters has a badly broken leg. He gives him an assault rifle and loads up to go after Walter but is interrupted by Walters minion who opens fire on them. The minion has specific orders not to kill OD , who rushes towards him firing and runs dry. Rather than say quickly reloading, he throws his rifle down and grabs an MP5 as Waters tries to hobble assault the minion. Having no orders to keep him alive, he is quickly killed to absolutely zero reaction by OD.

He died as he lived: Blurry and uninteresting

OD manages to close with the man who is literally not allowed to kill him but they both run dry. They get in a reloading battle that OD wins and he guns the minion down with a couple rounds. Naturally, he then proceeds to unload the entire magazine into his dead body and in a probably deleted scene, tea bag him before calling him racial epitaphs like any other twelve year old on Xbox Live.

"SHITCOCKING JEW NEGRO FUCKER CUNT!"

Walter then calls him up on a magical video walkie talkie to mock him for wasting his ammunition. Its pretty bad scriptwriting when the kill crazy lunatic is more likeable and professional than your hero. Regardless, he informs us that there is a bomb on Lori and the love interest. He rushes up to save Lori and defuses the bomb on her in a scene so cliche it has to be copy and pasted straight out of the screenwriters handbook right down to the one second left on the timer.

To say nothing of "I'm an Iraq war combat veteran sniper but I break down crying and have to be saved by a man!"

He confronts Walter several floors up and finds that Walter has a bomb attached to the love interest with both a timer and a dead man switch. Walter puts a gun to his own head and tells OD that his only chance to try to save the love interest is to talk him down using his negotiating skills. So OD charges him.

"You are absolutely terrible at this, I really hope you know that."

The weapon misfires and OD manages to get a zip tie on the deadman switch, preventing it from detonating the bomb. The wrestle around and OD gets the upper hand, punching Walter repeatedly while he lays helpless on the ground before they throw the bomb in his face as they push him out a window and detonate it, taking out the entire floor. Walters flaming carcass impacts 15 stories below.

And our brave hero roasts the old man he had easily subdued in a fist fight alive

The next day they wheel Waters dead body away and the Captain offers OD a job. Your first reaction should of course be "SAY WHAT?" but he tells the Captain he's not interested in staying in Detroit. He suggests putting Kellogg back on Alpha Team in an attempt to excise that particular plot tumor. The Captain then asks what about their HRT Certification and OD says that after everything that happened "just consider them certified". WHAT? No, I'm sorry. You don't get pity certifications for something as serious as Hostage Rescue. There has been officially no point to anything since his retarded "training" idea of switching snipers resulted in a situation that got a dozen people killed! He refused to be transferred away because he needed to get this training done! The entire thing officially has no point since he's just going to give them certification without any kind of test! How are they supposed to know what to do in a hostage situation?! What is this, The Wizard of Oz?

"Modernized hostage rescue techniques were in you all along Team Alpha! But seriously, that douche can eat a dick"

It Came From Netflix: SWAT Firefight

2012-03-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

If you've been in your local video rental store lately, you've- Oh right, those don't exist anymore. If you've been to Netflix Instant or your local gas station check out counter, you've probably noticed a lot of movies you've never heard that claim to be sequels to movies that were actually good. Welcome to the modern equivalent of the Italian Cinema's Sequelsploitation. Only instead of being unauthorized, they merely found franchises that didn't need or want a sequel and paid a paltry sum to get the right to make a sequel. Now I'm not saying they're all bad mainly because I hope there is some theoretical exception that proves the rule. I will however give basically anything a chance because it could turn out to be good or it could turn out to be horrible, which is also good. How bad is this movie? I watched Dungeon Siege 2 around the same time and it was the better movie.

As a matter of professional pride, I have to defend how blurry some screenshots of this movie are going to be. This is because the movie is probably the shakiest and blurriest of all the shaky cam movies I have ever seen. I can only hope they were trying to get a tax incentive for hiring camera men who suffer from both Parkinsons and ADHD because the idea that this was in any way intentional is mind boggling. I could stick a camera in a paint shaker and kick it down a hill and the producers would ask me how I was able to stabilize the footage so well. The movie makes Cloverfield look like 12 Angry Men. People have filmed themselves being ejected from rollover accidents with more clarity than this.

How does this even happen?!

The movie begins with a stock footage tour of Santa Monica before heading to the house of one of the only survivors of a secret government experiment to create the ultimate douchebags to bridge the Douche Gap. Ultra Douche is holding a house party that gets interrupted by a pair of guys who are demanding money that UD owes them for absolutely no explained reason. UD says he doesn't have the money and the pair take the entire party hostage with their demands being to give them their money or they'll kill everyone at the party. This doesn't seem like the best strategy to get their money back on account of being completely insane but it slams us into the main credits rather than giving us a scene transition. The opening credits are of course also shot in Blurry Cam with the added bonus of the lighting being like someone threw chlorine in your eyes and made you navigate an obstacle course of Klieg lights and then on top it all, desaturated all the footage.

This is what happens when you put the Gaffer from Robot Holocaust in charge

After some blurry SWAT officers arrive, we meet the alleged hero of the movie Sgt Paul Cutler who is in charge of the SWAT response to the scene and with his Magic Hacking Pad takes control of all the full sized security cameras in the house. He then calls up UD who is inexplicably in another room armed with an assault rifle despite the last scene ending with a pistol in his face. Logic and continuity have been kicked in the knees and its only 3 minutes into the movie and it gets far worse from here as Cutler asked UD what happened. UD says some guys randomly showed up and took everyone hostage and the police should "Come in here and shoot these assholes". UD sees the mammoth 90s security camera in the corner suddenly and opens fire on it with his assault rifle.

I'd say this looks like my Grandmother filmed it but her horribly framed pictures were at least in focus

Using his Superfriends Batman level detective work, Cutler declares that this is a drug deal gone bad (!), and sends in the SWAT teams. Here we are introduced to the movies other gimmick: Putting a camera on fucking everything. See, the good SWAT movie came out during an explosion of personal video recording and the 24 hour news networks and would have snippets of video done in a gritty, realistic style like it was being filmed by someone at the scene. This was a stylistic touch that worked mainly because that was a good movie being done by competent people who knew what they were doing. This movie puts a camera on fucking everything and I mean everything. You know you're in for a rough ride when even the battering ram has a low resolution POV camera strapped to it.

Also, the hostage takers seem to have the sound man pinned down behind that bush!

