Face/Off (1997)

With Transformers 2 steadily approaching the billion dollar mark, Michael Bay has seemingly perfected the mindless, epileptic action film. What many forget, however, is Bay made his career on ripping off John Woo. It's all there. Quick cuts. Sweaty close-ups. Slow motion walking. Nauseating rotating shots. Bay just uses fewer doves and more breasts.

When Woo left Hong Kong for Hollywood, many predicted he would become what Michael Bay is today. For all intents and purposes they would have been right, if they hadn't factored in Woo not giving a damn. While his collaborations with Chow Yun-Fat were earnest attempts at spectacle, his Hollywood efforts are more self-parody. By the time Woo entered the American market, every action director had thoroughly replicated his style. What more could he do than take such ridiculousness to its inevitable breaking point?

Thus we have Face/Off.

Nollywood trailers

Nollywood refers to the films and filmmaking industry of Nigeria. I've watched about ten of these trailers on YouTube and cannot figure out what any of these movies are about.



HITLER has little to do with the German fascist. It looks like an intense, violent love triangle involving someone who happens to be named Hitler. However, I was happy to see that the case does become a flesh eater's affair (yummers).



BABY POLICE simply looks amazing. At the very least, the trailer is a work of art. It starts off almost coherent, but as it progresses, it gets faster and faster, louder and louder, crazier and crazier, until the term BABY POLICE is nothing but a rushed garbling of syllables which no longer have meaning or purpose.

There is a trailer for BABY POLICE 2, but it isn't nearly as good as its predecessor. It merely highlights some of the expected BABY POLICE tropes, never committing to the crazy nor retaining the time-honored BABY POLICE spirit.

This YouTube channel features numerous Nollywood trailers (most of which I couldn't embed, unfortunately).

THREE FEET TALL! TWO INCH FANGS!

Still looks better than Twilight.

Dolemite (1975)

When drugs and murder run rampant in town, the prison warden assumes the role of judge, jury, and releasecutioner, deciding to let local folk hero and pimp Dolemite back onto the streets. He's the only one capable of wiping out the plague of crime and corruption, as opposed to, say, the police. With the help of Queen Bee and his legion of karate-chopping prostitutes, Dolemite is determined to buy his club back, take down Willie Green, and murder as many corrupt honkys as humanly possible.
Dolemite begins with a scene that would be perfect source material for an introductory film course on how not to shoot a movie. The sound is terrible, the acting stilted, the shots wide, and the edge of the frame littered with boom mics and bounce boards. The scene is purely expository, articulating why Dolemite is in jail, when he's going to be released, and what he's going to do while he's out, like a thesis statement for the film.
He was framed for the the possession of cocaine and stolen furs. The cocaine I understand, but the furs seem completely superfluous. Isn't narcotics possession enough? Why throw some mink coats into the mix? If I blackmailed someone, I wouldn't ask for $50,000 and a bite-sized Snickers bar.

Dolemite wastes no time once released. Within the first 15 minutes, he's pimped out, surrounded by prostitutes, and serviced on the ride home. Unfortunately the mobile booty call is interrupted by a car of annoying white people trying to kill him. He settles the matter with the artful use of a submachine gun.
From then on Dolemite's plan gets a little hazy. He basically seeks haphazard revenge against those who've wronged him, especially the two corrupt police officers who put him in jail. When they try to frame him again, he kicks them in the general vicinity of their bodies and throws cocaine on them.
Somewhere along the way a stone-faced FBI agent shows up (Jerry Jones, also the screenwriter). Dolemite takes care of bad pimp Willie Green. And the mayor, a man so ugly he only could have been elected in the 70s, is implicated in the mess and promptly murdered.
A common theme runs throughout many black exploitation films where they pick and choose which illegal activities are acceptable and which are a source of shame. Dolemite scolds the rampant drug use and murder in the neighborhood, while lesser crimes like pimping and prostitution are not only accepted, but a point of pride. The movie blurs this distinction even more by making a junkie the comic relief. Even though Dolemite's mission is to curb the flow of narcotics, he uses Hamburger Pimp for information, saying he won't "have to worry about his fix from now on."
The boom mics and bounce boards are not just relegated to the first scene. They're practically supporting characters. If Dolemite were Casablanca, the bounce board would be Peter Lorre and the boom mic Claude Rains. The boom mic operator even makes a brief appearance in the bottom right hand corner, which would make him... Sydney Greenstreet or something.
If Dolemite is about anything, it's power through self-confidence. It's no coincidence that he uses "born-insecure" in one of his profanity-laden verbal smackdowns. He is easily the most confident man in the movie. Dolemite is out of the streets entertaining the troops, while Willie Green absconds to the shadows of various backrooms and Cadillac Coupe de Villes. He doesn't hire a headlining act for his club. He is the opening act. He is honest and proud, never ashamed of his behavior, nor requiring any need to. He's a man's man. And a woman's man. And he wants to cut a ghost. And he has his own theme song. What more do you need?

