So You Won't Have To: Sin City - A Dame to Kill For

 So far this year, the Cap'n hasn't had to write a "So You Won't Have To" review, which is honestly preferable on my end. Don't get me wrong: I don't mind biting the bullet for you folks every now and then, but any year I can go nine months into without seeing a movie bad enough to merit a SYWHT is a good year. Also, I've been trying to avoid those unless it's bundled into a Bad Movie Night or a Summer Fest. It's better for everybody, it seems.

 But once and awhile my curiosity gets the better of me, or opportunity permits me to watch something I had decided probably wasn't a good idea to see, and as a result I'm going to satisfy your morbid curiosity about former filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. At this point I can't even call him a director, because if what he's doing in Machete Kills and Sin City: A Dame to Kill for qualifies as "directing," then I need to rethink my stance on the quality of Asylum productions. I really don't know what happened to this guy, because the Cap'n was a fan of Rodriguez deep into his career. I'll still defend El Mariachi, Desperado, The Faculty, From Dusk Till Dawn, and the first two Spy Kids movies. I think Spy Kids 3-D and Once Upon a Time in Mexico have problems, but I still enjoy them. Planet Terror and Machete are a heaping help of down and dirty fun.

 Somewhere along the line he got too comfortable with the freedom of shooting digitally, and the ease with which he can put together a movie is working against him. Rodriguez's films are starting to look cheaper, sloppier, and his "freedoms" have become his weaknesses. Sin City had a lot of these problems, but because Rodriguez was working so hard to replicate the iconic imagery of Frank Miller's comics (with Miller along to co-direct) that you could maybe forgive a shoddy looking CGI shot. Well, for an hour at least - Sin City was too long, the stories to condensed, and the movie too faithful to the source material to really be interesting. I haven't been that disinterested in an adaptation since Watchmen, and the individual, uncut stories only work a little better.

 For 9 years, Rodriguez and Miller hinted that they were planning on adapting A Dame to Kill For - one of my favorite Sin City stories - as a sequel, but they kept putting it off to make garbage like The Spirit or Spy Kids 4*. All the while, my enjoyment of Rodriguez films continued to drop off, so while there was some hope when he and Miller decided to actually make A Dame to Kill For, Machete Kills seriously hobbled my expectations. Even with my hopes in check, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For managed to disappoint.

 Let's start with something you might have noticed from the trailers (if you watched them) and were wondering: no, there's no reason that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's new character has anything to do with A Dame to Kill For, or Powers Boothe as Senator Roark, or Bruce Willis' extended cameo as ghost Hartigan (yes, ghost Hartigan). While they could have easily just made A Dame to Kill For the entire film, Rodriguez and Miller again decided to cram in other stories as "filler," to pad out the 94 minute running time. Two of them add nothing to the Sin City universe at all, and the last one seems to contradict the first movie (if not, by extension, the comics) altogether.

 I don't want to spend more time on this than necessary, so let's just say that the Marv-centric "Just Another Saturday Night" was unnecessary, too short, and doesn't set the tone in the same way that "Keep the Customer Satisfied" did in the first film. Since I'm guessing that's what it was intended to do, even after nine years, it fails to remind us why we're here to watch a Sin City movie. It isn't as clear here as it is in "Nancy's Last Dance," but Mickey Rourke's Marv makeup looks horrible. I'm not quite sure why, but I'll chalk it up to the lighting, or digital after-the-fact "lighting," because Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger don't usually provide such lousy prosthetics.

 The second (and, I guess, fourth) segment is "The Long, Bad Night," a never published Sin City story by Miller, focused on card shark Johnny (Gordon-Levitt), who runs afoul of Senator Roark (Boothe), perhaps by design. The story has no payoff to speak of, particularly when you factor in the last segment, which undoes everything significant about Johnny's plan, but if you want to see Christopher Lloyd and Lady Gaga in semi-useless cameos, I guess this scratches your itch. It has some of the worst use of a green screen set (where only the door is real) I think I can remember, and we haven't even made it to the ubiquitous use of terrible green screen yet.

 "A Dame to Kill For" at least gave me some hope with the inclusion of Eva Green as Ava Lord and Josh Brolin as the pre-surgery version of Dwight, but those hopes were quickly dashed by the overall execution of the story. Maybe it's just how cheap everything looks, or how playing it "hard boiled" somehow translates to everyone snarling or sneering, which makes a two dimensional comic strip one dimensional on the big screen. It's laughable how bad everyone is, and Green is actually perfectly suited to play Ava Lord, but comes of terribly under the "just go for it" direction of Rodriguez and Miller.