So after a POV shot of the battering ram smashing through the door, they throw one of the movies incredibly weak flashbangs at Ultra Douche and he surrenders while yelling that the hostage takers "drank all his beer". They then slowly saunter into the room with the two hostage takers while one of them is using an innocent woman as a human shield. I have to guess that they either were just really worn out from running towards the house or went "Fuck it, its Friday". The one without a hostage surrenders while every one of the SWAT team officers surrounds the other guy. Cutler orders the officer with the grenade launcher to "take the shot" because he's locked on with the laser (!) and a full fifteen seconds later he fires.

"Can you identify this bucket full of your daughter?"

He hits the hostage taker in the hand with some kind of 40mm projected water disruptor, saving the hostage. Now, I'm not an EOD expert but I'm pretty sure something that can penetrate and fuck up a bomb enough to render it useless will probably penetrate through his hand into his abdomen, causing him to die a horrible death. I'm going to let it slide because there are far worse things ahead. The Captain comes over while he is putting his gear away and tells him that he is going to be sending him to Detroit to teach them "FBI HRT Certification". Cutler says that he would rather go back to Iraq than Detroit.

"I never asked for this"

The best part of this exchange is that the movie is filmed entirely in Detroit so he's talking about what a shithole Detroit is, while filming in Detroit and receiving film subsidies from the state. This is probably what instigates the next scene after he is bribed to go to Detroit, he is driving around on a "scenic" tour of Detroit and suddenly goes "Detroit ain't so bad". Which just sounds like an amazing tag line for their advertising campaign to get tourists.

"Ask about our urban decay tours!"

He heads down to the police station and walks in on Officer Kellogg having the audacity to be eating a waffle sandwich! He asks what their response time is and upon hearing that its 15 minutes, heads down to a bus terminal and calls in a fake bomb threat to test their response time on bullshit calls. After this, he heads down to the station to talk to the SWAT teams CO and demands that he be put in charge of the SWAT team instead of being a mere adviser. Cutler uses the fact that he is somehow able to get them all fired to get command of the team and heads down to browbeat them. He sees an officer eating some ice cream and tells him that he better enjoy it because he won't be allowed to eat anything unhealthy while he's around, despite the fact that he is in perfect shape. He then proceeds to tell another officer that he is banned from smoking for the duration of his stay because he doesn't like smoking. He then overrides their protests with a literal "It sucks to be you."

"Utterly unlikable in....15 minutes, 40 seconds."

After finding out that Cutler is the end result of all those experiments in douchebaggery and is in fact the Omega Douche, we see him going through his new squads files. Their dossiers that give all their personal information including all their where they live, what they're good at, what they're terrible at, psychological evaluations and a list of their weaknesses. I am not making this up but this will be a key plot point later, so help us God. The next morning they start their training which consists of a filler montage of them working out in a field and them shooting women and children on the target range.

"Skateboarding is not only a crime but a capital offense!"

I'm not joking, he double taps those children and proceeds to the next target. And yes, every other shot is a jittery, low quality weapon mounted camera. After finding out that his new team is competent AND capable of killing children without a second thought, Omega Douche then decides to throw them the first of his promised "Curve balls". He makes Kellogg (The best shooter in the entire force!) shoot with 20 pounds handcuffed to his wrist with music blasting into his ears. After Kellogg fails to hit anything while significantly handicapped, Omega Douche criticizes him for his poor accuracy and tells him he needs a lot more training.

"I am a Grand Master in Douche-Kwon-Do."

They get a call up to a hostage situation at an office building. Using the magic tablet, they determine that a woman named Rose is being held hostage by an obviously strapped for cash Robert Patrick playing a man named Walter Hatch. Omega Douche calls up to the office where she is being held and asks for Rose. Walter demands that they leave immediately and hangs up. Seconds later a chair with a cell phone taped to it smashes through the window of the sixteenth floor and starts ringing. Telling his men to cover him (leading to the amazing sight of everyone aiming their pistols and shotguns near vertically), he picks up the phone and in the goofiest voice possible asks "Heya, why are we talking on this phone?"

"Can you hear me now?"

Walter tells him that its because they were trying to record him on the land line and that if they don't stay back, people will get hurt. Being the skilled negotiator that he is, OD immediately tells everyone to grab their gear because they are going to be making a full assault on Walter's position. He orders Waters to be sniper but Kellogg tells him that he's the best shot and should be the marksman. But no, OD is "mixing things up" only its not training, its a real life call. They deploy with two men rappelling down to the window with a sniper covering them from across the street while the remainder will breach in from the office door. As the best shot in the unit, Kellogg will of course be carrying the battering ram.

"Just 15 floors to go Kellogg!"

They breach in under cover of the weakest flashbangs in the world thrown by the rappelling team members and proceed....to do nothing as Walter has in fact had positioned himself so that he could have executed the two as they entered the room. OD is incompetent enough that he did not check those corners and the villain could have ended the movie in 3 seconds flat. We are not that lucky, so insteadWalter demands that they drop their weapons and leave. OD then proceeds to open up new negotiations with "Heya Walter, I'm the guy from the phone."

"Are you for real? Did you get your FBI HRT certification in a cereal box?"

After some painfully terrible negotiating on the part of Omega Douche while the hostage begs them to kill Walter, he orders the sniper to take the shot in a painfully obvious way, going so far as to tell the hostage to "Stop moving" after telling someone to call for an EMT unit for Walter. The sniper takes the shot but misses wide and as Walter aims to shoot the sniper who is staring dumbfounded at him, they tackle him and wrestle the gun out of his hand. OD laughs while telling Waters to try to aim a bit better next time because he's the worst person ever and the fact that Walter could have very well just killed someone is something he finds funny.

"Ahahahahaha! Oh man, the look on your faces!"

Kellogg is still pretty pissed and tells him that he should have been the one shooting because he wouldn't have missed. OD tells him to shut up and secure the hostage. In a bizarre twist, the hostage grabs a gun and holds them hostage, demanding that they shoot Walter because he's a monster. So they draw their pistols and get into a Mexican standoff with the hostage they just rescued in an attempt to protect her hostage taker that they just tried to kill.

"Man, we are terrible at this"

They try to talk her down but OD couldn't negotiate getting his Big Mac without pickles and she proceeds to shoot herself in the head. Walter swears bloody vengeance against them for her death and we cut to OD moping around because this was the first hostage he has ever lost in 10 years in SWAT. This leads me to suspect that this was only his second call as his negotiating style is being smarmy, condescending and generally pissing off everyone he fucking talks to.

