I’m in the exclusive club of people who really liked Hensleigh’s PUNISHER movie, and I’ve also been a believer in Ray Stevenson since I saw his PUNISHER movie, so I was excited for this one. Happy to say it speaks well for both. Some of the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes describe Stevenson as “charm-free” or “as much charisma as a potato,” but I strongly disagree, I think his performance as a cold but intelligent lug is what makes the movie. Maybe those guys are just intimidated because for once it’s a man’s man playing a role like this. Instead of having to work out and toughen up to seem convincing they just had to give him bad hair. I think he’s actually bigger and more menacing than the actual guy – how often do you have that problem in a movie?

Anyway it’s a good character, not a good man but a funny one. He starts out well meaning. He’s a longshoreman and the union boss treats his guys like shit. His friend collapses on the job from exhaustion and all they’ll do is toss him in a trough of dirty ice water and tell everybody else to get back to work. When the same friend gets into trouble with some gambling debts Danny works out a deal with the mob that gets his friend out of debt and screws over the union at the same time. Next thing you know he’s muscling his way in to the guy’s job.

But he’s crooked as hell and doesn’t seem to have any illusions about it. He just tries to cash in. This is the beginning of a long and winding career with various rackets. He gets busted, he becomes an informer, he still works as a mob enforcer, he starts trying to open up a restaurant. In the process he crosses alot of dangerous people, and they keep trying to shoot him or blow him up, which gets to be a pain in the ass.

At one point D’Onofrio observes “You must have the biggest nuts in Cleveland,” and this does seem to be true. He’s tough and he’s fearless. He likes to give people countdowns. When he decides it’s time for the previous union president to vacate he just waits in the guy’s office, tells him “I’ll give you three seconds to do it,” slaps him, and steals his gun. This is not a sissy he’s doing it to either, this is a bully who previously told him “I’ll come to your house and drink all your beer” (and then something about fucking his wife.)

He’s not afraid of anybody. When a huge biker party across the street is noise-polluting his barbecue he walks over, turns off their music and says “Party’s over. You got five minutes to clear out.” And then guns and fists get involved. But he’s not just a thug, he’s also well read and has alot of interests, including healthy eating. At that same barbecue he criticizes the menu: “No vegetables, no fruit, no nuts. Stuff’s got too much cholesterol.” (His buddies don’t know what that is.)

Kilmer’s role isn’t that big, and it’s kind of cool because he’s a cop that knew him from the neighborhood, but he’s not the guy that’s always trying to bust him. He gives it a shot but isn’t like the arch-nemesis or anything. Actually he kind of likes Danny, and at one point they coach softball together.

Along with Kilmer the cast includes Vincent D’Onofrio (as a squeaky voiced mob boss), Mike Starr, Christopher Walken, Paul Sorvino, Robert Davi, Tony Lo Bianco and Vinnie Jones. I’m sure Dennis Hopper would be in it if he was alive. I was thinking that was everybody who would be in a movie like this but then I realized there was no Michael Madsen. But otherwise it’s all of ‘em.

All of those guys are in about ten thousand movies a year and most of them are garbage, but here they’re all used pretty well. For example Vinnie Jones is just a quiet, professional thug that helps Danny muscle all the garbage haulers into unionizing. He doesn’t talk a whole bunch, just looks very intense and wears a hat. It’s a good role for him.

Also it has Jeff Chase, this 6′ 7″ guy who was also in the remake of THE MECHANIC. Since this is a period piece he wears glasses that make him look like Super Drew Carey.

The men in this movie have a simple idea of the American dream. You got a wife, some kids, a car, a house, a business. Danny gets the wife (Linda Cardellini), the kids, the car (a green Cadillac) and, you know, various businesses. When he meets another guy that leads the trash haulers they admire each other, they compliment each other’s vehicles and businesses, they show off their houses and their kids. That’s what makes a man.

But it all gets taken away. His wife leaves him, takes the kids. His house gets blown up, so he has to live above a bar and work out of a trailer. His cars keep getting blown up. I mean, he can get other ones, but it’s dangerous. 36 bombs exploded in Cleveland in the summer of ‘75. Some of them were his, but you know, the other ones could’ve got him.

Poor guy can’t even hold on to a radio. One of his car radios starts freaking out, that’s how he knows it’s gonna blow. Then he’s in the park working out, somebody shoots his portable radio. On one hand he’s gotta be thankful, because the radios keep warning him of danger. On the other hand a man’s gotta relax and listen to some tunes now and again, he doesn’t want the radio to get destroyed every time.