 Brolin might have been all right, but the inexplicable decision to keep him, post surgery, and not bring back Clive Owen was a horrible idea. Rodriguez has no excuse, as Machete Kills was filled with actors who came in as they were available (which, admittedly, led to its "piecemeal" execution), and Sin City famously features a conversation between Mickey Rourke and Rutger Hauer that was filmed weeks apart. Putting Josh Brolin in a "Clive Owen Wig" and giving him a few prosthetics to make him look slightly different (honestly, I couldn't tell until the close-up) doesn't cut it. Unless Clive Owen flat out refused to be involved with the film (and he didn't - he was shooting The Knick), Rodriguez could have figured out something.

 There are plenty of small parts in A Dame to Kill For, giving Rosario Dawson a chance to come back as Gail, Jaime King to play Goldie and Wendy again, and Jamie Chung to step in as the new Miho. Ray Liotta and Juno Temple set the tone of the segment off in the wrong way where he hysterically overacts, but at least that's something. Christopher Meloni, Martin Csokas, and Jeremy Piven have almost nothing interesting to do with one-note characters, and I didn't even realize Piven was supposed to be playing Michael Madsen's Bob. He makes no impression whatsoever, like Stacy Keach playing a penis head with boils in one scene. Dennis Haysbert admirably steps in for the late Michael Clarke Duncan as Manute, although he lacks the stature to really pull it off, especially against Brolin and Rourke. Also troubling was the fact that I could see the seam of his eye prosthetic on the edge of Haysbert's nose half the time. Are we really sure this movie cost Robert Rodriguez $60 Million dollars?

 Seriously, before I get into "Nancy's Last Dance," which is the "Exhibit A" of what's wrong with A Dame to Kill for, can I mention how cheap everything in this movie looks? Where did the 60 million go, because it wasn't in the CGI rendering of every background. That looks somehow even worse than the last Sin City movie, and that was from 2005. There a moments of almost comically bad green screen work, where (I kid you not) the camera moves to mask the fact that the actors are hanging in the air (static) on wires. I laughed out loud when Nancy (Jessica Alba) and Marv "jump" over a fence, and by that I mean they didn't move at all and the camera panned down to the fake ground they were "landing" on. It's embarrassingly shitty looking; the kind of crap you'd expect from DTV, not a 60 million dollar movie.

 Okay, I've already spent way more time on this piece of crap than I wanted to, but let me finally chase off any die-hard Sin City fans who are mentally attempting to wriggle their way out of this review. Let's talk about "Nancy Last Dance," a newly created piece by Frank Miller designed to give Jessica Alba a showcase and close out A Dame to Kill For. And, in doing so, taking a dump all over "The Hard Goodbye" and "That Yellow Bastard." Right now, I'm going to SPOIL "The Long, Bad, Night," because, who cares? You're never going to see this awful movie, even if you, like me, wanted it not to suck as hard as it does. At the end of "The Long, Bad, Night," Johnny comes back to Senator Roark's back-room card game to beat him (again) just so that "everyone knows I beat you twice. They won't talk about it here, but it'll get out there, and everybody will know." Roark kills his illegitimate son, and goes back to playing.

 Immediately after this happens, "Nancy's Last Dance" starts, which undoes the significance of Johnny's act by jumping forward in time past "That Yellow Bastard" and "A Dame to Kill For" to a seriously broken Nancy. She's a drunken mess, angry at Hartigan for dying and angrier at herself for not shooting Roark when he left Kadie's Bar in "The Long, Bad, Night." She cuts her hair off, mutilates her face with a piece of broken glass, and decides it's time to kill him once and for all. While this is happening, Ghost Hartigan is wandering around, giving us the half-mumbled musings that come from Bruce Willis phoning it in as a favor. But here's where it gets stupid. If you'll remember, Senator Roark is alive when Marv is arrested and executed in "The Hard Goodbye," which is why it makes no sense that the very same Marv helps Nancy break into Roark's house and is just outside the room when Nancy kills Senator Roark. And how does she kill him? Well, he has the edge on her all the way through the scene until Ghost Hartigan appears in a mirror and scares him.

 I'm going to let you digest that for a minute. Take your time.

