stevemains's Reviews

The Code Conspiracy (2002)

2/10

85 minutes of movie in a 110 minute package.

24 October 2009

I won't completely dissect this movie. It isn't worth the time, and you can get basic plot details from other reviews. Suffice to say it's exceedingly stupid. I gave it two stars largely because at times it's shot well. Some scenes look better than a movie with this budget and this much aggressive incompetence behind it should. I'll just comment on a couple of things beyond that.

The Code Conspiracy uses a lot of technical jargon, mostly in the form of cryptographic and technological talk, to try and lend some weight to its (weightless) religious message. Like pretty much everything else in the movie, it fails to do this and succeeds only in annoying and boring the audience.

Vast, brainless sections of this movie make no sense whatsoever. There's no reasonable explanation for what happens late in the movie on the beach. What goes on as people are getting on the plane, and why it does, are muddled at best. I get the sense that huge portions of the film that would have helped things to make sense were excised. But the rest of the movie is so badly paced--filled to overflow with pointless scenes and long, lingering shots we don't need--that it's hard to buy that as an excuse.

Pacing is the movie's worst failure. Any stupid flick, even a pretentious one, is more forgivable when it's short. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of awful movies, and I'm not exaggerating when I say that probably 90-95% of them clock in within ten minutes of the ninety minute mark. How on earth this movie thought it could get away with a hundred and ten mind-numbing minutes is a mystery more compelling than any Bible Code.

This movie's pretty good for laughs, though. MST3K fans may recognize David Warner from Quest of the Delta Knights. Again, though, it's paced very slowly. There will be some boring spots, but keep in mind there will be something completely ridiculous just around the bend. I especially love the awful, awful songs.

Lastly, I want you to consider all the positive user comments this movie has received here. All of them were posted in the first half of 2005, and almost every one of them--no matter what the country of origin (and there are lots of those)--misuses commas in the exact same bizarre way. Every single one of them also either has commented on no other movies, or has commented only on other movies that starred Jim Fitzpatrick. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's not a coincidence. Thirteen reviews. Bogus. Every other review besides those? Resoundingly negative. The score this movie has is clearly equally bogus. Or maybe it's... dun Dun DUN! A conspiracy!

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Firehead (1991)

2/10

What are you waiting for? Detonate!

9 April 2008

I purchased Firehead because I like bad movies and, well it's called Firehead, isn't it? It's terrible. Inexcusably bad. But you probably already guessed that or, heaven forbid, watched it and knew.

It concerns a Russian super-soldier with telekinetic abilities who defects to the US ("I'm going to find a free country") and eventually turns on his American handler as well. Christopher Plummer plays his former boss, Vaughn, who is part of a shadowy secret group that wishes to rule the world. I'd explain more of the plot, but it's a fun combination of dumb and nonsensical, so I won't. It doesn't matter anyway. Suffice to say that Vaughn decides it's a good idea to enlist a chemist to track down a rampaging super-powered defector blowing up factories. But fear not! He has assigned an assassin to tag along and take out this raging Russian. An assassin who frequently gets surprised by people sneaking up on her, sure, but an assassin no less. It goes pretty steadily downhill from there.

The only reason this movie gets even two stars out of me is wholly because of the performances of Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer, who manage to prove they can float on top of sewage. I suspect they owed somebody favors. Big, big favors. They're good enough, in fact, to be part of the problem. They'd raise the bar back up off the ground, and I'd foolishly start expecting good things only to be hit upside the head again with, for instance, a government-trained professional gunman shooting down a very narrow hallway at our protagonists walking side by side and missing. That sort of thing.

Such a vast, uncountable amount of bullets are fired at our two (sometimes three) protagonists that I started to be concerned with the quantities of wasted metal that would go unrecycled when said bullets inevitably missed. This movie features perhaps the worst gunfights I've seen in a movie. If you kinda run and then maybe duck and then sort of look the other way when someone's unloading their clip at you, even if you're completely out in the open, you'll be just fine in the world of Firehead.

If you come to Firehead hoping for a good movie, then seriously, what's wrong with you? It's called Firehead. If you're hoping for a hilarious bad movie, then you're headed in the right direction. It's not one of the best of the worst or anything--there are some slow moments, but it seriously shines in spots. It has awful, awful gunfights. Constantly. It has probably the worst little girl actress I've encountered delivering some inspired lines. In also has an ending so dumb, tangential and inexplicable that I was amazed. And it has enough little unexpected bad moments, one of which involves a squeaky toy, to keep you interested.

2/10 for quality. 6/10 as bad movies go.

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Freedom Deep (1998)

2/10

As Australian post-apocalyptic movies go...

12 August 2007

Warning: Spoilers

...I'd rate this fourth out of the four I can think of. As Australian post-apocalyptic movies featuring Kurt Cobain's ghost go, Freedom Deep is A-number-one!