Once you’ve lost your wife, kids, house, car and radio you just got your national pride, so he starts busting out the Irish flag. Alot of these mafia guys stick with guys from their own background, so they end up shit talking each other. Danny loves to throw a good ethnic joke at an Italian or a Pollock. In his union days a Scottish guy calls him a potato eater, so he makes a little speech about the history of potatoes and then says at least he doesn’t “eat fat out of a sheep’s asshole.” In those days he wore a green suit and all the carpet and everything in his office was green.

Even after everything’s gone to shit he tries to stick to his routine, put on his Adidas track suit, go to the park, do some jogging and pushups. More than once there are assassination attempts during his workout, but he keeps coming back. Think about that if you’re having trouble getting motivated to go for a run or whatever. Danny Greene kept in shape even though it opened him up to snipers.

I do think at the end Hensleigh is a little too in love with the legend of Danny Greene. For the most part it’s a generous but not worshipful portrayal of a criminal. But in the fateful minutes before he (SPOILER) gets blown up (in my opinion there is a factual error in the tagline “the man the mob couldn’t kill”) he has a group of little boys on bicyles recognizing him and talking to him like he’s Gene Simmons or Evel Knievel. Then for no clear reason he passes on his Celtic Warrior crucifix necklace to one of the kids. That’s going a little overboard in my opinion.

Then Kilmer’s character narrates that “his murder directly led to the indictment of 27 mafia associates” and “the collapse of Cleveland organized crime.” That’s because they caught the guy who blew him up and this led to other people who led to other people and the whole Tyler Perry’s House of Payne came crashing down. Seems to me like an interesting historical detail but not something you can give the guy credit for. He was dead. It’s not like it was his plan to get blown up by a guy that would flip on another guy that would flip on another guy.

One of the extras is an hour long basic cable style special about the real Danny Greene. In the movie they have him see the guy who’s about to blow him up and point at him, finger-gun style. Turns out this is because in real life they found one of his severed arms with the index finger pointing. And one of the cops (the Val Kilmer character I guess) said he was pointing at the guy who did it saying “I’m gonna get you all for this.” And he did. Not on purpose though, is my guess. Like I said, he was dead at the time.

One weird note, I noticed on the credits that Tara Reid is an executive producer. What the hell? Turns out her brother Tommy is a producer who bought the rights to the book and directed that documentary on the extras, so he must’ve figured getting her involved would help too. You always want some of that AMERICAN PIE cast member clout on a movie like this.

I also noticed Richard Jewell’s name on there, but it turns out it’s an actor and not that security guard that found the bomb at the Olympics, saved a bunch of people’s lives but then got blamed and humiliated by the media even though he was innocent. I forgot that guy died. Poor bastard.

Anyway I really dug this movie. If the trailer or poster made you think “Guy Ritchie,” don’t worry about it, it’s not like that. If you like Ray Stevenson, and especially if you want to see him with a mustache, I recommend this picture. He has some different mustaches throughout. You will like it.

What exactly is THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS? It’s not a sequel, not exactly a remake to BAD LIEUTENANT. Werner Herzog, who directed this new one, claims he hasn’t seen BAD LIEUTENANT. Ferrara claimed he was gonna stop this one from being made. (In my opinion he failed.) This isn’t about the same character and I didn’t notice any mention of the original screenplay in the credits. But it does have a little bit of a BAD LIEUTENANT vibe, and that’s all I can ask.

Actually I hope you guys haven’t seen any of these, but there are some DTV sequels to WILD THINGS and CRUEL INTENTIONS and THE SKULLS that aren’t exactly sequels, they basically just do a similar plot to the original, rehash some of the famous scenes, but with different characters. At first TBL:POCNO seems like they only took the idea of a corrupt, crack smoking cop trying to solve a case and used the title. But then he also starts getting into debt from betting on sports, same as in the original, and there’s even a scene that’s the (tamer) equivalent to the infamous scene where Harvey Keitel pulls over the two teenage girls and has them make faces and show him their asses while he jerks off and talks dirty to them. People are talking this BAD LIEUTENANT up for being weird, but that’s just for a movie starring Nicolas Cage, it’s really not as extreme as the original. It’s a funnier and more mainstream-palatable take on the crack smoking, gambling, cheating, murdering, lovable bastard cop genre.