"Hello Dominos, I would like a- What do you mean I can go fuck myself?"

We then cut again to the rest of the team at the bar where Kellogg is mouthing off after too many drinks. He's pissed that he should have been the one taking the shot and while he's an asshole, he's perfectly right about it. OD assaulted someone rather than try to negotiate, spread his team too thin by making two of them rappel for absolutely no reason and putting the best shot on a job that doesn't require any kind shooting. In any kind of realistic scenario, he would at minimum be under suspension until a review was conducted. But nope, he shows up at the bar to get right up Kelloggs ass and challenges him to a contest. If Kellogg wins, he will leave town. If he wins, Kellogg is fired.

In the morning, Kellogg will be sober but Cutler will still be a gigantic douche

So they head over to a boxing arcade game that measures how strong you hit it. OD tells him to take his best shot and Kellogg hits it as hard as he can, scoring an 855. OD then grabs Kelloggs pistol and pistol whips the target as hard as he can scoring him a winning 937. Kellogg accuses him of cheating and OD gives a big speech about how you have to do anything you can to win in the world of SWAT and that Kellogg was a moron for not cheating first. Ignoring how utterly stupid that is (since he challenged Kellogg to punch it), in any kind of sane movie this is the point in which the hero would pull a "I'm not going to fire you but your ass is mine" move where he puts the arrogant guy through his paces and makes him a better person. Omega Douche living up to his rank and station, instead immediately fires Kellogg, telling him to get his stuff out of his locker, he's off the force.

And then he drinks Kellogg's beer because human suffering is delicious to him

In the morning, the CO of SWAT is naturally pissed about a team leader betting a drunk man for his job. OD tries to defend his actions by saying that Kellogg is impulsive, reckless and doesn't listen to authority. For the sake of brevity I won't point out all of the extreme hypocrisy contained in this statement. The SWAT CO doesn't even have any part of that and points out that OD has zero authority to actually fire anyone from the Detroit police department. Unfortunately, instead of sending OD packing back home after writing up a formal complaint to whatever asshole certified this man, he moves Kellogg to another team and transfers in a female friend of OD's from Seattle.

Patrol Officer Cheap Titillation

The sad part is that I watched this movie several times and I still cannot tell you that her name is Lori without cheating. Its like that for everyone outside the "protagonist" and antagonist, they're all so incredibly vague that you start calling them things like "The female one", "Guy who eats things", "The black guy", "Blandy", "Baldy" and "Other, Bigger Baldy". Then later on when things start happening, the movie expects you to care about what happens to them but all you can do is go "No! Not....uh.....that guy!"

From left to right: ????, ????, Kellogg, ????, Waters (I felt bad about calling him "The Black Guy")

They head up to the top of the abandoned Projects and Lori gives a long winded filler speech about lessons learned in Iraq about speed shooting. Iraq it seems is the New 'Nam (Better tasting than Nam Classic!) when it comes to shallow characterization. They start practicing sniping but realizing that he hasn't been a dick in the last 3 minutes, OD decides its time for more of that innovative "training". He tells Baldy that sure he can hit the target when shooting properly, but how about upside down? He forces him to flip over onto his back and tells him to shoot one of the targets in the ear. He misses the ear by a couple mm so OD and Lori brow beat him for not properly calculating the drop while upside down, saying he needs to do a lot better than that in the future. Think this is going somewhere and that this is going to prove important later? It absolutely doesn't, the movie is just wasting our time in order to pad itself while trying to show how "innovative" OD is.

Innovative training! So innovative it has absolutely no use!

Omega Douche is driving home from a hard day of being unlikable and wasting people's time when the movie looks at its watch, realizes its almost half over and decides holy shit, we need some actual plot. So OD gets a call from Walter, who tells him that because he caused the death of Rose, he's going to bring a whirlwind of death upon OD and everyone he-And then OD cuts him off by calling him an asshole and telling him he wasted his time calling before hanging up. Fantastic negotiation skills at work here. The next day, Walter shows up outside the police station and steals the Big Binder of Everyone's Weaknesses from a car using his own magic hacking device, in full view of the entire precinct.

Pictured: Tactical Espionage Action

Inside, Omega Douche finds out that Walter was given Movie Bail (IOW absolutely free to go) because he was actually the hostage in that particular hostage crisis as the 911 tapes and witness testimony has Rose pulling a gun on him and holding him hostage. Its never explained if this he altered the evidence or if OD went in completely blind without even listening to dispatch. Given what we know so far, I have to say that OD just absolutely sticking his dick in it is the more likely explanation. Regardless, because he has no criminal record, the fact that Rose killed herself after a history of suicidal tendencies and the fact he never fired a single shot, they let Walter go free. OD naturally does not tell anyone at all that the man called him up and threatened him over the phone and instead gets a date with the movies love interest on the literal condition that he stops annoying her.

"I find your total lack of redeeming features oddly attractive for poorly written reasons"

They go on a filler filled dinner date where they small talk about how they're both extremely flat characters before heading back to her place. They start making out and it segues to a sex scene right before seguing to Walter standing right outside the window watching them screw while ominous music plays. Walter Hatch likes to watch apparently. He then calls up a contact telling him to get to Detroit by 12pm the next day. They meet in a public park and Walter tells his man that they're going to do things "just like Belgrade".

Staring off into space in opposite directions while standing an inch apart is how real spies try to pretend they're not talking to each other.

We cut back to filler training missions being run by OD over the course of several days. The director looked at all his gun mounted cameras that he had going and said to himself "You know what would look great? Swinging these things around as fast as possible". I would show you what this looks like, but you would probably assumed I was accidentally uploading scans of Spirograph art. Instead after a couple days of motion sickness inducing camera work and jokes about getting Mesothelioma, OD heads home for the day only to find a giant flower funeral arrangement in his living room.

Just like in Belgrade! Hahaha, man you should have seen Milosevic's face!

Rather than say, alert his superiors about this and previous threats, Omega Douche heads down to the police station in the middle of the night to get Walter's personal information from the computers and takes off for his last known address listed. He picks the lock on the door of the house, creeps inside and hearing movement inside one of the rooms proceeds to kick the door down while yelling "I GOT YOUR MESSAGE ASSHOLE!"

It is of course an old Asian couple who think that a dangerous lunatic has broken in to rob them. They are half right.

