Suburban Commando (1991)

This film was apparently (According to Wiki - not a sitcom by Jessica Hynes) intended as the Danny Devito and Arnie follow up to Twins. Imagine. I'm both stunned that Twins was released in '88 (my memory of it coming out are clearly not real memories) and grateful that they didn't take this on. Hulk Hogan is the perfect choice for this film, and I think Christopher Lloyd (bless him) is perfect in his role as a cowardly, bossed around husband and father.

Hulk Hogan is probably my favourite bad film actor. He's been in some classics (Santa With Muscles, Secret Agent Club, No Holds Barred, Mr Nanny and the first ten minutes of McCinsey's Island) and varies in cheesiness from Very Cheesey to the Hammiest of Hammy Ham (Santa With Muscles).

I got up at 7:09am this morning in order to watch a bad film. I was thinking about Milk Money but was really in the mood for some Hogan. I hadn't seen Suburban Commando in years so I decided that was what I'd watch.

The film opens with what is essentially the infiltration/plant destroying, DeathStar sequence from Star Wars. This is the first of pastiches of other films and similarities (mostly to other Hogan films). We learn that Hogan is Shep Ramsey, a sort of superstrong space Conan. He kicks some bad guys arses and spouts his usual excellent one liners (when throwing a baddy in to the ceilling of a lift he says "Going up!"). The main Bad Guy has the President held hostage. As he is about to destroy the planet Shep bursts in and beats up some more henchmen. At some point during the battle the president throws a rectangle (I don't know what it is meant to be. A blade? A letter? Some flat, rectangular thing.) at the Bad Dude's hand, slicing it right off. His band grows back green, his eyes turn green and he chokes the president. At this point Shep RUNS THE FUCK AWAY LEAVING THE PRESIDENT TO DIE, BLOWING THE SHIP UP AND KILLING EVERYONE ON BOARD IN THE PROCESS....good work. Shep escapes on a pod, like in Aliens.

I enjoyed the pod sequence because it is really shit. The pod is spinning out of control. By which I mean they've spun the image around. Hogan shouts at it to get back on couse whilst pressing a switch (like a light switch) on a remote control...except he isn't pressing it. He is barely touching the thing for the first five or six attempts. When he finally realises that some pressure is required for the flicking of the switch it works first time. The pod stablises and we get a video call from Shep's boss. He informs him that the old Shep probably wouldn't have killed the president and that he should take a holiday. This holiday is to be on Earth. Shep hates Earthlings. He says so himself. And so the film begins.

Shep crashes into an abandoned Disco. Convenient. He then heads into town and beats up a fat bastard and steals his clothes (he deserved it, he left his dog in a car on a hot day). This is similar to the Terminator 2 sequence except (Thank Fuck) Hogan was not naked, he was wearing a bizarre...thing. He looks a little bit like a dick. A metal dick. Less so than Shaq in Steel, mind.

Christopher Lloyd's wife has convered his workshop - his one joy - in to a spare room because Lloyd is too much of a wimp to ask for a raise. Shep moves in.

There are some scenes showing Sheps strength by having him lift cardboard replicas of metal objects, having him be hilariously confused by Earth (the arcade sequence is a classic - are all arcades in America narrow corridors of Joust machines?) and Christopher Lloyd being a brow-beaten wimp man who can't bring himself to ask for a raise from his boss (who is a similar, though less overly aggressive version of Brell from No Holds Barred).

At some point Lloyd plays nosey-bastards and discovers Hogans Laser-Gun (like the one in Secret Agent Club but with the inconsistant powers the exploding crystals of Santa With Muscles). When Lloyd follows Hogan he discovers Shep's (sorry for the continued use of both Character and Actor names...deal with it) spaceship, powerfull armoured suit (silver egg box lycra thing) and weapons he decides to give this superhero lark a go. He saves a lady in distress from what appears to be an attempted gangrape - a kiddy friendly gangrape though. Either that or the two guys just like dragging women around in different directions for no purpose. Anyhow, Charlie (Lloyd's character) defeats these foes in an Inspector Gadget-esque fluke way. However, he leaves a Laser-Gun on and these can be traced by The Undertaker and Some Bloke - Or Hutch and Knuckles as they are known in this film. They are Intergalactic Bounty Hunters (like two shit Boba Fetts).