Before we move on I want to say a few things about the title. I believe PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS can and will be the new funny subtitle to add to everything, finally replacing the tired “ELECTRIC BOOGALOO.” I had been trying to get people to switch to “FAREWELL TO THE FLESH” as an all-purpose fake sequel subtitle, but that’s never gonna catch on. So look how well POCNO works for any movie title:

COMMANDO: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
AVATAR: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
KING OF NEW YORK: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
BAD SANTA: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
A CHRISTMAS CAROL: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS
GARFIELD: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

I also think it’s interesting to note that the title screen calls it THE BAD LIEUTENANT. There’s a THE in it. I think we finally found the missing THE from THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. Part 4 of that series was just FAST AND FURIOUS, because the first THE went to THE FINAL DESTINATION and the second one to THE BAD LIEUTENANT.

Herzog’s THE BAD LIEUTENANT PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS dumps the Catholic themes of Ferrara’s, so unfortunately Nic Cage never hallucinates Jesus and calls him a rat fucker. Instead of a nun getting raped it’s a Senagalese family getting massacred. He gets high about the same amount as Keitel, but never waddles around naked or does that weird Chewbacca cry. Instead he summons his super power, which I usually consider an enjoyable type of overacting, but I read that Nic Cage didn’t like being called “over-the-top” in this movie. So instead I will call it mega-acting. He’s not just firing off on all cylinders all the way through though, he’s like a mess of a guy barely holding it together and then a few times when he smokes crack he goes into the Castor Troy/howditgetburned mega-acting mode. It’s like Popeye eating spinach or Pac-Man eating one of those bigger dots that means for a short period of time he has the power to digest the souls of the dead, except for their eyes.

One thing that’s great about Cage playing this role is that you kind of feel like you’re supposed to root for him. There’s one scene, not a real important one or anything, where he flips out on a pharmacist because she’s taking a personal call and he’s been waiting forever for his prescription. It’s kind of a FALLING DOWN type situation, everybody hates poor service and phone etiquette, so you get a satisfied laugh from this nut getting so fed up that he pulls out his gun and jumps behind the counter to get his Vicodin, leaves his co-pay plus tip and tells the security guard “Get the fuck out of my way!” before leaving triumphantly. Ha ha, wish fulfillment, right? We can all relate to wanting to do something like that, or some of these other things he does, like when he takes crack hits out of a teenage girl’s mouth and forces her boyfriend to watch at gunpoint while he fucks her in the parking lot.

(After that scene a guy in my audience said matter of factly, “He’s out of control.”)

That’s just the beginning of the joyfully unhinged mayhem that happen in this movie. I would have fun listing all of them, but I’m not gonna because I think most of you should just take my word for it and see for yourself. That guy in the theater who might’ve expected a normal Nic Cage movie like NATIONAL TREASURE was right, things are out of control and it’s fun to not know where the line will be drawn. But I want to be clear that it’s not just a bunch of random weirdness. It has a definite plot and structure to it. I like the original BAD LIEUTENANT but I gotta admit it’s a chore to get through, and it took me two times to enjoy it. This is different. This one’s a fun time at the movies.

To me it works brilliantly as a subversion of cop movies. Since DIRTY HARRY and WALKING TALL we’ve seen approximately three hundred and six thousand four hundred and thirty two movies where a cop goes over the line and breaks the rules in order to bust the bad guys. Here is a guy who does that while also stealing drugs from his hooker girlfriend’s clients, threatening old ladies and babies, etc. In fact, he’s so functional while high that he comes up with a master plan to play everybody against each other, and at one point it works so well that even he seems shocked.

Cage himself seems to be enacting some master plan to fuck with our minds, because this is not the first time he’s tried this crazy formula. It’s Nic Cage and Millennium Films (whose movies are mostly DTV, including many with Seagal, Van Damme and Snipes) taking the title of an arty cult movie and giving it to a somewhat respected auteur who you wouldn’t expect to do a movie like this to do a supposed remake that has very little to do with the original. And the funny thing is everybody made fun of him about THE WICKER MAN but he didn’t give a good god damn, he felt confident in using the formula again. What if he was getting at something there that nobody picked up on? I did feel like there were some things going on in that script that people didn’t give it credit for, but it wasn’t as good as this. I’m gonna have to revisit that one. Anyway if he wants to make it a trilogy maybe he could let Abel Ferrara get revenge and remake AGUIRRE or something.