After breaking nto their house based on a last known address without a warrant and pointing a gun at them, he tells them its alright because he's a police officer. He heads outside, leaving them to clean up their soiled bedsheets and gets a call from Walter mocking him for being such a fucking moron and telling him he'll come to his funeral before hanging up. OD checks his car and discovers a bomb attached. Finally realizing that he should probably get some assistance, he calls in support. When they arrive they say they tracked the signal to a nearby cell tower but its a prepaid phone. OD points at the sky and goes "Google Earth?". The CO sadly shakes his head and tells them that they tried that but the images were "ten hours out of date".

Not sure if retarded or...no, that's just fucking retarded

I'm...going to need a bit to recover from that. Check out Part 2 featuring the oddest cameo ever, coming soon...too soon....

Talk to me Goose.

So Bad its Badass: Lone Wolf McQuade (Part 2)

2011-10-03T04:28:00.000-07:00

See Part 1 here.

When we last left off, McQuade had left 3 extremely disposable people to go after Falcone. But first, he stops by his house to find the love interest Lola waiting for him with plenty of belligerent sexual tension on tap as she has started to clean up his absolute mess of a house since it looks like the start of an episode of Hoarders. After an insensitive remark, she tries to leave but he stops her and they have a sex scene in the mud outside his house.

No part of this is pleasant to contemplate.

After this, he forces his way into Falcone's domain and the two have a showdown at last. A bizarre, utterly confusing showdown as we see that the head of all organized crime south of the border is a midget in a wheelchair. The movie plays this completely serious and the two of them have a Holmes\Moriarty relationship.

They've faced each other in a battle of wits before.

He tells McQuade that Wilkes is the one running guns but he won't give him the information on where he is because he'd never betray a former business partner. Falcone swears that he's a third party in the whole endeavor and that he's only there to "watch the game". McQuade tells him that it may be a game to him, but if he finds out Falcone is involved he'll "have your little ass".

Oh god, he's intrigued

Falcone disappears through a revolving door disguised as a wall and mockingly tells McQuade through a set of speakers that the informant Snow won't live through the night, before bursting into evil laughter, causing the audience to question their very sanity since the movie has treated all this with unbelievable sincerity.

David Lynch wishes he could make things this weird.

McQuade tries to rush back to Dakota's place in his turbine powered Super Truck but he's too late, as Wilkes and his men arrive first. They severely wound Dakota with automatic gunfire while only pinning down Kayo in the kitchen. Wilkes finishes him off with by snapping his neck with his foot without even putting out his cigarette and has Snow gunned down. McQuade arrives hours later and tries to comfort a distraught Kayo.

"I'm pretty sure he didn't suffer"

McQuade heads back to the office where he finds out he's under Federal Indictment for his reckless lone wolf behavior and is put on paid probation. He returns home and has some quality time with Lola. Later that evening as he's in bed with Lola, Wilkes stops by to kill his dog before spraying down his house with automatic gunfire. So to recap at this point he has to avenge his daughter being attacked, his mentor killed and his dog being shot, all while on suspension for being a loose cannon lone wolf. Wilkes is really pushing it right now.

McQuade is met at his house by a black federal agent named Jackson who wants McQuades help against Wilkes. McQuade questions why he's not an utterly useless dickhead like the agent who indicted him and Jackson tells him that he knows what he's doing and is "not the token nigger around here".

Pictured: The only black man in the entire movie.

They fly around in his aircraft on aerial recon and find Wilke's large military airfield that he has in no way attempted to camouflage, probably under the assumption that nobody would dare fuck with David Carradine. McQuade and Jackson fly back and set out for the airfield with a bunch of federal agents under Agent Burnside, who rides McQuade's back and generally acts like an incompetent, bureaucratic dickhead.

You can smell this guy's death coming

They do a quick recon of the field and bring their vehicles forward under the cover of night. Wilkes has an incredibly large operation with a military airfield, hundreds of men and his own cargo aircraft flying guns out to all the worlds terrorists. McQuade has a bad feeling about it though, as he says that its all been too easy so far.

"You call that easy?!"

Burnside is running out of patience after having been repeatedly held back and despite McQuade trying to stop him, marches out with his men to order the entire crime syndicate military base to surrender on his bullhorn.

The "Yell at people with a bullhorn" plan is oh for two so far in this movie

Burnside and his men are shot dead within seconds while McQuade, Jackson and Kayo are all repeatedly injured by gunfire. McQuade orders them out while he holds off the workers. He kills many of them before being dragged down by severe injuries and sheer numbers. Wilkes lands in his helicopter with Lola and starts repeatedly roundhousing the captive McQuade but Lola begs him to not do it this way so Wilkes has him buried alive in his Super Dodge Ram twenty feet below the ground as McQuade passes out from his severe injuries.

So far he's doing better than any other Chuck Norris villain and that includes Satan.

The bad guys make two critical mistakes: They didn't take his beer and left him his keys. Kayo tries to rescue him but gets in a losing gun battle. Below the earth, McQuade heals himself by drinking from a six pack he had in the truck like an alcoholic Popeye and pouring it in his wounds like it was the water from the Holy Grail.

"Is...is that Pabst?"

He then puts the keys in the ignition and starts the vehicle, activating the turbocharger with SFX that implies that it was built for the MIB using advanced alien technology. Above ground they witness the ground crack open to reveal his flashing lights and siren as a heavenly choir sings over a triumphant musical score as his truck rises from its would be tomb, running down several men who were trying to kill Kayo, before McQuade guns them down with a sawed off shotgun. He then collapses on his truck and has a beer with Kayo and the inexplicably alive Jackson.

"Man we really fucked that one up"

With everyone at the airfield apparently dead or having left, the movie cuts to McQuade having a reprise of his earlier training session but too injured to complete it. After remembering the death of his dog, mentor and scumbag witness, he round houses a shed on his property to pieces. Falcone shows up at McQuade's exes house to tell him that Wilkes has taken his daughter as an "invitation". So that means that so far, Wilkes has put his daughter in the hospital, killed his mentor, killed his dog, tried to kill his truck and kidnapped his daughter. The man clearly has no concern for his own safety at this point.

"Oh god honey, the Dwarf is back"

McQuade heads down to Mexico but tells the others to stay behind. He stops for gas as villagers worship the the ground he's walking on, and it turns out that Jackson has beaten him down to Mexico with a truck full of ordinance as Kayo arrives from tailing McQuade. He grudgingly accepts their help and they hobble off to infiltrate Wilkes base. I do mean hobble since they all sustained life threatening injuries less than a day ago but were healed by the power of Beer. They split up as they approach the base and McQuade infiltrates it while Jackson snipes guys with a crossbow.