So I watch bad movies for fun. That's my excuse. After reading the back of the DVD's packaging, which contains the phrase "we see how his talents are nutured (sic) and developed under the guidance of his spiritual mentor - 'Kurt Cobain,'" how could I not buy it? I could not not, that's how. There's another misspelling in the quote above I'd love to reproduce, but IMDb automatically corrects it every time I try.

Freedom Deep takes place mostly in two time periods, between which it alternates: 1998-ish and 2018, with a little bit of "much later" as well. The nineties bit concerns a young boy named Liam, who has trouble at home and trouble with the other children at school. And, come to think of it, trouble with his teacher at school, a fact which is revealed in an inadvertently hilarious scene. The other prominent timeline focuses on an adult Liam (who, it should be noted, looks absolutely nothing like young Liam) who basically wanders around the desert a lot. To spice things up, sometimes he wanders through the snow. At one point, in a radical narrative departure, he manages to wander in a boat.

Not sold on it yet? Just wait. The best part is that no incarnation of our protagonist, not young Liam, adult Liam or even old Liam, speaks a single word. Not because they're mute, but because it's, y'know, artsy. There's some voice-over here and there, but even that's sparse. I believe it was 28 minutes into the movie before *any* main character actually spoke a word to someone else, and that was through a headset to an unknown party. It's all about as enthralling as it sounds.

Freedom Deep is a mess. It's Gordian's Knot, and I have no idea why anybody tied it. So there's this woman. She's a bounty hunter. Or an assassin. Or a government agent or something. I guess it's possible she's from the future of the future. I couldn't tell you. It's 2018, civilization's presumably in crumbles, and for completely unknown reasons she's been tasked with finding Liam wandering out in the desert. Liam's probably wandering the desert to get away from the society that wronged him, except I think that society has been destroyed for close to 20 years at this point. Maybe whatever society sprung up in its place picked on him too. Liam's had it rough. Anyway, she shoots a camel, finds her quarry, has a confusing wireless conversation, burns her headset, rapes Liam at knifepoint (!), they fall in love, and he never says a word. Your typical boy meets girl, really.

All the while, she reads through the pages of a book Liam has written. It's the same book Liam started writing back in the 1998 timeline. One would hope that's a helluva book. And clearly it is, as she decides to spare his life because of it; she's convinced it must reach civilization.

Meanwhile, young Liam runs away from home and manages to find a surrogate family in the form of a gay couple, half of which is a transsexual "mother" and the other half of which really likes heroin. Liam escapes his troubles, as he always has, through his love of plaid shirts, a horrendous hair-do, Kurt Cobain, and lots of music that sounds nothing like Kurt Cobain's. Music rights cost money. Soon he finds another outlet for his pain (pain best represented in voice-over by the heartfelt words "heal my wounds"). Poetry!

The movie states that young Liam's story starts in 1998; we're told no more. Liam endures school and home life, escapes from it, finds an odd replacement family, takes up writing, gets in a series of publications, and becomes well-known enough to get into a meeting with corporate bigwigs who'd like to put his column in their magazine as a regular feature, all by March 12th of 1998, the movie tells us. Even assuming the rest of it started on January 1st, that little dude can move.

I have no idea what to make of this movie. I didn't mention how Kurt Cobain really fits in because, well, he doesn't. Why does anyone care what a pubescent mute thinks, at least enough to publish him? Who is sending someone to catch and possibly kill adult Liam? Why? Who does our almost-assassin talk to on her headset? Why does she burn the thing afterwards? Are there wireless towers or satellites after the nuclear holocaust? What the heck happened with the cliff scene? Why does the word "prophet" keep popping up in reference to this movie? If Liam arrives at what looks like a fully intact city at the end, was it really harmed in the first place? Is he just some nutjob wandering around the desert for years and all the rest is his hallucination? Why did the writer-director think he could get away with three versions of a main character who never utters a word? I'm baffled.

It's not the worst movie I've seen (I've given out a whole lot of one-star ratings), but it's bad. And it might not be the most confusing movie I've seen, but it's at least top five. As bad movie fare goes, it's entertaining and maybe worth a watch, but isn't a must-see crappy flick experience.

In conclusion, let me present a condensed version of what the experience of watching this movie was like:

Me: Wait, what?

Roommate: I dunno.

Me: Rewind it.

(Rewind.) (Watch it again.)

Together: What?

(Repeat.)

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Lorca and the Outlaws (1984)

2/10

A Drinking Game

12 July 2007

I've come up with a drinking game to play while you watch Starship. Here's what you do. Get a bottle of your favorite liquor and a shot glass for everyone who wants to play along. Fill up each shot glass to start off, and then slap Starship in the VCR. The rules are that everyone takes a shot whenever something interesting happens. Suitable for teetotalers. Unused liquor can be deposited back in the bottle utilizing a funnel.