I read in a recent Entertainment Weekly article that Nicolas Cage outbid Leonardo Dicaprio for a dinosaur skull. I wonder what you do with a dinosaur skull? Just mount it on the wall? Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there.

There are many good character actors showing up for little parts, including a sleazy Val Kilmer, a  really memorable Shea Whigham, Xzibit in a really nice suit, Jennifer Coolidge (who I didn’t recognize playing a serious role), and a tight-bodied Fairuza Balk in her underwear making sexual advances at the lieutenant and he has a big bulge in his pants but he’s too high to be interested. The biggest surprise for me was Eva Mendes is actually pretty good as his junkie hooker girlfriend. I always wonder how she even gets in movies, but here she’s not bad. And I thought it was really funny to have the same couple from the inexcusably terrible GHOST RIDER reteaming for something like this.

I love THE BAD LIEUTENANT PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, and it gives me a new respect for Nicolas Cage. It takes alot to make up for GHOST RIDER, NATIONAL TREASURE and all that shit, but this and KNOWING might do it. I know there are some gossipy stories now about Cage being in debt, but I hope that won’t stop him from aiming his mega-acting powers in the direction of more enjoyably one-of-a-kind movies like this. And I hope he doesn’t have to sell the dinosaur skull to DiCaprio, because he’s earned it.

* * *

If you haven’t seen the movie yet consider that the end of the review, because I want to discuss THE ENDING: PORT OF CALL SPOILERS

This is for my buddy code name Mr. Armageddon who didn’t hate the movie but said it didn’t have a point or meaning. I disagree. For the most part it’s just a cracking crime tale, full of dark humor, inappropriate behavior and occasional spots of violence. Somehow you want this asshole to stumble out the other side alive, but he keeps getting himself in deeper trouble with a wide variety of enemies.

That would be enough for me to enjoy it, but the way it’s bookended with the flooded jail cell opening and the aquarium ending turns it into something of a zen koan. It’s hard to believe all of his addiction happened after the opening, but I think that’s what you’re supposed to assume – he started using Vicodin because of the back injury and it just got out of control from there.

Well, he’s in this sea of corruption, he’s encouraged and tempted to let the prisoner die. But he saves his life instead. A selfless act that ruins his expensive underwear (and pants and shirt I’m assuming, although this is not mentioned). Because of that act he gets the injury, and the addiction, and turns into a bad lieutenant. In the end he somehow manages to pass himself off as a hero and becomes a bad captain and a family man, but he can’t stop being a junkie.

But in the end we learn that what he did really made a difference, because the man he saved did turn his life around. And he wants to return the favor. He sees that the captain is at rock bottom and he seems to basically become his sponsor, be there for him and talk to him. And this should be a redemptive moment for the captain. He was rewarded greatly for all the horrible things he did, and I think that weighs heavily on him. Now finally the one good thing he did a long time ago has come back to him. He actually deserves this help. He really can be a force for good, for positive change in the world.

And he sits there and thinks about it but he comes to the conclusion that he regrets doing it, because it ruined his underwear.

(or that’s what he says anyway. It’s up to you whether he’s serious or not. And I don’t think his new friend knows what to make of it either)

[ratings]

Fortunately this one lives up to the word-of-the-mouth. This summer everybody’s excited about Robert Downey Jr.’s funny turn and ad-libs in IRON MAN, but it must’ve been less surprising to people who saw this one. Not only is Downey the star, he is the narrator who possesses the powers of someone recording a DVD commentary. He can skip around, make jokes, apologize for bad narration, complain about movie conventions (specifically comparing one scene to a shot in THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER).

Yes, the movie is covered in meta. You got that all powerful narration, you also got a character obsessed with an old pulp detective series called Johnnie Gossamer, so the mystery elements of the story of course mirrors the types of things that would have happened in those books if they were real books. But also a movie adaptation of the books figures heavily into the plot. All of this could easily be annoying, but I guess Downey and Black are just good enough at it for it to come across more as genuine wit than as smarmy hipsters trying to show off.

But I guess to be fair they are showing off. The movie is extremely writerly. If you’re familiar with Shane Black you know the conversations are gonna go at lightning speed and all the characters are gonna have insults and smartass responses that you yourself would never come up with until a week later. Val Kilmer gets to call Robert Downey Jr. an idiot in many different ways. Like:

“Jesus. Look up ‘idiot’ in the dictionary. You know what you’ll find?”
“A picture of me?”
“No! The definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!”