 Now, this could be filed under "fanboy nitpicking," and I wouldn't blame you if you decided to go that way, but "Nancy's Last Dance" feels like Miller trying as hard as he possibly can to find a way to put Nancy and Marv together in a story we haven't seen that gives some unneeded closure to her story. He does so at the expense of the logic of not only his stories, but of the first movie. I read some forum post about how maybe Marv was supposed to also be a ghost (hence why he couldn't follow Nancy into the room) but there's a lot of Marv interacting with people when Nancy isn't on-camera for it to all "be in her mind," I get the mental break part of it, but the pretzel logic in this segment is pathetic. Coupled with the horrible "action" and really bad looking Marv prosthetics, or the Ghost Hartigan in Nancy's living room that might be impressive if everything but the couch wasn't a green screen shot, it's just the final nail in this movie's coffin.

 Rodriguez killed any interest I had in the Sin City, Machete, and Spy Kids series in the span of three years. That's an impressive feat. For bonus points, I couldn't even finish watching the From Dusk Till Dawn TV show. I think I'm finally, officially, done giving this guy chances. Whatever it was he had, it's gone, and like Kevin Smith, Rodriguez persists in pushing on, pursuing his own stupid interests in as lazy a way as humanly possible. No amount of gratuitous nudity and extreme violence is going to hide the fact that Sin City: A Dame to Kill For looks more like a star-studded fan film than an actual movie. It's not worth my time and it's certainly not worth yours, but I guess I'm glad I saw it So You Won't Have To.




 * I was going to say Shorts, but I didn't want to confuse people who wouldn't know Rodriguez made a dumb kids' movie with the Robert Altman film Short Cuts.

Bad Movie Night 2014 Recap (Part One)

 It's an off and off tradition here at the Blogorium to take a Saturday in April and devote it to some of the very least that cinema has to offer. I try to keep the "bad" movies entertaining, and generally speaking am successful, but these one day events are strictly for the willing. I'm not going to promise you're going to have a good time, but the door is also unlocked. That last part will be important in a little bit. Previous Bad Movie Nights have included titles like Mac and Me, Troll 2, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, She Devil, and Masters of the Universe. I don't always go for the low hanging fruit (okay, we did watch Batman & Robin the first year), but if you're going to sift through the best of the worst, it helps to have some familiar titles.

 The following winners comprised our 2014 edition, which to date includes the most infamous, most hated of all Bad Movie Night entries. And I knew it would. And none of them left. Remember that.

 We didn't start out at the bottom, but The Neanderthal Man isn't exactly high art. I like to kick off BMN's (and Summer Fests) with a B-Movie from the 1950s, particularly one with questionable "science." In The Neanderthal Man, Professor Clifford Groves (Robert Shane) is furious that his colleagues won't accept his theory that primitive man was as intelligent (or more) than modern man. And why won't they take him seriously? Only because he admits he has no proof for this theory. None. But, it turns out, he does! Using "science," Professor Groves has invented a serum that activates a regressive state in cats (and later, in humans), turning cats into sabretooth Tigers and his deaf / mute / illiterate housekeeper into Tim Curry from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

 The Neanderthal Man is a hoot; it's a hodgepodge of borrowed sets (why the mountains of California hosts a cafe that looks suspiciously like an Old West saloon, complete with cowboys, is never addressed), mismatched footage (the tiger is clearly just a tiger, complete with chain in most shots, and in close ups is a stuffed animal with tusks to indicate it's not just a tiger loose in the mountains of California). Groves' fiance Ruth Marshall (Doris Merrick) is partial to long winded monologues about the meaning of love and science that make it feel like the screenwriters thought five dollar words literally translated to five dollars per word. The titular creature that Groves becomes is clearly wearing a mask and sometimes forgets to put his hairy gloves on. He has a grown daughter, Jan (Joyce Terry), and wears a wedding ring, but has a fiance. Jan only owns one dress and wears it for the entire movie, which takes place over a few days. Groves kicks out a zoologist (Richard Crane) who investigates the shenanigans, but doesn't bat an eye when he's back in their house the next day and the day after that. It's the perfect recipie of "let's get this done and get it in drive-ins" that kicks things off in the right spirit.