Hogan finds out and berates Lloyd for fucking up big style. They go on a search for the gun - looking here and looking there - and then comes my favourite peice of dialogue in a Hogan film that doesn't involve markings made by a human. For those who intend on watching the film, you may want to skip the next bit as it is a SPOILER!!!!!!

******

...
Shep: [clicks fingers] Wait a minute...[grabs something that looks like the PKE meter in Ghostbusters] We can finder them with this. It zeros in on the gun's electronic signal.
Charlie: A homing device! Great! Why didn't we just use this in the first place?
Shep: Shut up.

******

Anyway, fights happen (of the comedic variety), Charlie misses a deadline, grows some bollocks and helps Hogan beat the bad guys (the main of which steps in to some electrics, a la Brell in No Holds Barred). quits his job and Hogan goes home in a scene of heartwrenching sadness akin to ET. Oh, and Hogan takes a human broad with him. Broad is neither my word (well, it is) nor his - but you just know that is how he'd refer to it if describing the scene.

The thing with this film is that, unlike the last two films mentioned, I actually liked it for what it was for a lot of the film. The rip-offs I took to be Spaced-esque pastiches, I laughed at some of the jokes and I like the concept. There were some things that I laughed at that were awful - some of the one liners are so bad I could just imagine watching it with friends and us grinning at each other and shouting "EH?!" - and funny because of it. As for Hogan's hammy delivery, I don't know how to take it. It is fucking funny but does he know? Is it hammy because he is utter shit? Or is it hammy because he is hamming it up on purpose? I think the latter because his rubbish acting is like in No Holds Barred, but his hammy acting is in things like Santa With Muscles. He can be either shit or exagerated hamminess to the maximus, and when he is the latter I believe it to be for comic effect. Either way, I love this film. I love everything that is good and I love everything about it which is bad. 

This one, for me, was no effort at all to watch. I cannot wait to watch it with others!

Fat Slags (2004)

You know a film is going to be good when it is by the Director of Kevin & Perry Go Large

I haven't seen it in a while but I remember really laughing at Freddy Got Fingered. It was a really stupid film. Really stupid. It was full of gross-out humour but it really went for it and it didnt seem childish, due to it being too bizarre. Fat Slags, on the other hand, is really juvenile. It doesn't take risks. It doesn't do anything new. It isn't funny. It doesn't have any characters that you feel any sympathy for at all. It is a mess. Possibly the worst film I have ever seen.

However, it wasn't boring. It was difficult to take but there was such an onslaught of shit jokes and things happening and z-list celebrities appearing and then disappearing that it was, sort of, easy to watch. Easier than something like Monster A-Go-Go or Plan 9.

The film, which is a live action version of the Viz comic strip of the same name, is about two overweight, northern ladies who like shagging and eating and punching people. their names don't really matter.They are played by Fiona Allen (of Smack The Pony 'n' shit - the one who always seemed to be trying too hard during the unfunny songs at the end of the show - WHY DID SHE AGREE TO THIS?) and Sophie Thompson (of EastEnders, costume dramas and being Emma Thompson's sister fame - WHY, SOPHIE, WHY?). They get sacked from their job by John Thompson (Cold Feet, Steve Coogan's sidekick, The Fast Show, Corrie - WHY!?) for blowing up the place where they work. They breifly talk about how their job is the only good thing about their life, thus deliberately telegraphing that they'll lose them soon. The first joke that I can really recall is a visual gag (the Slags would laugh at the word 'gag' - it's one of those films), where a door that has "Show Us Your Pass" written on it is blown up in to the air by the aforementioned explosion, and lands on John Thompson (WHY?) and then something else lands, covering the P in Pass. You see, it now reads "Show Us Your Ass."

For some reason the people involved didn't get to this part of the script and just put it down. Talented people.