Stylized dialogue like that can be distracting, but here I don’t think it is. They pull it off and it’s a big part of the movie’s appeal.

The story unfolds in that seemingly random way that alot of my favorite pulp writers’ stories do. Lots of goofy little things happen in just the right sequence that happens to bring together a bunch of characters and a bunch of guns. At first Downey’s character seems to be a bigshot actor, but then we find out he’s just some dude who was running from the cops and happened to run into a casting session. His actual guilt over getting his friend shot by police is mistaken for a raw improvised performance and next thing you know he’s poolside at a big Hollywood party. The female lead Michelle Monaghan (the gal from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: 3 who looks kind of like Liv Tyler) is at the party for similarly random reasons involving the accidental shooting of a drunk TV star dressed as a cyborg. In this movie things don’t happen for normal reasons.

I like the way the story pays tribute to noir but doesn’t follow it as stringently as you keep naively thinking it’s going to. There are alot of good laughs that come from seeming to use a normal movie convention and then actually not. For example the heroine stumbles onto the clue that solves the whole mystery, so the heroes go chasing after her knowing she’s getting herself into danger. But later they learn that she is actually at home because she decided her theory was stupid and forgot about it.

In a way I think maybe Black’s hiatus helped rejuvenate him. It put him back in the just-don’t-give-a-fuck mentality of a guy in his early 20s who doesn’t know what he’s doing. For me the biggest laugh in the movie involves a bodily mutilation that really has no important purpose in the story but just is something that could easily happen if people are slamming doors during emotional conversations. He must’ve been watching some movie with a door slamming argument and thought “You know what I’m gonna do in my next movie?” Either or that or he was writing the argument, jokingly thought of doing this, and then realized “Why the fuck not?” The motto of every great writer, from Mark Twain to the guy who did Choose Your Own Adventure.

Black definitely cuts it as a director. The performances are all good, it looks nice and slick, it’s well-paced, nice uses of music, the bits of action work well. I definitely wouldn’t guess this was a writer-turned-first-time-director deal. So Black and Downey both came through when it counted, but I also gotta take my metaphorical hat off to Val Kilmer as the toughest character in the movie, “Gay” Perry. He’s a private investigator working for the producer of the movie. He’s supposed to help Downey prepare for his role but ends up being his partner and savior when he gets into trouble. Perry also happens to be openly gay and is too self-assured and capable for anybody to successfully give him shit about it.

In some movies Kilmer doesn’t come across too well – he can seem like kind of a weirdo who thinks he’s smarter and more interesting than he actually is. Not this one though. In this one he’s alot like his character in SPARTAN. Not as much of an asshole, but it’s another guy who always knows what to do at the drop of a hat (another metaphorical hat, but not necessarily the same one I tipped in the last paragraph), can always figure out what people are trying to pull on him and knows how to fight his way out even if it involves firing a small gun from inside his underwear (long story).

I would love to see sequels to this. Not because there’s anything about the plot that should be followed up on, but just because I would like to see those two characters come back and get involved in other cases. Well, that ain’t gonna happen, so I’ll settle for Black sticking around for a while as writer-director.

[ratings]

The movie feels much less Hollywood and more realistic than any other of its type, but at the same time you have to accept some pretty crazy shit. I’ll just say it: “the girl,” as the agents all call her, is mad at her dad so she whores herself out at a brothel one night and then, coincidentally it seems like, she gets shipped off to a white slavery ring in Dubai. I say coincidentally because they don’t know she’s anybody’s daughter. They just like her because she’s blond.

So that’s pretty far-fetched, in my opinion. But just go with it.

What’s great about the movie is the way Kilmer executes his job. You never are really told what he’s gonna do. He has these daring plans and then if something goes wrong he has to quickly come up with a plan B, C and C.5. For example, he maps out a complex operation with a recruited team of mercenaries who are going to raid the place where he believes the girl is. But scoping out the place the night before it’s gonna go down he looks up at the stars and realizes that the north-south on his map is reversed. That means the sun will not be in the eyes of a driver they have to ambush. So he says “fuck it” and storms the place right then and there.