 After that, we transitioned to one of the most requested Bad Movie Night entries: Gymkata. At movie designed to capitalize on Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas, it's a perfect example of nothing really working in a movie, and yet still being quite entertaining. Thomas plays Jonathan Cabot, whose father disappeared during a super secret challenge in the nonexistent Eastern European country of Parmistan. In addition to being a gymnast, Cabot is also a spy, so he infiltrates the competition with the help of Princess Rubali (former Playboy model Tetchie Agbayani), who doesn't say anything for the first fifteen minutes, but when she does, you realize why. He father, The Kahn (Buck Kartalian), who looks and acts like a character Mel Brooks would be playing, rules Parmistan, but his Australian right hand man Zamir (Richard Norton, back when Australians were the bad guys, before Crocodile Dundee) is plotting a coup and using the games as a ruse to set it in motion... or something.

 Following a lengthy training montage that never mentions that "gymkata" is the style Cabot uses (a combination of gymnastics and karate) and his ability to walk up stairs while doing a handstand (never used again in the movie), John and the Princess are off to Parmistan to be betrayed in a salt mine, float down a river, be captured, and eventually rejoin The Kahn who apparently was expecting them. Yeah, don't expect coherent through lines in this movie. Just look for hanging bars or pommel horses, because Cabot seems to find them just when he needs to attack many people who happily stand there and let him kick them while swinging. I feel bad for the poor, toothless people of Bulgaria who stood in for citizens of Parmistan - they're clearly excited to be in a movie, but at least one of them is knocked over by a horse on camera and they kept it in the film! The entire fictional country is treated like a shithole that these foreign combatants need to survive through, including the closed off city of the insane, which is at least the most surreal part of a film that involves Kurt Thomas climbing a rope while holding his legs straight out for no good reason. I can understand why we never saw a Gymkata 2, or any other action vehicles starring Thomas. Still, quite amusing in a stupid way.

 The Demolitionist, on paper, sounds like a movie geek's dream come true. Directed by Robert Kurtzman (the "K" in KNB visual effects, and also the creator of From Dusk Till Dawn), this quasi-Robocop knock-off exists in its own heightened reality where "over the top" isn't quite good enough for the cast. Oh, and did I mention the cast includes Susan Tyrell (Forbidden Zone), Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead), Jack Nance (Eraserhead), Reggie Bannister (Phantasm), Heather Langenkamp (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Bruce Abbott (Re-Animator), Joe Pilato (Day of the Dead), a young Derek Mears (Jason Voorhees from Shit Coffin), and an uncredited Bruce Campbell (Crimewave)? Yes, it's a dream come true, until you realize that most of them are barely in the movie.

 Instead, we spend most of our time with Nicole Eggert (Blown Away) and Richard Greico (Point Doom) as the titular Demolitionist and the bad guy, respectively. And wow, do they not know how to play camp like the rest of the cast. I'm not sure what Kurtzman was thinking, but these two blocks of oak drag down everything that could be fun about The Demolitionist and quickly explain why you've never heard of this movie before. Eggert plays undercover cop Alyssa Lloyd, who is seriously injured by "Mad Dog" Burne (Grieco), and dies in the hospital. Her partner takes a bullet point blank to the brain but somehow lives (he also kind of looks like Crispin Glover, but isn't). Burne is one half of a brother team who has a sadistic side and loves brazen daylight robberies (Kurtzman apparently has a favorite "type" here, since you're going to think about how much cooler the Gecko brothers are than the Burnes). When his brother dies from electrified pee (don't ask), he decides to... I don't know. Kill the mayor (Tyrell), replace her with the corrupt chief of police (Peter Jason, wearing a leftover costume from Demolition Man and otherwise known as "that guy!") and generally continue to run wild with his biker gang (which includes Mears, Savini, Campbell, as well as a Greg Nicotero /Howard Berger cameo two-fer).

 But science can bring Alyssa back! Professor Jack Crowley (Abbott) injects nanobots into her bloodstream and she becomes a super cop - for a while, until she needs more injections or she'll rot. There's a LOT of "do I want to be like this" and contemplative staring from Eggert, or maybe she just forgot her lines. I don't know. The potential for The Demolitionist to be schlocky fun pretty much fizzles out before it gains any momentum, so by the time Bruce shows up it becomes the highlight of the movie as you a) recognize him, b) debate whether you really saw him, and c) hear his one line and realize that it is, in fact, Bruce Campbell to save the day. And then he dies when the Demolitionist kills everybody in the biker gang. It's almost as lame as the wasted potential of abandoning a little girl holding two live grenades. Such a shame.