"Aargh, this arrow in my side is instantly killing me, preventing me from shouting a warning"

McQuade finds his daughter with Lola (who he forgives easily) and starts to escort them out when he's discovered by a guard and alerts the whole base by shooting a guy in the face with his shotgun. This is when things go apeshit with guys streaming out of every door like it was Call of Duty 4 as our heroes absolutely ruin their shit with automatic weapons and copious amounts of explosives.

"There's Janeway, too. That's also Janeway. That's also Janeway!"

Kayo flubs it by letting the guy who kicked his ass earlier walk right up to him as he's reloading and kick him in the face. The guy asks if Kayo remembers him as he goes for his gun but Kayo is faster and shoots him dead before uttering probably the worst attempt at a one liner ever: "I never forget an asshole." Congrats Kayo, you have cemented yourself as someone who could pick an asshole out of a police lineup.

No..I just...no I'm so sorry

Wilkes hops in a half track and starts spraying them with fire from an M60, hitting McQuade's daughter in the leg while pinning McQuade and Lola down.

"God I love this job"

Kayo keeps firing his infinite ammo LAW at henchmen while Jackson gets raked by gunfire. He has a "oh not again" reaction to being shot, as the bullets probably bounced off ones from earlier gunfights. He throws some grenades at guys who decided to one up video game enemies by hiding behind crates of explosives that are stacked in front of a couple tankers full of fuel.

"I REGRET NOTHIIINNNNGGGG!"

Wilkes continues to fire his M60 at McQuade as he hops in a bulldozer, starts it up and slowly drives at the halftrack Wilkes is firing from. Wilkes takes this as an obvious challenge and abandons the MG to hop into the drivers seat to start an incredibly slow game of chicken. The two collide but the bulldozer has way more oomph and it pushes the halftrack back until it crashes into a house. Wilkes gets out and in an unspoken agreement, he and McQuade put down their weapons for the fight that Wilkes has wanted for so long.

"I'm David Motherfucking Carradine"

At this point, I have to tell you that I have nothing that can contribute to how awesome this fight is. Its David Carradine and Chuck Norris actually beating the crap out of each other to an amazing Spaghetti Western soundtrack in fight choreography originally designed for a Chuck Norris \ Bruce Lee rematch. Chuck Norris for once is the underdog in a fight and its epic. Its the ultimate showdown of Kung Fu and Kickboxing. They put it on the movie poster it was so great.

Note: That's a nuclear detonation.

So while I can't do it justice, I can tell you that during the fight, McQuade's daughter gets punched in the face in Slow-Mo which gives McQuade the extra push to kick his ass. Wilkes gets laid out but manages to get an SMG which he uses to accidentally kill Lola. As she's dying, she tells him that Wilkes killed her husband and forced her to work with him. So as a final recap: Wilkes has put his daughter in the hospital, killed his mentor, killed his dog, tried to kill his truck, kidnapped his daughter, shot his daughter, punched the daughter in the face and killed the love interest. Its basically assisted suicide at this point as McQuade dodges SMG fire to throw a grenade at Wilkes who is shooting from inside a warehouse full of explosives.

Oh yeah, he's dead alright.

Falcone then shows up in a helicopter to harangue McQuade for "breaking their deal" of Falcone telling him where Wilkes was in exchange for him getting all the weapons. McQuade tells him that he merely assumed that there was an agreement before stealing his helicopter and leaving him for the Federales. Point to McQuade in this battle of wits.

And then they dropped him in a chimney in retribution for Tracy's death.

The movie ends with McQuade being given a commendation and him going to go see his ex-wife and daughter's new house. Before they can leave though, Kayo rolls up with his sirens on and tells McQuade there's a bank robbery gone bad in progress with the robbers having taken hostages. McQuade ditches his family to go kill more criminals and his wife commenting that he'll never change.

And then he was assumed into heaven.

So Bad its Badass: Lone Wolf McQuade (Part 1)

2011-09-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

Lets get this out of the way: Chuck Norris is a meme for a reason. His movies were all based on a simple formula: Create a villain everyone wants to see get the shit kicked out of them, have Chuck Norris kick the shit out of them, then roll credits. In at least half his movies, the villain doesn't even have any kind of fighting ability or credibility as a fighter, he's just a human heavy bag for Chuck Norris to manhandle like a gorilla trying to get a suitcase open. The guy has kickboxed to death hijackers, drug lords, crooked cops, Vietcong, Ninjas, Karate Serial Killers, and the Antichrist. If it has a face and isn't Bruce Lee, he's round housed its face off. He even got a TV show (Walker: Texas Ranger) so he could roundhouse everything from gangs to abusive dads to HIV on a weekly basis. Stephen Seagal tried to do the same thing with his career but it just wore out its welcome faster than Seagal himself at a buffet.

I was going to make a movie title pun before I realized Belly of the Beast had beat me to it.

What few people realize is that Walker: Texas Ranger was based on an early Norris movie called Lone Wolf McQuade ( LWM from here on out). Its a spiritual adaptation because of rights issues and that's frankly a shame since LWM is unique and utterly insane. So without further preamble, lets dive right into this delicious turkey!

We start the movie with our hero Texas Ranger McQuade watching Mexican bandits round up stolen horses and state troopers preparing to arrest them through his rifle scope.

Binoculars? He's not a Rockefeller.

The state troopers make their way down into the valley as the Bandits corral the horses, and McQuade shakes his head at the poor expendable red shirts before heading back to his truck to grab his rifle, since he knows that as the main character he's going to have to clean this mess up sooner or later. He loads it with an armor piercing round and watches the scene unfold below him as the State Troopers confront the banditos.

Who are apparantly led by a living stereotype of Mexicans

The Frito Bandito sneers at their request for him to surrender, swears at them in Spanish and opens fire with his pistols at the troopers. The Troopers have the high ground, cover, assault rifles and started out already in position, so they are naturally utterly outclassed by a guy who's straight out of the Tea Parties image of Mexico. As one of them is gunned down we get a reaction shot from one of the troopers, who might be familiar to some of you.

Picture him fifteen years older, with a facial tattoo and his spirit crushed

Yes, that's Robert Beltran who would later play Chakotay on Star Trek Voyager in a marathon of Not Giving A Fuck Anymore. He's one of the State troopers who are getting a mud puddle stomped in their collective asses by the Banditos as McQuade calmly watches from a distance with his rifle.