People always say that Mamet is a writer but not a director. I disagree because I see some serious directing going on here, some serious visual storytelling. I love the scene through the POV of a sniper’s scope. The way it’s paced, the way Mamet visually establishes everything you need to know in the scene but still doesn’t make it obvious how he’s gonna fake out the sniper. It’s like the camera itself is trying to kill Kilmer and it can’t do it. He beats the camera.

Mamet of course is known for his fuckin dialogue, and there’s some of that here, but it’s mostly pretty quiet. The music is really quiet too, which I think is a big part of the movie’s unusual feel. I think with the same story and even cast this could’ve been a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, a better one from around the CRIMSON TIDE era. But Mamet’s approach isn’t Tony Scott, it’s low budget art movie. So it really stands out.

One thing that keeps it Mamet is that Kilmer never turns out to have a heart of gold. When he rescues the girl he doesn’t reassure her, he tells her “Shut the fuck up!” Later she complains so he punches her in the stomach. I’m pretty sure Will Smith wouldn’t do that. When he tells her encouraging lies it is clearly not out of empathy, it’s a calculated psychological trick to help with his mission. The mission is everything with this guy. He has a young partner you expect him to bond with. But when something bad happenes he doesn’t get broken up about it. Like in many movies he holds onto his partner’s meaningful-family-heirloom for him. Unlike many movies he uses that heirloom to roll a cigarette.

There are two exceptions to the character’s cold-bloodedness, and although he would never admit it it seems like he ultimately ends up doing what he does for an emotional reason. But it’s kind of like BAD SANTA. The fact that he’s so much more of a pure cutthroat than most movie heroes makes it more meaningful when he does that. At best he has a heart of bronze.

This is a really good and unique movie. Or so I thought, but then I went onto IMDb and read that it is a terrible movie that makes no sense and the acting is horrible and the dialogue is so bad you could drive a truck with it or whatever. So you should all be ashamed of yourselves if you were involved in voting it onto the Badass 100, because those type of accolades are what got me to finally see it, and no doubt others will follow and also believe this is a good movie. Thanks alot guys, you embarrassed me in front of the IMDb message boards.

[ratings]

Well this is not that good but it is another dumb movie by the same director. I think maybe the pressure of doing a sequel to DIE HARD was too much for Renny Harlin to take, it damaged his brain and he’s been mushy ever since. MINDHUNTERS isn’t as good as DEEP BLUE SEA but it’s worthwhile if you’re into that type of stupid shit, like I am. It has Val Kilmer, Christian Slater and of course DEEP BLUE SEA’s LL Cool J in the cast but it sat on the shelf for a couple years. It actually came out on DVD in Russia a long time before it came out in american theaters. So maybe the Russians could tell me what to call this genre.

Here’s the premise: a group of hotshot students trying to become FBI profilers must face their final test – they are sent to a remote island to track a fictional serial killer. But then somebody starts killing them for real one by one in elaborate show offy ways.

Even the very premise of this movie makes no god damn sense. How could anybody learn anything about profiling from a hypothetical killer? All that means is the teacher (Val Kilmer, ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU) made up a story and the students guessed it right. Maybe it would have some value if he could base it on a real killer, but then if these were really the top students they would probaly know about all the famous cases, wouldn’t they?

Then even if there was some value to it, how exactly would they have done this exercise on the island if they hadn’t been rudely interupted by a real killer? The island has a fake town of empty buildings filled with mannequins covered in worms and maggots. What are they supposed to do, interview the mannequins to see if they saw any suspicious mannequins in the area? Narrow it down to a few suspects and then interview their neighbor and relative mannequins? Maybe they could do an autopsy of the dead mannequin they find hanging up on hooks. This guy thinks he’s Jack the Ripper. The victim’s internal organs have all been removed, she’s completely hollowed out. Either that or because it’s a mannequin it already was hollow. I’m not sure.

Of course the teacher, Val Kilmer, is an eccentric genius or something. Alot of the old guard there don’t believe in his methods. Alot of them think he’s crazy. The reason we know this is because of the part at the beginning where he says, “Alot of the old guard here don’t believe in my methods. Alot of them think I’m crazy.” I’m guessing somebody read the script and pointed out that the method of testing made no god damn sense so they went back and added that line. Just like the part where they point out that “foreign nationals” aren’t allowed in the FBI, so Val Kilmer has to half explain that the british guy is “American on the inside.” It would be too hard to rewrite it so he’s an american, so they just threw that line in there and started filming. No time for rewrites, the Russian video market awaits!