This is the absolute worst kind of movie: a boring one. I watch lots of terrible movies. In the right frame of mind, an onslaught of cheese and surprise 80s dance numbers and mullets can provide a fun evening like nothing else. Battlefield Earth, for instance (and by the same director), is wonderful because it aims for real emotional impact over and over again and achieves not an ounce of it. Starship, on the other hand, might just be aiming to put me to bed early.

Action matters when we care about its outcome. Nothing we give the least little tiny crap about is ever really in jeopardy in Starship, and the one time something terrible happens to a main character it's filmed so poorly we're left for a minute wondering precisely what happened.

This movie's a mess. But not, let me stress, a hilarious mess. It's not an interesting mess. It's not something to get drunk and make fun of. It's not a crappy, crappy, crappy movie; the situation is altogether more dire than that. It's boring.

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The American Way (1986)

1/10

It felt like this movie was trying to kill me with the power of stupid.

21 June 2007

During the past six months or so, I have intentionally sat and watched hordes of terrible movies, in search of the most entertainingly godawful ones I can. I've probably been through about 50 or so. Riding the Bus With My Sister? Seen it. Shatner? Tons. Rock 'N Roll Nightmare? Hell yes. Haim? Feldman? Ferrigno? Medieval Harvey Keitel? All this and more. Perhaps that is the only reason I managed to endure all the way through Riders of the Storm. I've become inured to a certain amount of bad movie pain. But not this much. I'm only human. This is, no hyperbole, one of the absolute dumbest movies I've seen in twenty-six years of movie watching.

My brain has been so thoroughly assaulted by stupidity over the last hour and a half that it can't even collate exactly what happened. A million things are all going on at once, and not a damn one of them makes sense. There's a plane, see? An old bomber flying across the U.S., and on it are seven, sometimes eight men, all but one of which have apparently not touched the ground in fifteen years. They're outlaws with no support system. At all, near as I can tell. Perhaps their plane is powered by wishes and daydreams, because they certainly have no way of getting fuel. They fly around the country using the sparse equipment on board to basically create a television program, S&M TV, and then interrupt legitimate broadcasts with their pirate signal. The things they broadcast are not professional or smart or funny or pertinent or, really, interesting in any way, and after fifteen years of it they have a nation of fans. Naturally. Did I mention one of the guys has a jet pack and that another one of them performs in-flight engine repairs without a safety harness? There's a third whose only job on board appears to be to do tai chi and sweat. You'll never once see the pilot out of his seat. Well, he's only been flying for fifteen years; another two or three and he'll take a nap. They have no way of getting a steady stream of food, but don't worry: the jetpacker (oh God) sometimes brings candy bars and whatnot stuffed in his jacket. This movie thinks you are dumb, dumb, dumb.

Our heroes are trying to discredit Mrs. Westinghouse, a female presidential candidate. They're disgruntled Vietnam veterans and she's looking to beef up the military and, they're guessing, go to war again. She's utterly without charisma, couldn't deliver a rousing speech if her life depended on it, doesn't come off as intelligent, and looks kind of like someone's homely grandma. Clearly, she must be stopped at any cost. Furthermore, she's labeled at one point as "mysterious," and the only way the character makes even a little sense is if she basically popped up out of nowhere recently--had no past *at all*--and somehow quickly became some party's primary candidate. I'll refrain from giving away what even the back of the VHS box can't help but give away, but Westinghouse's big secret is just another fragrant turd of stupid the movie lays down. It'll be obvious from the word go anyway.

Whenever I thought I could give up for a bit and mentally move past one lump of potent idiocy like a speed bump just so I could follow the movie, along came two more. At one point I literally sat staring slack-jawed at the screen for probably ten minutes because I just couldn't deal with it. The movie tries to take swipes at religion, politics, country music, the military, aerobics workout videos, etc., etc., but it's all so amateurish and painfully unfunny that it seems about on the level of a really bad public access show with a mysteriously large budget. It plays about like an eleven year old wrote a script and, through a series of farcical errors, it got produced and turned into a real movie with real money behind it.

It's got plenty of garish 80s style behind it--the fact that the director worked on music videos came as no surprise, nor did the fact that this was his first movie--but its substance is practically nil. The movie has no idea that's the case, however. It seems at times to believe that it's a satire, but it's way too dim to be capable of meeting any satirical ambitions. On a second viewing it might be laughable, but there's so much to deal with that the first time around was just a painful exercise in masochism. I'm not sure I'd even recommend it as an entertainingly bad movie. Useful as a trial of sorts, a challenge for you and your friends to get through, perhaps.

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