Re-Evaluating Bad Movies

Correct.  Cause Tarantino's actually made some good movies.

Nope.  District 9 isn't all that good, either.

Nailed it.

STRIPPED TO KILL (1987)



From Roger Corman comes a stripper movie that saved money on its budget by consisting 90% of its runtime on stripping scenes. It’s supposed to be about an undercover cop investigating the murder of an exotic dancer, but who has time for that when there’s naked women to droll over? At least the ending is hilarious.

The Incredible Hulk is just so forgettable, that might be it's biggest crime.

Dark World has more entertainment value to me than Incredible Hulk. 

TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA (1970)



This movie used to be on TV all the time when I was a kid. I still think of it as one of Eastwood's Greatest Hits Western alongside the Dollars Trilogy, High Plains Drifter and Josey Wales. It's about Eastwood and "a nun" (played by Shirley MacLaine) helping the Mexicans fight the French. It's directed by Don Siegel, Eastwood's main collaborator after Sergio Leone. The film is very much in the spirit of Spaghetti Westerns (it even features a badass score by Ennio Morricone) but Siegel's direction is lifeless and the script could have been spiced up a bit. I can see why its been dismissed by PG Cooper's Generation Z. With so much content on Disney+, who has time for this shit?

I like District 9. The first time I watched it was as a bootleg, the subtitles were missing for the alien dialogue and I thought the movie was supposed to be like that. I still really enjoyed it.

Universal Soldier: Regeneration

To call the Universal Soldier series a legitimate action franchise is a bit of a stretch.  Actually it's a huge, enormous Stretch Armstrong stretch.  Rambo, Terminator, Rocky, those are franchises.  Universal Soldier got its start in the early 90s as a JCVD vehicle directed by Roland Emmerich and co-starring Dolph Lundgren when some people in Hollywood were still trying unsuccessfully to make him a thing.  It had a couple direct to video sequels before they tried to revamp the 'franchise' with Universal Solder: The Return, a movie I haven't seen but by all accounts is unwatchable.  Fast forward a decade and Universal Soldier: Regeneration quietly, stealthily dropped into our laps.  Once again starring JCVD and Dolph Lundgren, it's a movie that should have sucked.  Trying to relaunch a terrible franchise should only amounted in another crap mountain.  To my surprise though Regeneration isn't crap.  In fact, it's the best film of the franchise and an all-around awesome B-action movie.  

A team of innumerable terrorists take over the Chernobyl power plant and threaten to blow it up.  Leading the charge is a mad scientist in control of a stolen and upgraded Universal Soldier (a UFC fighter named Andrei something, I don't follow any of that).  They've also kidnapped the children of a Ukranian prime minister (topical!).  The US and Russian forces get their asses kicked time and again even after sending in other UniSols who are summarily dispatched by the upgraded one so eventually they have to track down Luc Deveraux, still trying to reintegrate into polite society with the help of a nice scientist lady.  They pump him full of chemicals, reactive him and send him to kill everybody and rescue the children.  Along the way he finds a clone of Lundgren's Andrew Scott.  The two share a pretty awesome fight scene, you just need to ignore the fact that there's 0 reason for Lundgren's character to be here, it makes no sense that he's back and the only reason they have him is because Dolph still has the tiniest amount of name recognition among 40-something action junkies.  Anyways, you can probably guess what happens.  By no means is this a great film but it's a surprisingly raw and entertaining action flick that has a high body count, bullet count, fight count, thrown through walls count, pretty much anything that someone looking for an action escape might want to find.  It's a really good sendoff of 80s/early 90s action movies that were just fists and bullets before Fast and Furious came along and made cars driving through planes and gliding down buildings all the rage.  This movie also ignores all other Universal Soldier movies that came between itself and the first one so I guess you can say it helped launch the retcon phase we all know and love today.  It had a follow-up, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning which is a big piece of shit but Regeneration is a hell of a good time.  Neverending , if you haven't seen this put it on the list so you can watch it and tell me how wrong I am.

I haven't but I heard that's also surprisingly good.