You already know you’re in for some serious stupid bullshit in the opening scene when the two leads, some lady and Christian Slater, are doing an investigation and they stumble across the home of a serial killer. Movies like to fetishize serial killers and give them these stupid gimmicks and forced atmosphere that makes it all real hard to swallow. This particular killer lays it on extra thick. Inside the house you got:

1. maybe a dozen rotted, dead animals hanging from the ceiling on strings attracting flies
2. a ballerina music box playing a lullaby
3. a birthday cake with a slice cut out and lit candles!

Number three was the winner for me, I was ready to love the movie at this point. I think maybe it was some kind of reference to the slasher movie HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, but more likely just some random shit that makes no sense. What definitely makes no sense is that all this was not even real, it was an exercise set up by Val Kilmer. No wonder the old guard don’t like him if he’s going around hanging dead cats on strings and shit. I mean what exactly possessed him to whip up a birthday cake for this one? What convinced him that was the crowning touch needed for his students? As soon as their car pulled up did he run and light the candles and if so, did he then run away giggling?

Probaly the biggest laugh in the movie comes early on, when Christian Slater becomes the first guy to bite it. He is the victim of a trail of dominos that sets off a contraption like the one Pee Wee Herman used to make his breakfast. I recently saw FINAL DESTINATION 2, so this is the second movie I’ve seen in a row where it seems like the heroes are being haunted by the ghost of Rube Goldberg. Anyway, Christian Slater gets sprayed by some kind of liquid nitrogen and in about 5 seconds his legs turn to solid ice and break off. He falls apart and shatters on the ground. I rewound it twice.

The movie could definitely be improved by more ridiculous shit like that, but there’s a good amount to go around. LL kicks holes in the walls and climbs around to avoid a water/electricity booby trap. Val Kilmer gets hung up by hooks HELLRAISER style, and then controlled like a marionette. At the end there’s a gunfight underwater. At one point it seems like they ran out of good deaths so they just have a bunch of spears fly out of who knows where and impale a guy.

LL gets both the best bad line and the best good line, and I’m gonna tell you both of them.

1. “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe. Who’s the next motherfucker to go?”
2. “I guess we found out his weakness. Bullets.”

It’s a good thing nobody gives a shit about the ending to MINDHUNTERS, because I’m about to give some of it away. LL gives more support to my theory that rappers cannot be killed in horror movies or thrillers (the one exception being Redman in SEED OF CHUCKY). In DEEP BLUE SEA, LL seemed destined to be the first guy to go, and yet he ended up escaping the sharks about five times more than any white person in the movie, and making it to the end. In HALLOWEEN H20 he was shot and appeared to be dead but showed up alive to save the day at the end. In HALLOWEEN RESURRECTION, LL’s fellow rapper-actor Busta Rhymes is stabbed and appears to be dead but shows up alive to save the day in the end. And in MINDHUNTERS, LL is hit on the head with a fire extinguisher and appears to be dead but shows up alive to save the day at the end. Don’t call it a comeback. The new ground that’s broken here is there’s a climactic scene where the audience is supposed to think LL is the killer. I feel that it is cheating though because the way they convince the audience is by having LL chase after the main woman and say menacing things to her, acting evil. When he turns out not to be evil, he never explains why he was being such a weirdo earlier, and nobody asks.

This is not a prime example of the enjoyable stupid bullshit genre, it’s only a decent one. But we could have another one on the level of DEEP BLUE SEA coming our way before we know it. Renny Harlin is currently planning a movie about werewolves on the moon.

[ratings]

Then out of the blue I got an anonymous tip, telling me Vern, there was a movie in the mid-’90s which attempted this same thing. You got the rubber makeup and you got the sci-fi nonsense. It’s even a remake of an old movie based on a classic book, just like the apes picture. The one catch is that everyone in the world claims this movie is a worthless piece of utter garbage. but you should still watch it, Vern.

Well all I gotta say is that the world is wrong. Dr. Moreau’s Island is one of the greatest genre type pictures I have seen in my post-incerceration catchup period. And I’m gonna explain why. And you’re gonna sit here and you’re gonna keep your yap shut and you’re gonna just listen.

This is a picture that opens with a knife fight on an inflatable raft.