From here they learn they've been asked to the BBC to take part in a depate about the neutrition of northern women. This is a set peice to get them amongst the less disgusting people of London (except they are horrible in a different way, with their shunning of fat people in clothes shops (Naomi Campbell (WHY?...Oh wait, Naomi Campbell)), etc). Here we meet a super rich dickhead (Jerry O'Connell - the fat kid from Stand By Me, Sliders, other stuff - WHY!?) and his lackeys (Anthony Head - WHY!?) and Geri Halliwell (see Naomi Campbell). Jerry gets hit on the head by a pot plant, is fascinated by a pen, sees Fat Slags, falls for them straight away and sets out to make them stars. Blah..blah...blah... Angus Deaton (WHY?) ...blah...blah - then DOLPH LUNDGREN (WHY!? - this is the lowest point of this mans career. Say what you like about Masters Of The Universe and Rocky 4, this is FAR worse).

WHY?!

Anyway, the girls fart, burp and swear (which are treated as jokes in and of themselves) for about an hour. They make it as stars. Gerri Halliwell puts on weight and Naomi eats a burger because people are all sheep and buy in to what is fashionable at the time, etc etc etc. We get the odd flash of naked fat suits. Fucking hilarious. Only it isn't.

Towards the end, Jerry gets his cock accidentally bitten off by a Fat Slag (Sophie Thompson) and bangs his head and realises that he doesnt love them. And then....well, the last clip is removed from YouTube so I don't know how it ends!!! Great.

There is a subplot with their northern boyfriends - they make some anti french joke in a geordie accent, get interegated by PUNT AND DENIS (WTF?!) who cannot understand their Geordie accent and then shag some women in bhurkas because Punt and Denis confuse something they say for Osama Bin Laden and deport them to Afganistan. Don't know how it ended for them either - and I don't care. On of them is played by the police officer in People Like Us.

The thing is, they didn't really do the gross out stuff properly. a dildo in a cake isnt funny and it isn't gross. Biting off a cock might be one or both of those things but it is only mentioned and not shown so it isn't either. If you are doing gross out show it. Show the womans face covered in blood as she tries to reattach it or something. Freddy Got Fingered has the famous baby scene and the broken leg licking scene and the animal wanking scenes and it works (for some). Fat Slags works for no one. It is too lowbrow for even most fairly lowbrow people (although, I vaguely recall my Dad saying it was funny - WHY?).

There is one scene that works as a gross out thing (not funny, just made me think "that is horrible") - when we cut from a guy (one of the Geordies) vomiting and cut it with some horrible looking yellow sauce being dumped on a kebab, so it looks like he's vom'd on the kebab.

There is also a scene where a joke almost made me smirk but they overdid it. This is a comment made by Anthony Head after they realise the laptop has been stolen. They then labour the joke by essentially doing the same joke again.

Having said all of this, I still have a fondness for the film. I don't know if it is just because I feel like I achieved something by watching it all (well, as much was on YouTube), or because I like to think about how it got made (WHY?) and how the people involved feel about it, or if it is because I know I am funnier and it makes me feel good about myself. It might be a lot to do with the latter. It is true to say that you can see most of the jokes coming (COMING - LOL) and know what is going to happen next so you know that you could, at very least, have written as well if not better than the actual writers. Everyline is the dumbest logical thing that could be said. The only thing that this doesn't work for is the random shit that makes no sense. And when each fart will happen (you know it will happen, but when - usually around every three minutes - but when exactly?). By random shit that makes no sense I men things like when Fiona Allen sits on her friends dog and flattens it (obvious so far) then throws the disk like dog out of the window, hitting an old man who farts, falls into a wheelbarrow and explodes. That written down is far funnier than the actuality of it.