 Peering into the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I returned with Doctor Strange, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton. Now that I've sent half of you away squealing with joy and the other hand angrily stomping off to complain on a comic book forum, we actually watched the almost totally forgotten 1978 TV movie version of Dr. Strange. It's 80% origin story, 10% magical showdown, and 10% setup for the continuing adventures of Stephen Strange that television audiences never got. And yet, Stan Lee contends that the only reason that Dr. Strange didn't do well was that it aired opposite Roots.

 Were that true, Dr. Strange might have been a curious case for counter-programming, but the truth is that the movie is just pretty bad. It mostly meanders through its plot, about Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development's Jessica Walter, looking way hotter than you'd ever want Lucille Bluth to) trying to destory Thomas Lindmer (Special Guest Star John Mills) - split his name up and you'll get it - with Clea Lake (Anne-Marie Martin, of The Boogens fame) and Dr. Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten, of The Inglorious Bastards, but looking suspiciously like John Holmes) caught in the middle or their mystical feud. Morgan's demon master sounds like Bane and has an unfortunate stop-motion mouth, while Merlin - er, Lindmer - just has Wong (Clyde Kusatsu), his butler / assistant.

Most of the movie takes place at the hospital where Strange works, and after LeFay possesses Clea and uses her to push Merlin off of a bridge (which doesn't kill him, because he uses his regenerative Time Lord magic powers to get up and walk away), she ends up in the psych ward. Strange tries to help her, ends up meeting Merlin and fighting Morgan (in the last fifteen minutes of a 90 minute movie) and gets two magical costumes, one worse than the other. There are sources of amusement to be drawn from New York in the 1970s, including a prominently featured Seinfeld Book store that hints at what's to come in television. But unless you're a fan of Doctor Strange - and I must admit, I didn't know much about him - this isn't going to ring your bell. People who know Jessica Walter from Archer or Arrested Development will probably enjoy this, although it's going to feel weird seeing her in so many low-cut dresses and showing so much leg. On the other hand, I spent most of Dr. Strange trying to figure out why I recognized Clea, and now I know it's because of my fondness for The Boogens... Oh, The Boogens.

 We're only at the halfway mark, gang! I'll be back tomorrow to wrap it up with A Talking Cat?!?, Mutilations, Things, and Samurai Cop!

Shocktober Revisited: Four Reasons Day of the Dead Get a Bum Rap

Between watching movies for "review" purposes* and working on essays, I tend to throw movies on before bed, parsing their running time out over a few days. The last such movie was George Romero's Day of the Dead, which has the reputation of being the "lesser" entry into his living dead series. Rather than give a full-on review, I thought I'd dust off "Four Reasons" and give you my take on why that reputation is undeserved, even if Day of the Dead may not live up to the lofty expectations from Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

1. Tom Savini at the top of his game + Greg Nicotero = Best Zombie Effects Yet: Tom Savini gets a lot of credit for his effects work in Dawn of the Dead but I've always found the "blue" zombies to be a bit distracting. They're also unintentionally silly, which lends itself well to the "comedy" parts of Dawn of the Dead but leave the menace of a world overrun by the living dead greatly diminished.

Thankfully, Day of the Dead (mostly) drops the blue-skinned dead in favor of more appliance work. Operating on the notion that these zombies have had some time to decay, Savini and Nicotero (later of KNB Effects) swing for the fences and craft some really elaborate and unique makeup jobs. One of the first zombies you see doesn't have a mouth at all, and they get crazier from there. Guts spill out, limbs are hacked off, and brains are exposed for research before the film ends. Oh, and then there's the death of Captain Rhodes, a kill echoed in Shaun of the Dead with Dylan Moran. The effects team bring their A-Game to Day of the Dead and for my money the movie has the best zombie makeup "gags" of the series.

2. Bub - Whether you love Land of the Dead or hate it, the central plot point (sentient zombies) doesn't exist without Bub. For the first time in any of the Romero series, the living dead have a face. Howard Sherman manages to keep Bub, the zombie that learns and "remembers" from feeling like a bad story direction without ever making him too human. Bub is still a zombie; he still eats flesh and is a threat to everyone in the facility (especially Rhodes). And yet, there's a glimmer of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation that the living dead are more than a mass of oncoming death.

Land of the Dead addresses this more directly (and some, including the Cap'n, would say more ham-handedly) by pushing the evolution of the dead in isolation further. The precedent Bub set in Day of the Dead allows Romero to pursue this idea, even if he bungles it a bit in the twenty year gap.