I repeat. THIS IS A PICTURE THAT OPENS WITH A KNIFE FIGHT ON AN INFLATABLE RAFT. Two minutes into the picture, a guy has been eaten by a shark and David Thewlis has beat another guy’s face in with a plastic oar. And then we find out that he is the last survivor of a “U.N. Peace Keeping Mission.”

Admittedly the narration in this scene is a little heavy handed. We didn’t need it pointed out that these men were “behaving like beasts.” But just bear with us here.

Next thing you know Mr. Thewlis is rescued by Val Kilmer and brought to an island where maybe this “U.N.” organization whoever they are can go pick him up. Val picks up a wild bunny rabbit and shows it to Mr. Thewlis. Thewlis thinks it’s so cute he gives it a little kiss, and then Val breaks its neck and says it’s for dinner.

(This one act leads to the downfall of the island when mutant animal people start killing the bunnies and then the humans. I’m not sure if this is a vegetarian statement or just a statement against rabbit meat, but either way it is a subversive message I’ve never seen in an expensive studio picture before.)

You see, Mr. Thewlis walks in on a lab full of weird mutant animals. He sees a disgusting cat lady with six titties giving birth to a cat eyed baby. Turns out Marlon Brando is an eccentric nobel prize winning scientist who lives on this island and injects human dna into animals to turn them into weird mutant animal people. He implants them with stun gun type devices that he can activate in order to keep them in line, and he drives around in a popemobile with his face painted white like Michael Jackson and makes glorious speeches to the beast people.

After this whole spectacle Marlon feels kind of bad so he tries to smooth things over with Thewlis by inviting him to dinner with his “children,” who dress in suits and bowties but look like that werewolf kid you see on the cover of documentaries about sideshow freaks. And then he makes Mr. Thewlis shake hands with Majai, a wrinkly two foot tall man who wears the same clothes as Marlon and later does a piano duet with him.

DAVID THEWLIS: This is the most outrageous spectacle I have EVER witnessed. LOOK at yourself!

MOREAU: I understand that I must be… shocking to you. However, I must also point out that I have an allergy to the sun and that’s why I put this medication on.

Mr. Brando is the best thing about this picture. He is absolutely perfect playing a friendly, but completely out of his fucking mind, mad scientist fucko. He plays the role very realistically, acting the way he or Michael Jackson or Ol’ Dirty Bastard would probaly act if they were mad scientists.

In the middle of his big speech about how he is trying to perfect the genetics of the human race, Dr. Moreau turns to little Majai and says “No, please don’t do that!” because he has his little bumpy feet on the table.

In one of the other best scenes of this movie the beast people break into the house, obviously to kill him. He offers them a biscuit and then starts playing piano, telling them about Schoenberg and Gershwin.

Well lets just say that unfortunately Dr. Moreau is not in the second half of the movie. Then we get more into the world of these beast people who are done by that stan winston guy from the jurassic park. They are half tiger and half warthog and what not and the makeup is very impressive. And like in the new apes movie the actors walk and move in very animal like ways. Then there is alot of fighting, etc. as the animals act more and more like fucking humans and their whole world goes immediately down the shitter.

I could not tell you why this movie is so underrated. This is in no way Badass Cinema but mr. brando’s performance is infused with the outlaw spirit that outlaw awards are made of. And it is a movie that actually has some things to say about the way our world is going. Of course there is the obvious technology theme. You don’t need this movie to tell you that scientists are growing human ears on the backs of mice and restaraunts serve a new combination of asparagus and brocolli. And the narration is a little too obvious pointing out that the people of the real world are more animal-like than the beast people in the movie.

But then there is the whole idea of Dr. Moreau and Val Kilmer creating laws, and enforcing them, but hypocritically breaking them (by killing the bunny) and how this affects the once law abiding beast people. Even without the hypocrisy it makes you uncomfortable to watch these freakos lord over the animal people, and it makes you look at the way the freakos of the real world lord over both animals and peoples.

And then if you want to get even deeper this brings up religious questions. The beast people are created by Moreau, they call him the Father and he calls them their children, but they wonder why he causes them pain. And if there is no pain, is there no law? Should they still follow these codes when they have nothing to lose?

Yes, Dr. Moreau’s Island is one of the great misunderstood movies of the ’90s and I would like to thank both director John Frankehnheimer and fired original director Richard Stanley for making it. Some day, when my influence is greater, people will come to understand your work. Then you can stop making all this “reindeer games” garbage and make more REAL pictures with Mr. brando. thanks boys.

[ratings]