This film is truly terrible, one of the worst films that has ever come in to existance. Their are films that have no budget (50s-60s B-Movies), vanity projects (Manos, The Room) and straight to DVD action films starring wrestlers - many of these are bad but they stand little chance of being any better than that, and there is no expectation of it being better. Fat Slags hardly has Waterworlds budget but it is a film that should have a built in fanbase (the Viz readers) and it has funny and famous people in it, but it misses the mark by so much that it is actually heading in the opposite direction to the mark and is continuing to get further away as we speak. And because of this I am actually quite looking forward to watching it again. With friends, of course. This is made for mocking. You will want to meet the people from the film just to ask "what the fuck were you thinking? Surely you get sent scripts all the time, why this?" I'm still stunned at it's badness. Utterly amazed. Awe-struck. Wow.

0/10 - must see.

Heartbeeps (1981) - a very late night, unedited waffle about the movie.

Wow. Stunning. Maybe because of the introduction declaring my love for all things shit-film, I then go an watch a shit film that has left me thinking "Thats and hour and ten Im not getting back!"

Having said that, there was something about it. I think it was a combination of the music and the overall feeling of gloom. Let's first give a run down of the film and then I'll explain what it was that I liked about this movie.

The film begins with us seeing the Crimebuster robot freaking out. The Crimebuster looks a bit like a black Dalek, but somehow far shittier looking. Like a black Ford Escort with Dalek modification. For those who have seen it, in Great Yarmouth there is a car that drives round in the summer which is modified to look like a giant clown driving a tiny car. This is like that except not a clown...a black mound.

Anyway, Crimebuster is going mad, shooting at tree stumps and sniffing skunks. Cut to Universal logo.

The film suffers from What-The-Future-Will-Look-Like-From-The-Point-Of-View-Of-Someone-In-The-80s syndrome. There are some robots that look like Johnny-5 sweeping using a broom. They haven't created a automatic hoovering robot, but they'd programmed a shitty metal looking turd to sweep the floor. There are computers everywhere but they look as high tech as the ones in the bank in Ghost. And if you don't get the reference, you are an uncultured swine. I refer to tiny monitors with black backgrounds and green old-skool font.

We're now introduced to Val. He is being driven by Randy Quaid and some old dude to a shelf where he is left awaiting repair. Val is a robot. He has damaged his foot by dropping a bin on it. Nevermind the next hour are spent with him walking across a forest (clearly his ailment is minor). Val doesn't look like the other robots - partially because he is a C-Series (apparently that is a thing) and partly because he is Andy Kaufman doing a Muppet Babies voice. Andy Kaufman got the role because they wanted to see if he would work as a leading man. I felt he faired as well as anyone could, to be fair. In this film Andy looks like a cross between SMart era Mark Speight (RIP) and the singer from Primus in the video to Wynona's Big Brown Beaver.

Whilst on the shelf he meets another malfunctioning robot called Aqua. She talks to him about the beauty of the sunset. He reacts as if he'd never heard anyone state anything but fact before (in spite of previously living with humans) and asks her about beauty and the correct responses to such comments are - I imagine this is what an autistic person has to do, learn standed responses to certain comments. Then, suddenly, they hold hands and then stop again.

They are soon joined by a robot Jew that is stuck telling terrible jokes. This robot is on a box with wheels. His jokes are of a groan/ EH!? GEDDIT! nature. Theyre all shit, but they're all meant to be. A shame really, considering they are the only real jokes in the film.

The robots decide to go and get some data on some trees (WHY?!) so head out on a mission where little happens, and what does seems to be filler (such as Val being attacted by a bear and Phil wanting a helmet). Ah yes, Phil. Phil is a little robot created from Aqua's wiring and Val's circuits (I know this from the lines "He's got your wiring" and "Yes, but he has your circuits"). This is essentially the running joke for the rest of the film - things happen and we're meant to chortle at how similar this is to a parent and their kid. JOKES! LOL!

The films other joke is to fast forward things (why didn't it fast forward the whole thing?). By this I mean the Benny Hill thing but without the music and without anyone laughing. Sped up bear, sped up van, etc. Oh, there is also a scene at a party (I looked away for a second and suddenly the robots are waiting at a party) where there is a girl who looks like a more well covered Lady Gaga. High point of the movie.