Quotable quotes:

Dolemite: I've been wantin' to see me a honky dance!

Corrupt Cop: You got all them black bitches workin' for you.
Dolemite: You forgot about the white ones.

Hamburger Pimp: I'm so bad I kick my own ass twice a day.

Dolemite: I'm gonna let 'em know that Dolemite is my name and fuckin' up mother fuckers is my game!

Dolemite: If you ever see a ghost, cut the mother fucker.

Arbitrary ranking system:

"If you don't see this explosive bucket of cinematic TNT, then you're a no-business, born-insecure, jock-jawed mother fucker!" -Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Maybe you’ve heard of Troma, the production company that gave us such fine cinema as Surf Nazis Must Die, Redneck Zombies, and Poultrygeist. The company is synonymous with the sort of bottom of the barrel, unwatchable garbage that takes us all back to those days of drive in movie theaters, beach movies, and casual racism. But it wasn’t always this way; it wasn’t until 1984 that Troma discovered independent horror movies make far more money than softcore porn. 1984 was the year Troma released its first “horror” movie, a comedy/horror/superhero thing called The Toxic Avenger. The Toxic Avenger was inexplicably a big hit in the mainstream, spawning a number of godawful sequels and even a cartoon (although I think every successful movie in the 80’s automatically got a cartoon). I even had a Toxic Avenger action figure despite having never seen or heard of the movie.

NEVER FORGET

The film starts across the river from New York in the 80’s; the only thing worse than New York in the 1980’s was New Jersey. We’re introduced to “Tromaville,” a suburban town whose main attractions are the gym and the Mexican restaurant. The opening credits take place in a health club that makes me think maybe this was originally conceived as a softcore porn. We got a lot of shots of pretty hot chicks doing chest exercises for the opening of a horror movie. We also meet Melvin, the fake-toothed, jew-froed janitor. His very presence offends Bozo (who looks like an evil Jon Stewart) and his yuppie buddies Slug, Wanda, and Julie, who intimidate the little nerd for no good reason. Afterwards, Bozo is told he’s starting to get a belly, and responds by re-doubling his efforts on the bench press. This guy is why personal trainers have jobs. It’s at this point that I realized the music from the opening credits STILL has not stopped.

Typical New Jersians

Wanda and Slug break off from the group to an empty locker room. Wanda gets turned on by her gang’s hit and run exploits, and the two start doing it right there on the bench. It took a whole six minutes to get to nudity and we still have zero horror. Melvin walks in on the action and the girl barely slows down long enough to brandish a knife at him.

I'm not sure whether Melvin is reacting to the knife or the nudity

Later, the yuppies are in the car and go over the rules for murdering pedestrians. These darn kids must play too much of those durn videogames! Like, uh… Frogger. They see a kid and run him over, stopping to take pictures. Since this is an independent film, there are zero other cars on the road so they take their time.

To be fair, Melvin is an awful janitor

Back at the health club, Julie, Bozo’s girlfriend, sets a trap for Melvin by coming onto him and asking him to meet her by the pool in a pink tutu. After seeing more nudity, Melvin agrees. The pool is suspiciously completely dark, and we get a solid minute of total blackout while Melvin gropes around for the girl. Somebody switches on the lights and Melvin is kissing a sheep, and the whole club is there to laugh at him. For some reason their laughter causes Melvin to run away up a flight of stairs. In the meantime, a couple of drug-addict toxic waste drivers park their truck outside the health club so they can snort some coke. You can guess what happens next. Melvin leaps out of a second story window for no reason and lands in a vat of waste. He catches on fire and runs home, where he turns into a monster while the music from Frankenstein plays. Hey, and it only took 21 minutes! Ghost Rider should’ve taken some notes!

Get help, Academy Award Winner Marisa Tomei!

Meanwhile, the only honest cop in town is being beaten up by three cartoon villains including a crossdresser and a guy that calls himself “Cigarface.” The bad guys are all ready to shoot the guy’s dick off when Melvin, now a 7 foot tall monster, beats up the two men and one crossdresser, brutally murdering them. We see various reactions to the murder including some dismay from the obesely fat mayor and his inexplicably German police chief. At the health club, Wanda relaxes in the spa for another nude scene when her boy Slug shows up. She references the Elephant Man to show that Troma is down with David Lynch.

He's doing this while his fellow mob guy is being brutally beaten. Ah, vanity.

The film abruptly cuts to a Mexican restaurant, where three MORE cartoon villains show up; my favorite is Patrick Kilpatrick, longtime movie bad guy, wearing face-paint over half his face, no shirt, and suspenders to hold up the red underwear he’s got on over his pants. The leader says “We are the entertainment for this afternoon” and brandishes a knife. Total Dark Knight rip-off! And when they say entertainment, they mean it: even though they immediately open the register, they don’t actually take the money, they just hold everyone hostage for no reason. When one of the patrons objects to this course of action, offering to be the sole hostage if everyone else goes free, he gets shot in the chest for his efforts. The leader spots a dog and eventually realizes it’s the seeing eye dog for a beautiful blind girl named Sarah (who is also doing the worst job of playing blind I have ever seen). Face-paint guy shoots the dog while the leader talks about his longtime dream of “cornholing a blind girl.” That’s a pretty specific dream! The bad guy bends her over a table, and at this point I’m questioning whether these bad guys had a plan at all. Did they just decide they were going to play it by ear once they showed up with guns looking like idiots? The non-talking member of the three has also kissed the cashier with identical footage three times.