"Lets see how this plays out"

The troopers surrender and are rounded up as Frito Bantio rants at them, telling him they're trying to take the horses that he rightfully stole before randomly yelling "Andale!" because that's what Mexicans do right? The leader of the state troopers in a moment of genre blindness yells that they'll never get away with this. This of course backfires and he gets ready to cut off Chakotays head for being taller than him, so I guess the appeal to authority didn't work out.

Clearly someone who will respect the authority of your office.

McQuade finally decides that maybe he should step in to help and starts blowing up trucks with his rifle. FB asks him why he's "messin with my cars amigo" as if he was just minding his own business before McQuade showed up and started messing up his stuff. McQuade informs him that he's a Texas Ranger and everyone reacts like its Jabba's throne room and he just told him he has a thermal detonator.

FB tries to calm his men down and orders them all to lower their weapons. He tells McQuade to stand up so he can see him, and McQuade obliges but this causes one of FBs men to freak out and fire on him.

Bullets and Chuck Norris have a gentlemen's agreement in his movies

So McQuade carefully lines up a shot and shoots the man dead. This prompts FB to stomp around before shooting the head of the troopers dead and taking Chakotay hostage. He yells that he'll kill him if McQuade doesn't throw down his weapon and come out unarmed as one of his men nervously tells him that nobody has ever messed with a Texas Ranger and lived. McQuade actually follows through though, and comes down from his rock with his hands up. FB has two of his men grab McQuade and he tells him about how a Texas Ranger once kicked his fathers teeth out and mockingly asks if McQuade is going to try it. So naturally McQuade kicks his teeth out.

Never invite Chuck Norris to kick you in the face

He proceeds to disarm the men holding him and kill the rest with the signature Chuck Norris weapon: The autoaiming Ingram SMG.

At least he only has one in this movie.

It doesn't matter what he's doing or how he's holding it, this weapon will never, ever miss. He even at one point spins around in a circle firing it with perfect accuracy despite the fact that everyone he hits is clearly several feet from where the rounds are impacting. Soon the only left alive is FB (begging for mercy before trying to grab a pistol) and McQuade tells him that he's just like his father. Which means that he either kicked the teeth out of FB's father when he was really young or he kicked an old man's teeth out. Neither would be out of character.

After Chakotay gets a little too overeager in thanking McQuade, we cut to him driving back to El Paso to witness his mentor Dakota's retirement ceremony.

He taught him everything he knows about being a Texas Ranger and his secret blend of 11 herbs and spices

They crack open some beers and their boss comes over to tell them how much he despises them before telling McQuade to see him in his office. Once there he gets the standard dressing down scene where the captain yells at him, saying despite the fact that he's awesome (he leads arrests for the entire nation), he's too dirty and unwholesome. The Captains ideal ranger is "a model citizen, a pillar of the community, he goes to church, he lives clean and has a loving wife and kids."

Ae you saying he doesn't live clean?

He then shows an editorial by a senator saying that McQuade is a walking symbol of police brutality before telling him that his "Lone Wolf days are over" and giving him a new partner: Chakotay, naturally. We finally get to learn that his name is Arcadio Ramos but everyone calls him "Kayo". McQuade storms out and the captain tells Kayo to follow him.

We are then introduced to our main villain for the movie Wilkes, played by the man himself David Carradine who seems to have insisted on just filming in whatever he was already wearing.

A dramatization of the producers casting Carradine

He's selling weapons to Cubans who want to overthrow Castro and they try to double cross him, jamming a pistol in his face. He's David Carradine, the white Shaolin Monk himself, so naturally some two bit Cubans don't stand a chance. The leader is killed by a roundhouse kick and his men are gunned down by the dozen armed men accompanying Wilkes. Talk about failing a perception check!

We go back to Kayo who's snooping around McQuades dumpy house but gets caught.

And yet this is an improvement over working for Janeway

He gets kicked out by McQuade and chased back to his car by the happiest looking Dog that's been dubbed over with random snarling. McQuade goes out back to go target shooting shirtless, and we keep cutting to the most overblown reaction shots from Kayo possible, trying to sell how badass he is for being able to hit a target from six feet away. This guy apparently cannot believe what he's seeing.

But then again he was captured by a snack food mascot.

After his shirtless target shooting practice, he gets into Super Truck and heads off. Kayo tries to follow him, but McQuade hits the little red button on his truck and manages to get it up to about a hundred and twenty, leaving Kayo in a ditch as he crashes trying to keep up. He picks up his daughter from his ex wife's place and we get to meet ~~Dead Meat~~ his daughters boyfriend who gushes over McQuade and how he received the Silver Star in the Marines before he was a Texas Ranger. His exposition delivered, he awkwardly shuffles off frame as McQuade takes his daughter to a horse show.

While he's working in the stables, he is watched by Wilkes and his boss.

What.

Then without a word, Wilkes leaves and the dwarf snears in triumph.

What.

Then the scene ends. No explanation, not even a hint as to what the fuck that just was and we're off to the romance sub plot. McQuade saves a woman on a runaway horse and it turns out she's the widow of a wealthy man who died under mysterious circumstances. After much small talk, they head over to an exhibition fight where Wilkes is beating the shit out of random people in a boxing ring. He sees McQuade and tries to goad him into a fight but McQuade refuses as that god damn dwarf watches.

Wilkes takes offense to this and has some goons beat the shit out of Kayo while McQuade watches.

"Lets see how this plays out."

Dakota tries to intervene but is knocked unconcious and McQuade decides that he should probably step in before they start working over the love interest with a tire iron. He works over the redneck mooks with ridiculous ease, establishing dominance over the secondary characters. One of the mooks also learns why a beer bottle is a terrible weapon, as McQuade grabs his hand and crushes his hand into the bottle until it shatters inside his grip.

Number one in police brutality three years running

Wilkes comes over and tries to pick another fight but the love interest steps between them and stops the fight before it can begin. They walk away and Kayo asks why they aren't you know, arresting the guys who assaulted two law enforcement agents. McQuade tells him that if he locked up everyone he got into a fight with, he'd have half of the county in jail. Which is probably not hyperbole knowing this character, but this whole thing somehow causes him and Kayo to bond while the Dwarf looks on and laughs in triumph.

Seriously movie, what the fuck?