The Patriot (2000)





The Patriot, one of Deexan 's top 3 all time favs.  It was the summer of 2000 and a 15 year old Doomsday who was just a few months shy of stumbling across the CS forums was beyond excited for the release of two movies that were both gunning for the title of Greatest Movie of All Time; Gladiator and The Patriot.  This was back in the day when Mel Gibson was still a huge, enormous star, years before his sugartits and Jew ranting mic drop.  We already saw Mel slaughter those limey bastards in Braveheart and being given the chance to watch him do it with bayonets and tomahawks was the sweetest gift you could give a kid like me.  I'll be honest, I enjoyed the hell out of The Patriot when it first came out, I saw it 2 or 3 times in theaters and watched it a bunch on my brand spanking new DVD player.  I still remember John Williams' cheery score and how it perfectly timed each heroic entrance of Gibson on screen.  He single handedly won the Revolutionary War after all, how could he not have his own score?

Holy shit, where to begin with this gem.  Everything about it is so Hollywood and easily digestible, it's like an R-rated family action movie set in colonial times.  Benjamin Martin is a respected family man and rocking chair aficionado whose wife unfortunately died way back when so he raises his family on his large farm by himself.  He has some African American farm hands with him but they're NOT SLAVES!  They're freed men, you see.  Benjamin Martin is one of the good guys, he doesn't have slaves even though he lives in North Carolina in the 1700s (I'm serious, there's some dialogue dedicated to this).  His son Gabriel (Heath, RIP) joins the resistance against the British crown and after some bad stuff goes down everyone realizes that Benjamin is actually a hardcore warrior who mercilessly killed a bunch of folks in the French and Indian* Wars years earlier and now he's going to show the British what's what.  Benjamin is still a father though and he has to balance his paternal duties with winning a war only he can win.  With Shakespearean dialogue like 'I'm not a child,' 'You're MY child!' you know that Benjamin is teetering on the razor's edge of family and patriotic duty.  Fortunately he chooses patriotism (this is The Patriot after all) and sends his family away because those Brits aren't going to kick their own asses.  In the meantime we get tomahawk chops to the forehead, cannon balls ripping off limbs, bayonets to the bellies and as much hoo-rah Americanism as you can handle.  Like I said, the movie is called The Patriot.

Joking aside, The Patriot is not a very good movie at all but goddamn is it entertaining.  It's the definition of high budget, big spectacle camp.  The dialogue is blissful cheese, every role is hammed up to the 10th degree and just the notion that Mel Gibson basically founded the nation by winning the war is so over the top I'm surprised this isn't aired every 4th of July for every flyover state American to enjoy.  The fact that this movie came out 2 years after Saving Private Ryan is a bit perplexing because they're such polar opposites.  Now I'm not the biggest fan of SPR but there's no denying that it changed the way that war movies are made (back in Spielberg's 'game changer' days before his 'War Horse and BFG' days).  Naturally war movies now had to have a first-hand realistic feel to it but in the hands of a filmmaker like Rolland Emmerich, the director at the helm of The Patriot, it became a product that almost felt cartoonish.  Jason Isaacs portrays an unhinged British colonel who burns entire families and villages to get to Benjamin (despite the fact that nothing even close to that had ever been recorded as being done by anyone in the British army) and chews up and spits out every line of dialogue with the intensity of a bad Bond villain.  I'm convinced that everyone from Gibson and Emmerich down the line were absolutely positive that this was going to be a big player all around, from the box office to award wins.  I can't remember how well it did financially, I assume it did fine but of course no one got any serious critical acclaim because the movie is ridiculous.  No one that is except John Williams whose score was nominated for an Oscar.  I guess he's the big winner here.  The Patriot is a big, stupid, fun movie that's too new and violent to be enjoyed by the old folks who still watch movies like In Harm's Way and Sands of Iwo Jima but maybe one day the old folks of 2050 will sit down and force their grandchildren to sit through this.  And their grandkids will hate every minute of it.


*French and Native American Wars? French and First Nations Wars?  Good thing our woke patrol citizens were only 3 years old when this movie came out.