"Do you like Mexican food little baby?"

Predictably, the Toxic Avenger shows up and saves the day and Sarah’s virtue, tearing off the leader’s arm. He then proceeds to deep fry the non-talking guy’s hands, force-feed Kilpatrick a sundae and then shove his head into a shake mixer, and throws the leader into a pizza oven. Why does a Mexican restaurant have a shake maker and a pizza oven? Sarah’s traumatized, so Toxie takes her to her home to start a romantic sub-plot.

When she went blind, all her other senses actually got worse.

Long-story short, Toxie falls in love, but that doesn’t stop him from taking out his old health club enemies. The girls get maimed, but Bozo gets driven off a cliff and I forget what happens to Slug. We also get a great montage of Toxie’s heroic actions including opening a jar for a housewife. Toxie and Sarah have sex but it’s movie sex not porn sex and we really don’t see anything. Also the music WILL NOT STOP even when people are talking or things are happening.

A dream deferred is a dream denied. -Langston Hughes

When Toxie shoves an old woman into a washing machine the evil fat mayor sees an opportunity to turn the town against him, covering the fact that the old woman apparently ran a white slavery ring. He calls out the National Guard, but a bunch of hippy-dippy kids Toxie has saved in the past few weeks get in the way. Toxie asks the mayor if he has any guts, then pulls out some large intestine. The crowd cheers as Toxie gives Sarah some flowers, and we’re out!

The Toxic Avenger to the rescue!

I’m really torn on this one. I laughed at the jar-opening bit pretty hard, and I loved how the villains were comic book villains: ridiculous looking ciphers with zero positive characteristics. I mean really, how does shooting a dog aid your escape from a restaurant robbery? It makes the scenes where terrible things happen to these guys worth your time (although Bozo’s death was really lame). On the other hand, god please turn the music off! Some of the jokes are just atrociously bad: in one scene Slug puts a snake in an aerobics instructor’s leotard, with hilarious results. What’d the instructor ever do to him? Who knows? Toxie gets hit in the crotch by Sarah "accidentally" so many times you start to wonder whether she's just a mean bitch who can see. The poor lit, 80’s porn atmosphere starts out as part of the film’s charm but at 82 minutes it’s worn out its welcome. As terrible an actress as the blind girl was, she was really hot. And Marisa Tomei and Patrick Kilpatrick get their careers started here! Bizarrely, nobody even uses the term “Toxic Avenger” until the epilogue. Until then he’s called “Monster Hero,” a name so bad I believe a local newspaper could’ve come up with it.

Maybe it was its “super-powered” revenge of the nerds story, but Toxic Avenger was a big hit at the time, shaping Troma’s future as a terrible horror movie studio. But Troma’s not all bad: they were the first to bring a Japanese film to America (My Neighbor Totoro), and distributed Cannibal! The Musical for a young Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

What to Drink:

Toxic Waste... or Tap Water if you live in NEW JERSEY!

Quotable Quotes

Bozo: would you take a look at that fucking guy? Can't even mop right!

Wanda: You want to give me a fuckin' disease?!

Bozo: Yeah, this is FUN (after running over a child)!

Melvin's mom: My little Melvin: he must have finally reached puberty!

Frank: We are the entertainment for this afternoon!

Leroy: you like mexican food little baby? well how'd you like to have this hot tamale shoved down your throat?

Frank: I'll kill you motherfucker! (realizes his arm has been torn off) Aaaaaaahhh!

12 year old prostitute: You said you were going to take me to the david bowie concert! He's not David Bowie!

Arbitrary Ranking System:

3 mops out of 5

Something is wrong with Japan

We all know that Glorious Nippon is a strange place. But the trailer for Neko Ramen Taisho (a.k.a. Pussy Soup) further confirms it.



Part Hello Kitty. Part Garfield. Part God of Cookery. Part Every Anime You've Ever Seen.

Pussy Soup.

If you're in the Dallas area, it's playing on Saturday, July 18th at the Magnolia as part of the Asian Film Festival of Dallas. You can purchase tickets through the link.

"Shine on Me" is everything you want in a movie...

...and it's only a music video.

Also, "everything you want" is RenFest fanatics throwing energy balls in front of a wind machine.



As the "first music video in a trilogy of romantic fantasy, music videos" (the comma is there so you don't hyperventilate while reading this), I eagerly await the second and third installments, Shine on Me 2 : Pirate Dragon Explosion, and Shine on Me 3: Return of the Sing.