3. Desperation - This is where I disagree most with critics of Day of the Dead; many say that the film is nothing but people arguing for 90 minutes and then a zombie invasion to clean up, but I take another position. If you follow the progression from Night to Dawn to Day of confusion / survival / desperation (and take it further to "adaptation" in Land of the Dead), then Day is the necessary "dark" chapter in the series. It lacks almost all of Dawn of the Dead's cautious optimism and even the last second escape for Sarah, Johnny, and McDermott is more "now what" than Dawn's triumphant chopper ending.

Day of the Dead represents a pocket of humanity that sees an increasingly hopeless situation that they can't see a way out of. For the scientists, research is slow and equipment is diminishing. For the soldiers stationed to protect the scientists, they see men dying for what appears to be no reason. There's no outside world to contact and no Fiddler's Green to escape to, so they're stuck with each other, frustrated and underground. So yeah, I can understand tension bubbling over into Rhodes' profanity-laced tirades. His men are there to babysit people who seem to be doing nothing.

Day of the Dead might get a little too dark and the fights a bit too repititious (there is, after all, only so many things Romero can show us in the underground facility) but I find that the film returns us to the looming threat of a mass of undead largely missing in Dawn of the Dead. The film is a more extreme take on Night of the Living Dead's basement scenario and I think that it sobers the "fun" of Dawn of the Dead in a way people weren't expecting.

4. It's the last really good Romero "dead" film - Say what you will about Land of the Dead but I'd hardly put it up there with the "original trilogy." (The less said about Diary of the Dead, the better.) Day of the Dead takes great pains to expand the collapse of society that Night of the Living Dead sets up and Dawn of the Dead spreads, and even if the scope of the film was drastically cut, I think that Romero conveys the fall of man better here than in his subsequent films. If Land of the Dead was more about the world outside of Fiddler's Green, I might be more kind to the movie. That opening sequence was about as interesting as Land ever got, and it had more to do with what Day sets up than anything to do with the crew of Dead Reckoning.

I'm not saying that Day of the Dead is at the top of my "dead" list; in fact, it still ranks behind Night of the Living Dead and possibly Dawn of the Dead. That doesn't mean, however, that I consider the film to be Romero's red-headed stepchild of the zombie series. The film is nowhere near as bad as people like to say it is, and the effects are easily better than anything in Dawn, Land, or Diary of the Dead. The acting is a little rough, the movie is a bit repetitive, but I dig the dream sequences and thematically I find it to be quite consistent with what came before (and after). Day of the Dead gets a bum rap, but not one the Cap'n thinks it deserves.

Retro Review: Wishmaster

 Today's Retro Review is a special one for two reasons:

 1. It was the first movie I watched with Professor Murder, and largely the reason we became friends shortly thereafter.

 2. For better or for worse, it's the catalyst for Cap'n Howdy becoming the "trash savant" that you dear readers will assume is going to watch literally any shitty film that comes out. And you're right. Sometimes.

 While it is true that I would rent nearly anything from Carbonated Video that looked interesting for years prior to the release of Wishmaster, young Cap'n Howdy had a slightly more discerning taste when it came to seeing something on the big screen. I stopped hanging out with a friend in high school because he tricked me into seeing Biodome and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls on separate occasions (also, he stole my yearbook and burned my German textbook after borrowing it). To be fair, I also saw 12 Monkeys and Pulp Fiction with said person, so you can understand why I'd fall for two proto-Trappenings.

 It is also true that I saw McHale's Navy earlier in 1997, and while that is barely a watchable film, the large group I went to see it with all went for the same reason: Bruce Campbell. We support our Bruce, even when he's a third banana in a Tom Arnold TV-make.

 What distinguished Wishmaster from those films, and what began a regular trend afterward, was that the entire reasoning behind seeing a movie that in no way looked good was predicated on The Rocky Horror Picture Show experience: see the shitty movie, mock the shitty movie. It's a low-rent version of MST3k, another show I was (and am) a huge fan of, and one that continued for years and years.

 (For the record, we have certain rules in place when we do this: we always sit close to the screen, usually three rows back, so we'll never be louder than the movie. We also try to keep ourselves separated from the poor souls who wanted to see something like Lost in Space or Ghosts of Mars so that we don't ruin your experience of a horrible piece of shit. We don't like to be interrupted during movies we like, so we limit our interaction with said schlock to our own sphere).