McQuade goes out to dinner with the Love Interest who has a reputation as a black widow since her husband died under mysterious circumstances but she wins McQuades heart by backhanding a guy off his feet Love, Chuck Norris Style. While this is happening, his daughter is making out with DeadMeat when they see what is supposed to be an army convoy ambushed by men pretending to be the police.

"Look Phil, all I'm saying is we might have over done it on the flares"

They get in their car to get help but suddenly headlights from another car turn on beside them. Either the car was parked there since before they were making out or it managed to sneak up completely unnoticed like a Predator Lincoln Continental. I am of course going to assume the latter. So DeadMeat sees two men armed with SMGs and confronts them with a tire iron and is quickly removed from the movie. McQuades daughter freaks out and hides in a corner as the Predator Continental pushes the door closed and shoves the car over the edge of a cliff without making a single sound before slinking away.

"Iwo Jima, Cambodia, Beirut. Drawn by heat and conflict. He's on safari."

McQuade gets the call and after making sure his daughter is alright in the hospital, goes to investigate the scene. Unfortunately for him, the feds have arrived and tell him to shove off since its under their jurisdiction. So naturally he gets to work on the case with Kayo. He tries to get information by calling up random military officers which doesn't get him anywhere but luckily Kayo has a post it note with codes that get him into the central classified computer system of the entire US military. The shipment contained a wide array of military weapons from rifles to miniguns to 105mm towed arty to "Chi-Com Rifles". Lacking any other leads, he decides to go shake down the local scumbag and see what he knows with his side kicks Kayo and Super Ram Charger.

"When I am not around the truck is in charge"

They go after the general all purpose dirt bag of the county named Snow who is hiding out in a textile facftory. Super Ram charges through some gates to allow for some good old police brutality to unfold as Kayo beats a random man while McQuade tells him that he's getting the hang of being a Ranger. They confront Snow and he tries to shoot them.

This plan fails for obvious reasons

After Kayo and McQuade shoot his guards to death, Snow makes a break for it in his truck while McQuade jumps on board. After sliding around for a few minutes while Snow tries to shoot him with an empty gun, before he crashes into a tanker full of gasoline as McQuade rolls off. As the truck fills with gasoline, Snow keeps trying to start it. Which is of course, a terrible combination.

"Come on, start you piece of-AAAAAAH"

McQuade rushes in to save Snow and gets him clear before the entire tanker explodes. Rather than say, arrest him and bring him into the station, he instead brings him to his mentor's house. While there, Snow tries to pull a hidden knife on Dakota but gets his arm snapped like a twig for the attempt and Dakota fires McQuades Ingram at him until he starts talking. Falcone is getting his hands on as many weapons as possible and selling them to terrorists and dictators all over the world. McQuade leaves Snow with his mentor and rookie partner for protection. Naturally, this means at minimum two out of three must die.

Redshirts playing Poker.

So tune in for part two to see who lives, who dies and who gets their face kicked off and just what the fuck is the deal with that midget.

Movies That Kick Ass: 13 Assassins

2011-08-31T21:52:00.000-07:00

To sum it up quite simply: 13 Assassins is a movie that manages to combine excellent character drama with batshit insanity. Its filled to the brim with conflicts over honor, duty, loyalty and the nature of oaths. Also, it has enough dead bodies to a fill an Olympic sized swimming pool and more spike traps than a Dungeon Masters Guide.

Indeed they are.

The story begins with a house elder committing Sepuku in protest against Lord Naritsugu. Lord Naritsugu is basically evil incarnate but is protected because he's the half brother of the shogun. This allows him to get away with extreme acts of over the top villainy in every scene he's in without even slowing down once. This is a man who will go from zero to rape in 1.5 seconds, then mock the husband of the rape victim, then kill him while he tries to console his wife, behead his dead body, then insult his dead body to his wife's face.

I'm not a rape expert but I think this is considered a definite Faux Pas

And that's just what he does to warm up.

We follow Sir Doi as he ponders just what to do about Lord Dickhead. The guy is bad enough on a day to day basis (What with all the atrocities) but the shogun is about to elevate him to a senior position in which he'll have actual power over the whole of Japan, which terrifies the shit out of everyone. Sir Doi decides that the little shit simply must die. To do this, he goes to the Samurai Shinzaemon and tells him that he wants him to kill Lord Dickhead before he can ascend to a position in the government. To reinforce how much this man must die, he shows Shinzaemon the good lord's handiwork: The daughter of a peasant leader who rebelled because Naritsugu taxed his subjects so much they could barely afford their own food.

Oh god what.

Yeah, Naritsugu kinda made her into a human sex toy by cutting off all her limbs so she'd fit in a travelling case and removed her tongue so he wouldn't have to listen to her. That's pro level evil, not your amateur stuff you often see. As the finishing touch, he leaves her to die face down in the street in the rain rather than giving her any kind of merciful death. Because he was bored.

Shinzaemon asks what happened to her family and she answers using a brush in her mouth while bleeding from her eyes because of how much trauma she's sustained.

Shinzaemon in seeing this absolutely gut punching display has about the reaction to this much human misery and evil that you would expect.

"Yeeesss"

Or shit, he's overjoyed that this level of evil exists. See, Shinzaemon wants a meaningful death but that's basically impossible in the era he lives in. Lord Dickhead gives him the perfect opportunity to die an honorable death against not only superior odds but in a mission to kill someone who is basically pure evil. We then get to meet Shinzaemons opposite number, the Samurai Hanbei as Lord Dickhead is casually practicing his archery.

Magnitude 8.3 on the Dickter Scale

...on the family of the clan leader who comitted suicide as protest to Naritsugu's wanton brutality....

Hanbei is basically a slave to the oaths of loyalty he has to Naritsugu and when he tries to get Naritsugu to stop trying to finish off the entire family, Lord Dickhead throws it back in his face saying that Samurai must obey their lord even to the point of dying for them. This sets up the central conflict between Shinzaemon and Hanbei and their different ideas of honor. Hanbei's loyalty is to a Lord, Shinzaemon believes that a lord must earn loyalty. Both men know that they will be fighting over the life of Naritsugu as he travels back to his home territory the capital.

We get to meet 11 of the other assassins, which includes Shinzaemons nephew Shinrokurō who is bored of the samurai life and has taken up gambling. We learn that Shinzaemon is a highly skilled gambler in both games and life. He always takes the long shot bet and that's what he plans to do against Naritsugu. His plan is to politically block his path, forcing him through a specific town that they plan to buy out and fortify. So they set off and pick up a bizarre hunter named Kiga Koyota.

