Re-Evaluating Bad Movies

I enjoy when the lady gets machine gunned 18000 times and still mutters an 'I love you' to Rambo

COBRA (1986)




You're the disease. I’m the cure.

This is where the law ends and I begin.


LOL. What the fuck is this movie? Have SnoBorderZero and Eddie Murphy ever sat down to watch Cobra and wondered how this was supposed to be Beverly Hills Cop?! I don’t think Stallone knew what he wanted to make. It’s a Dirty Harry style cop film but also a slasher film but also a dystopian Mad Max style film. Can the man make up his mind? Genre fusion can be great if there’s a script that can pull it off. This certainly wasn’t it.

Saving that match for just the right moment...

Has anyone ever watched Joe with Peter Boyle? I'm reading Tarantino's Cinema Speculation and he brings up how his parents took him to see it when he was 7. I watched it yesterday, it's such a bonkers movie. I suppose you would compare it to Taxi Driver (Joe came out first) in that it's about a guy who rebels against the society around him but everything about it is so mixed up, it doesn't even know what message it's trying to deliver.

My thought was, does Joe even need to be in the movie? Why not just make the dad into a vengeful killer? It felt like each one was given half of a developed character, the dad being boring but mad because his daughter ODed and Joe being a right-wing maniac because, well just because. And the last twenty minutes of the movie are something else, I literally laughed out loud when the credits rolled.

Fat Man and Little Boy (1989)


No. This isn't my rock band with SnoBorderZero. It is Roland Joffé's shitty ass Oppenheimer movie. How many high school students must have suffered through this snoozefest of a biopic? Sadly, it also wastes the talents of a great cast. Paul Newman. John Cusack. Laura Dern. John McClane's wife. I guess Nolan won this battle.

HARDCORE (1979)




I’m unsure if this movie was made as a joke or not. George C. Scott stars as an overly conservative and religious father whose runaway teenage daughter turns into an underground porn actress. Scott and his fists leave his quiet town in Michigan for the hellish streets of Southern California to track down his child.

At its core, it’s unclear which message writer-director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) is trying to deliver. If this is a warning about human trafficking, it totally fails. If it’s a satire of the 1970’s porn industry, it didn’t explore it deep enough. If it’s a critique of the sexually repressed right-wing, why cast George C. Scott? The audience is certainly not on Schrader’s side.

Hardcore was produced by John Milius (Red Dawn) and he has been quoted as saying that Hardcore had a wonderful script that was squandered by Schrader’s amateur direction. George C. Scott shared a similar sentiment.

On a technical level, the movie is perfectly fine, so their comments might seem a bit puzzling. But I understand what they mean. Schrader’s direction is unfocused. There are two infamous scenes that illustrate this. First, is the one of Scott watching his daughter’s porn film. That scene has been parodied to death due to Scott’s overacting. Schrader clearly had no control over his actor on set, but he had no sense to edit around it. The other is one in which Scott goes “undercover” as a porn producer. That is the scene that made me question if the movie was a joke or not. Scott played the scene totally straight in spite of the fact that everything around him (including his own wardrobe) was played as a gag. Schrader had no directorial authority whatsoever.

That said, I wouldn’t call Hardcore a bad movie. It’s thoroughly entertaining and George C. Scott is quite compelling. Schrader had everything working against him but I guess that wonderful script saved him at the end.

It came and went on Tubi and you missed it. Step up your game, sir.

NO HOLDS BARRED (1989)




I was told this is PG Cooper’s favorite movie. Well — second favorite. Mulholland Drive is number one in his heart.

No Holds Barred stars Hulk Hogan as the Ripper.

I know PG Cooper is gonna ignore this post, like he does with all wrestling content that’s posted here, but I’m still gonna go off on a tangent. Maybe thebtskink will get something out of this.

So Hulk Hogan plays the Ripper. Is the Ripper any different than Thunderlips from Rocky III or Hulk Hogan himself? No. The Ripper is just Hulk Hogan under another name, like when he went as Hollywood Hogan on WCW. More puzzling is the cross promotion between No Holds Barred and the then WWF. The Ripper’s heel is Tiny Lister as Zeus. This Zeus character was actually on WWF as Macho Man Randy Savage’s tag team and Slim Jim eating partner. Now imagine you’re PG Cooper in 1989 watching Hulkamania go up against Macho Man and Zeus that’s a buildup to this theatrically released No Holds Barred movie. It actually opened at #2 at the box office, behind Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. So PG Cooper goes watch this movies. There’s no Randy Savage. There’s no WWF. Hulk Hogan is now the Ripper. What the fuck is this? Even more puzzling, after the movie came out, WWF did the PPV event, No Holds Barred: The Movie/The Match, in which Hulk Hogan and Zeus have one last match. Zeus was never seen again until he came back as Z-Gangsta on WCW. Can we get a Dark Side of the Ring on Zeus??

Anyway — in the movie, the Ripper is targeted by an evil TV executive. No. Seriously. This TV executive tries to steal Ripper from his competitor by trying to kidnap him. My favorite scene in the movie is when Hulk gets locked into a limo, so he literally explodes out of the roof of the limo, beats up a group of thugs and one of them shits their pants. I almost died laughing. I can’t find the whole scene, but the important part has been uploaded for Doomsday and SnoBorderZero to watch in disbelief.





After the evil TV executive fails to kidnap the Ripper, he sends out Zeus to rape Ripper’s girlfriend (played by Joan Severance, who was too good for this movie) and cripple Ripper’s brother (played by Mark Pellegrino of PG Cooper’s fav Mulholland Drive). In his review for the movie, Roger Ebert said, “isn’t Hulk Hogan a character for children?” lol. Also, every critic on the planet in 1989 singled out the scene in which Hulk Hogan cries while his crippled brother lays on a hospital bed. I can’t find the scene, so enjoy the doogie scene again.





So now, the Ripper has no choice but to wrestle Zeus on national television. If this were a real sports movie, this would be the most crucial part of the movie, but I guess this was just the appetizer for the PPV event. Van Damme fighting a terminally ill Raul Julia was more exciting than this. But I guess Street Fighter is a real movie compared to No Holds Barred.

To sum it up, was there a point to No Holds Barred? Well, if spending $8 million to promote a PPV event was worth it to Vince McMahon, then sure. The rest of us can pretend that Suburban Commando was Hulk Hogan’s first movie.

I'm pretty sure Hogan only became Hollywood Hulk Hogan when he turned heel and joined the NWO,so the new name did accompany a character change.

Also fuck Hulk Hogan. A boring in-ring worker and an asshole politicker who screwed fellow talent, the promotion, and the fans. Bret Hart said it best: "Do I like Hulk Hogan? No I don't, I think he's a phony piece of shit."

Yeah I'd be talking about him in much more acceptable terms (but still critical) if the racism didn't leak out in the Gawker suit.