NoWo600Wo: Good. Bad. Ugly. Etcetera.

Last weekend I learned that there is something scarier than the concept of unkillable Nazi zombies.

Good

Outpost

Outpost features the scariest historical zombies since the conquistadors in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. A man working for the C.I.A (I think) hires a group of mercenaries to take him to a currently war-torn area in Eastern Europe because he is on the hunt for something the Nazis left behind. The mercenaries believe he is just hunting for gold, but he is actually searching for a machine that controls time and energy, a project similar to what Einstein was working on before he abandoned it because of the nuclear bomb. A group of Nazi ghost/golems/zombies are protecting the place and start picking off people one by one in really gross ways. Outpost is somehat similar to a John Carpenter film, except that I think if anything, we get to know the characters in Outpost even less. Which is possibly the film’s only flaw.

Bad

Airborne

This is a movie that got played a lot on TBS when I was a teenager. One of it’s taglines is “the first rock n’ roll rollerblading movie”, although if you check out the poster, it has at least three taglines. It is a super cheesy movie that has never been released on DVD , but somehow Netflix Autoplay has it (you think it would be since a young Jack Black and Seth Green are in it and companies like to cash in on that sort of celebrity, but my boyf reckons there are some song rights issues). Given the fact that just about everything in this movie seems super-dated to the early 1990s doesn’t help the cheesy factor. It’s your standard teenage movie about overcoming the odds, or bullies, or being a California extreme sports kid who spouts surfer dude and Buddhist philosophies in strange non-sequiturs that is forced to move to Cincinatti. This is one of the few teenage films where the hero is rightfully mocked by his new classmates. Our hero’s name is Mitchell Goosen, which isn’t a very surfer dude name. He is dull and can only speak of waves. His cousin, played by a very awkward and not-cute-yet Seth Green is a kid still trying to figure out his identity, as noted by the fashion montage to “I’m Too Sexy” by Right Said Fred at one point in the movie. I felt extremely embarrassed for Seth Green throughout this entire movie. Jack Black is one of the bullies, and you get to see that he’s been doing his hyper persona for a good 16 years now, although he is actually kind of funny in Airborne. Anyway, Mitchell teams up with his bullies at the end to help defeat the bullies from the prep school in some downhill rollerblading race. Seriously, all this film was missing was serious class issue overtones and that speech from Wet Hot American Summer about defeating the evil “other” team from the other camp. Directed by Rob Bowman from The X-Files. Seriously.

(I would have posted videos of both the Seth Green fashion montage and the speech from WHAS, but Youtube has removed the fashion montage due to song rights, and I can’t find anything other than 10 minute clips of WHAS).

Ugly

The Room

Meet your new worst movie ever that is scarier than unkillable Nazi zombies. I don’t even know where to begin with this. The Room is a drama that tries hard to be a Tennessee Williams-type play but fails on a massive level. Although this movie was apparently made in 2003, the clothes and the look of the entire movie screams “early-mid 1990s Cinemax/Skinemax movie!” Presumably due to budget constraints (I’m not sure I’d consider $6 million budget constraints though), Tommy Wiseau writes, directs, produces, and stars in this movie as Johnny, a well-to-do banker and relatively nice guy with an accent of undeterminable origin who is being cheated on by his girlfriend/fiancee of 7 years, Lisa. Due to budget constraints, I’m sure the entire cast was found from a Craigslist post. There are a few gratuitous, overlong sex scenes. The first one happens within the first 5 minutes of the film and caused my uterus to shrivel up and die. The soundtrack for the film sounds like Color Me Badd, and Johnny pulls out a cassette recorder at some point, so this kind of proves that Mr. Wiseau’s points of reference ceased to exist around 1993. Despite all this and the rampant misogynistic overtones of the entire film, it is highly entertaining and good for a laugh. Just a warning again though: consider whether or not you want to become celibate before watching though. The sex scenes are that gross.

Etcetera

His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th

Eh, I liked the documentary on the Jason X DVD better. But I guess this is good if you want to see more interviews with the cast members of the series rather than horror critics and historians

Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives

Hey, I finally found a Friday the 13th movie other than Jason X to like! This one had likeable characters, and jokes that actually worked. The only things I did not get however was that Jason went after two female characters who were basically good people and good camp counselors, he tended to terrorize children in this one, and he walked at a really brisk pace (but he’s Jason, so he’s constantly a monster-man with purpose). I’m slowly working my way through the series, and none of the video stores had Part V, so we jumped ahead to Part VI.

I should probably recognize that trying to piece together a reasonable mythology for the Friday the 13th movies is not a good idea. This isn’t Lost, Supernatural, or Harry Potter.