Naritsugu and Hanbei meanwhile find their path politically blocked by a local lord whose Son Naritsugu beheaded earlier. Naritsugu is so arrogant he almost gets his face shot off right there for trying to force the blockade single handidly.

I'm pretty sure you'd need a silver bullet or a piece of the true cross anyway.

Hanbei says that his lord can endure a little humiliation if it means maintaining his safety since in a year he will be second in command of the country. Naritsugu has him utterly pegged psychologically though and uses his strict codes of honor against him to get him to do whatever the fuck he wants.

Meanwhile, Shinzaemon is fortifying the heck out of a town and turning it into a trap. They know it's a gamble because Naritsugu has over 200 samurai as escorts, but to them killing him is the only honorable thing to do. A conflict is utterly unavoidable at this point and you look at the time as the final battle begins.

Holy. Shit.

There ain't any excessive denouement either, the rest of the movie is all battle.

So the assassins have fortified their town into a total death trap and left a token group of civilians behind to maintain appearances when Hanbei scouts it. As he's escorting his lord through the town, he sees the villagers escaping into the forest and sees swords\arrows placed in strategic locations and realizes that he's been led into a trap.

Its at this point that the movie loses its fucking mind. Maybe you realize that when the so foot high spring loaded spiked walls slide in, maybe you realize that when they unleash flaming livestock on them.

Hope you like your steaks rare and angry

But no matter what point you realize it, this movie just became utterly over the top.

Shinzaemon traps them in the town via a series of spiked walls (complete with land mines) while simultaneously blowing up the only bridge out of town. All the buildings have been filled with spikes so they can't get through them and there's catwalks up top so the Assassins can get around with ease. The entire town is now a D&D death trap and Shinzaemon and co give them a proper greeting, informing them they're about to get fucking arrowed.

Its basically the Edo equivalent of the shower scene as the assassins shoot arrows by the dozens into the samurai bodyguards while wild man Kiga just hurls gigantic rocks at everyone with his sling. The bodyguards find that any possible way out is generally a trap and generally quite explosive, bringing entire buildings down on their heads. After this onslaught, Shinzaemon declares that they should end these "petty tricks" and get down to business.

He then officially declares his intentions.

Now, they've got the high ground and prepared defenses. So logically, they should man those and cut the lesser samurai to pieces as they try to climb out of the trap. They still have explosives and arrows to flush them out, so we should see a highly tactical battle in which-

"BANZAI MOTHERFUCKERS!"

Or they all jump into heaping crowds of mooks to mix it the fuck up. From here on out, this is going to be a battle god damn royale. There's so much action and so many great moments that from here I can only give you the highlights. Basically all the bodyguards are utterly inexperienced because it's a time of relative peace and are absolutely terrified of these mad men who have trapped them in the Edo Tomb of Horrors while the Assassins are humanoid typhoons because of either superior training, actual field experience, willingness to throw out any notion of a fair fight or in the case of Kiga: Pure street rat crazy.

This guy must smell amazing

The bodyguards find that no matter which way they attempt to turn to escape from this onslaught of Samurai and Crazy Guy with Rock. Often though, Lord Dickhead will actually run off in directions that he knows are going to be traps because he's actually that much of a dickhead and is having a great time watching all his men die trying to save him from the ambushes.

This is not even remotely a fair fight

Hanbei has to keep running around and coming to his rescue, since he's the only Samurai on his side who's worth a damn. He's having to bust his way through spring loaded falling spike walls to stand in front of a guy who is actively putting himself into danger all the time. This is a guy who can deflect arrows off hand with his sword and make stone cold killers back the fuck off.

The dreaded Jazz Hands defense.

Meanwhile, all the Samurai who aren't Hanbei are getting slaughtered with swords, spears, fire, explosives and large rocks but they begin to wear the assassins down. While they're an absolute wrecking crew, it seems they didn't do enough endurance training in the off season and its starting to cost them. One by one, sheer numbers start taking their toll and they start dying against the samurai bodyguards. Several are dramatically run through, others start collapsing dead from sheer blood loss from all the little lucky hits that made it through. One takes his own life with the gunpowder he was carrying, taking another man with him.

Fact: The human body contains two hundred and fifty gallons of blood.

While Hanbei keeps trying to reassure his men that they totally have this thing won if they just stay focused, Lord Naritsugu tells him that he finds this whole conflict amazing and they should totally usher in an age of non-stop war when he's raised to second in command. Hanbei is absolutely horrified by this but is stupidly loyal so he says nothing even though he's past the point that most people would go "Fuck it, you can have him".

Both sides start running out of Samurai due to various slashing related incidents, with Hanbei and a couple men left defending the lord as they manage to finally escape the town but find Shinzaemon and his nephew waiting for them. Shinzaemon tries to convince Hanbei to leave the gigantic dickhead to die but Hanbei, while acknowledging his Lord's dickhead status, swears that whatever else happens, he is a Samurai who will obey and die. The two men prepare for a duel and Shinzaemon comments that Hanbei was always his superior in the dojo but this is a real fight before promptly kicking a shitload of mud into Hanbei's face and cutting him down with ease.

So of course Lord Dickhead just casually kicks his head around.

This guy has truly raised the fucking bar

Shinzaemon tells Naritsugu that his life ends here because of all his atrocities but Naritsugu amazingly thinks that he has a chance against a stone cold motherfucker like Shinzaemon, who even lets him get a free shot in between insults (Since he wants to die) before cherry tapping him with his sword. Naritsugu dies after blubbering in the mud begging for someone to save him from the pain while Shinzaemon just looks on Like a Boss before beheading him. Shinzaemon dies of his basically self inflicted wound. The only survivors of the battle are his nephew and Kiga who apparantly possesses a Demon Healing Factor that will never be properly explained to anyone who is not Japanese.

Walk it off pansy!

The end credits helpfully inform us that Lord Naritsugu was reported to have died from a fever, which requires a bit more explanation than one of the characters being a Japanese Demon.

13 Assassins is an incredibly entertaining movie, both as a drama and as an action movie. I've done it very little justice with this skimmed over account since as mentioned previously, the final battle is a whopping 40 minutes long and not a single minute of that is wasted. Its a marathon of action that doesn't get old no matter how many guys you see cut apart. So go check it out from a library, Netflix it or buy it from Amazon for the sake of shameless internet writers who could use a buck or two to pay for Netflix.