 At the time, I knew of Professor Murder* from high school drama productions but didn't actually know the guy. We were actually kind of at odds - the musical he was starring in was preventing our smaller production from being able to rehearse, and we'd received word that he thought our Literary Revue was "stupid." When he leapfrogged from Drama 1 to Drama 3 between the 96-97 and 97-98 school year, we found ourselves in the same class, and didn't really know how to navigate that.

 The solution came when we both signed up for a series of classes on Shakespearean acting from Burning Coal Theatre, who was putting on a production of... Love's Labours Lost, I think with a student who graduated two years before me. As we were the only students from our school (and we were riding with our drama teacher every day), we got to know each other, our senses of humor, and the many ridiculous interests we had in common.

 One day, after getting back early and having time to kill before our rides got there, we decided to walk from high school to the nearby Imperial Theatre (now The Galaxy) to see a movie. And why not see Wishmaster? It was produced by Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street), written by Peter Atkins (Hellbound: Hellraiser II), directed by Robert Kurtzman (the "K" in KNB Effects), and featured cameos by many of the "big names" in horror, and was about an evil Genie. How bad could it be? Very, we hoped.

 And bad it is - I remember we had a nearly constant running commentary about the logic gaffes, bad acting, and the scenery chewing Djinn, played Andrew Divoff. Whether in his Djinn "monster" makeup or his "human" form of Nathaniel Demerest, Divoff was a hoot as the deliciously EEEEEEVVIIIILLLL villain that tricked people into making wishes so he could punish them ironically. There's the girl who wants to be beautiful forever (he turns her into a mannequin), the guy who wants to escape (he gets put into a tank full of water), and the guy who wants to see him "walk through him" (he turns him into glass or something).

 The last two are interesting because they were played by Tony Todd (Candyman) and Kane Hodder (Jason Vorhees), who appeared alongside Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger) and the voice of Angus Scrimm (The Tall Man) in Wishmaster. Also appearing: Reggie Bannister (Phantasm), Ted Raimi (Army of Darkness), Joe Pilato (Day of the Dead), Danny Hicks (Evil Dead 2), and uhhh... Verne Troyer (Pinocchio's Revenge)! I'd also like to point out something I just discovered, which is that Andrew Divoff was not only the Djinn in Wishmaster, but also Mikhail, the one-eyed Russian from Lost. I did not know that.

 It's a loaded cast (and crew) for a movie that amounts to surprisingly little - it's a slasher movie structure but with a supernatural genie that can make anything happen as long as someone wishes for it. He needs to collect souls or something to become real or take over the world... honestly I don't remember. It's bad of the Cap'n to not go check but let's be honest, there's only one scene that sticks out for me, and it involves Kane Hodder as a security guard who won't let the Djinn get by. The genie says "ask me for something", and Hodder replies "I want you to leave."

 The Djinn, forced to walk away, begins saying "no, no, I have to get inside," setting up the ironic kill. It's hilarious. In fact, here it is (the encounter begins at the 2:26 mark, but you might want consider watching the scene in the police station too, which is also silly).

 After Wishmaster, the Professor and I were on the same page, and we banded together with the rest of the gang to see terrible movies and give them what-for, even if only for our personal enjoyment. It also meant we intentionally sought out movies that were worse than Wishmaster and accordingly earned us a reputation of being willing to see every terrible movie that someone released (in theatres or on VHS / DVD). I cannot say that we didn't earn the rep, but I've been living that down ever since. The Professor? Well, he doesn't really care. He's the reason I saw Satan's Little Helper, Monsturd, and Dinocroc vs Supergator. Then again, I'm the reason he saw ThanksKilling, so I'd say we're even.

 And Wishmaster? Well, there are three more sequels, only one of which I've seen part of. Wishmaster 2 somehow sends the Djinn to prison, so that Divoff can spend most of the movie without his makeup and grant wishes like "I wish my lawyer would go fuck himself," which of course literally happens as the lawyer is trying to get the guy released. Divoff couldn't be bothered to play the Djinn again in parts 3 and 4, and I guess I couldn't be bothered to watch them. Someday... they're probably good Cranpire Movie candidates.




 * I don't use his actual name because of the sensitive work the Professor does, but most people familiar with the Cap'n know exactly who I'm talking about. I also can't claim any credit for the nickname - he earned it while away at school.