Anyway, Randy Quaid and the Crimebuster are out hunting them (the Crimebuster overheard a conversation and took this to mean "go get 'em"). So they're on the run and then they meet some nerds who work on a dump. The nerds save them,  they head back to the factory - heartwarming shit happens (though you'll care so little and it is so badly done you'll literally care more for the fungus growing on your washing up). We then hear that the two robots kept breaking themselves so they were eventually scrapped. Sad. Only, as I've just said, the scrapyard is run by those geeks and all the robots are living happily with the nerds! Great.

Now, all of ^ was shit. However, what I liked was the overall atmosphere. There were shots that lingered too long on nothing happening, to the point you could sense Kaufman was looking about for someone to say "you an say your line now." These lingering shots must have been terrible for Kaufman as he seemed to be told he wasn't allowed to blink (Aqua blinked a lot and they just added a roboty noise over the top). There were a lot of scenes where it was rather dark (except the scene where they search party decide to go home because "it is getting dark" - it was about 3pm by the looks of it). And it is so slow. slow, long shots, in the dark. It just makes me remember that a selection of people made this film and they chose for it to be this way. Add in the slow, electronic music that was someones idea of futuristic music but was actually just very 80s.

Apparently the guy who did the music has done the music or all but 2 of Spielberg's movies, so he is a talented man. The music is not bad in this film. It is just slightly warped with age and very 80s fiilmish. It is also slow. It is rarely comedic. And I think, overall, that is what I liked. It wasn't a comic film. It was a gloomy, lumbering romance between robots. Robots with massive inconsitancies over how human and understanding they were. It is just a horrible, misguided mess or a movie. A dark, bare-minimum plot, 80s mess. With stars. People who read the script and thought "This seems like a worthwhile venture." The film cost $10million to make in 1981. Amazing. More amazingly it made over $2million. It's not amazing that the loss is so big, it is amazing that it ever made $2m. There is no way a trailer could make this look entertaining. It isn't.

So - to clear up - what I like about this film - the way it is a very bleak looking, film with rubbish (special?) effects, with slow eighties music and dialogue made up almost entirely of jargon that the writer didn't understand and words like 'data' and 'compute.'

Why?

Over the course of my life I have watched many movies. When I was a young child it was mainly due to my brothers obsession with watching any movie that was on. My Dad had gotten Sky at the first available chance and as a wee kiddiewinkle we had the movie channels. Lots of Steve Martin, I seem to remember, and Bill Murray. This is possibly more to do with a cycle of What About Bob? and LA Story more than my brother having an obsession with either. I very muched liked films - especially action packed things like Jurassic Park and Star Wars, and things that tied in with cartoons of the time, such as Ghostbusters and Teenage Mutant Ninja/Hero Turtles. Things I could replicate to a highly accurate degree (in my mind) in the backyard.

As I got older I started to enjoy films more and more. Enough for me to want to study them at college and university. Whether or not this was wise is no longer relevant.

One thing that does seperate me from a lot of other film lovers, though, is my love of terrible films. Not just B-Movie, low budget horror stuff (as brilliant as that is) but bigger budget flops, obscurities, star vehicles that bombed, Kevin Costner movies, straight to DVD films, terribly acted dramas, films featuring pro wrestlers - just shitty films. They don't all float my boat - if a film is 'bad' because it is just plain borning then I don't tend to go back to it but, with the exception of the original Star Wars triology, The Big Lebowski and BASEketball (on a year end of Worst-Of show, as selected by Roger Ebert so maybe that also counts as a 'bad film') my most watched movie is probably No Holds Barred. NHB was the first film to include Hulk Hogan as the primary lead. It was produced by WWE owner/chairman/boss Vince McMahon. It is superb. On of my all time favourites. But, in everyone elses book (give or take a few other enthusiasts) it is considered woeful, without worth and should be buried alongside all those copies of the ET computer game in Mexico.

So, why do I love bad films so much? What is it about them? Is there anything more than just laughing at other peoples incompetence and irony? And can I stretch out this idea for a whole blog? Well, let's see. I am now going to watch as many bad films as I can and record my findings on this here blog. To start with Heartbleeps - review coming shortly.