THE SUMMER IN REVIEW

An Article

by Mighty Doom

            The past few months have seen the resurrection of the entertaining B-movie.  There will always be bad movies – but it takes finesse to make a bad movie the right way.  It’s a very particular formula, but most of all you need humor, some intentional, some not (if you want a perfect example, watch William Malone’s 1999 remake of House on Haunted Hill).  I’m a great fan of bad movies.  If you go into a movie like Blade II with no expectations, you’ll have a lot more fun than you will watching some of the true classics.  Citizen Kane didn’t make me laugh half as hard as Jason X.  Sometimes it’s better to lighten up and give your brain a rest.  Here is Doom’s definitive guide to all the summer movies the critics panned.

RESIDENT EVIL

            I’ll be the first to admit I had absolutely no hope for this film.  George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) was fired from the project after he failed to include giant crocodiles and lizard-men from his script, and Paul Anderson (Mortal Kombat) took his place.  Then I heard the film was going to be about an insane super computer that turns scientists in an underground lab facility into zombies.  I was all set to rip this movie a new asshole.  I caught it at a free midnight showing in Bennington, VT, and I had a hell of a lot of fun.  No giant crocodiles, no lizard-men, no computer-manufactured zombies.  Also no George Romero, but Anderson did a commendable job.  It wasn’t as scary as it could have been, and I still don’t find Milla Jovovovovich halfway attractive, but it was a damn fine B-movie, and I’m glad I didn’t pass it up.

BLADE II

            This might be my favorite B-movie of the summer.  Blade II disposed of everything that pissed me off in Blade (flat human characters, lousy villains), kept what worked (fast action, insults that make no sense whatsoever) and added some new stuff into the mix – namely my favorite simian actor Ron Perlman, direction by Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Mimic) and art designs by Mike Mignola, the best comic artist in the field.  Blade is contracted to hunt down a new strain of vampire that preys upon human and vampire alike, with the help of the Blood Pack, a group of vampire mercenaries.  There’s a lot of swordfighting, walking in slow motion and generally goofy shit like Blade catching his sunglasses in midair and random acts of wrestling.

THE SCORPION KING

            The Rock, with the aid of his walnut-sized brain, reprises his minor role from The Mummy Returns.  The Scorpion King is basically a Conan ripoff, but with goofier expressions and no Oliver Stone screenplay.  I think the funniest thing about this one was the fact that they’re always in the desert, sleeping on sand, in caves, etc., and they’re getting all sandy, but the Sorceress, being a naked woman with a painted-on costume, is somehow exempt from the “you get sand on you when you roll around in the sand” law of physics.  Other things that made me laugh were the bad guy’s flammable swords and Michael Clarke Duncan’s wrestling match with The Rock.

JASON X

            Now this is how you make a fucking B-movie.  I stand in true admiration of the Friday the 13^th series.  I mean, they made the same goddamn movie ten times in a row and it’s still funny! It’s also funny how every horror movie franchise, from Hellraiser to Critters to Leprechaun, ends up in space sooner or later.  At the beginning of Jason X, Jason is captured in the future and cryogenically frozen at Crystal Lake Research Facility.  Five hundred or so years later he’s found by a group of students (who else?) and brought aboard their research ship.  He thaws out and starts killing them.  Things go like that for a while, until Jason is killed by the ship’s resident android, then UPGRADED BY NANOMACHINES into a super armored indestructible Jason.  I can’t even begin to describe how fucking hilarious this movie is, especially the retro ‘80s virtual campsite simulation.  This is another one I’m buying when it comes out on DVD.

REIGN OF FIRE

            To put it simply, this movie is an absolute piece of shit.  It’s not in any way fun to watch, it’s unoriginal and it takes itself far too seriously.  There’s no humor.  There’s no characterization.  Hell, there’s not even any action to balance out a bunch of tedious, relentlessly grim scenes in which stupid people do stupid things and die as a result.  I usually find that entertaining, but Reign of Fire somehow made even the horrible deaths of large numbers of idiots…boring.  The plot is established within the first ten minutes or so – dragons are inadvertently unleashed by a drilling corporation and kill off most of the human race, leaving a few survivors in a small British hamlet to deal with frequent raids by the beasts – and stops.  I can honestly say I remember very little of this movie.  It’s just not worth the space in my head.

EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS

            Reign of Fire left a bad taste in my mouth, but Eight Legged Freaks served as the perfect cinematic mouthwash.  Giant spiders are set to destroy a small town, and only the local sheriff, David Arquette and Doug E. Doug can stop them.  This movie is a lot of fun – lots of funny kills, bad dialogue and a cool fat deputy I was glad to see survive the film.  Eight Legged Freaks comes in third in Doom’s summer B-movie roundup, only surpassed by Blade II and Jason X.

TRIPLE X

            Another fun movie, despite its extreme misogyny.  There’s a lot of awful dialogue on the part of the evil Russians, and a surplus of stunts that have no grounding whatsoever in physical reality.  My favorites were the exploding line of motorcycles and the super cocaine truck explosion.  Vin Diesel is hardly the superstar Hollywood has made him out to be, but at least he doesn’t take himself or this movie seriously.  It was also amusing to see Rammstein in the opening scene.  One thing I’ve noticed lately – Rammstein is on every goddamn movie soundtrack this summer.  They’re in Resident Evil, Triple X and even Fear Dot Com.  Perhaps Robert Stack will explain this…on another episode of Unsolved Mysteries, next on Lifetime.

FEAR DOT COM

            OH NO! Don’t log into the computer machine Inter Web screen alone! Fear Dot Com is probably the most artsy internet phobia movie I’ve ever seen, and boasts the worst fake computer operating system since the abysmal Swordfish.  I really hate computers in movies.  They’re all apparently designed by people who have never used a computer in their lives, and are deathly afraid of them.  They paste together a few buzzwords like “modem” and “virus” and hope no one halfway computer-literate will notice.  Anyway, Fear Dot Com is a B-movie trapped inside an art film, and as such it doesn’t work particularly well.  It’s a moderately interesting ghost story, but the most terrifying thing in this movie is really the main character’s cat.  Jesus H. Christ, it’s like a fucking boulder with fur! It’s one of those odd boneless cats where you look at it and think you catch a glimpse of an ear, or those weird squashed faces they have, but then it’s gone.  If a website ever comes along that really does kill people with their greatest fear, I will probably be killed by that screwed up cat.