Movie Review: Don 2 looks seriously slick

It's a bit perplexing to see just how young, fit and fresh Shah Rukh Khan looks in the promos of his films.

We saw the glaring gulf between the way he looked in the Ra One promo earlier this year and the way he looked on TV with Karan Johar or supporting his IPL team, and now we see him again, looking lethal in the first trailer for Don 2. Maybe those who do makeup and CGI for Rajnikanth are working their magic in SRK's films, or maybe King Khan only saves up his shininess for when it counts
the most.

Either way, the Don 2 trailer looks pretty darned sharp.
We see a speedboat slice through verdant green waters as Khan, in over- baritoned voiceover, tells us
that his enemies thought he was dead and now he's back and ready for more.

We catch peeks of Khan in tattooed longhaired Bangkok junkie/underpaid chinesevan waiter mode, both of which make sense as a disguise while the wounded tiger licks his wounds. A word about the voice, though: in a sequel to a film where he stepped into Amitabh Bachchan's shoes -- which seemed a couple sizes too big for him at the time -- this voiceover seems to be yet another tribute from Khan, trying to sound a bit like that man who keeps proving he'll never be too old.

And then, just as he uses up all the gravel in his throat mouthing the 'remember who I am, I'm the Don' lines from that classic song used smartly here as dialogue, he smiles and says 'boom', a car explodes on cue, and then it's Shah Rukh all the way.

The rest is standard blockbuster fare, explosions and slow motion turns to the camera, maximised for dramatic effect. But there's absolutely no mistaking the fact that this film looks very, very slick indeed. Clearly Farhan Akhtar's out to prove a point, and so far, he looks like he knows what he's doing. Wish they didn't throw in the weird Khan smirk at the very end, though.

What do you think of the Don 2 trailer? Do you think SRK will give us the year's biggest blockbuster with Don 2 or Ra.One? Do you think director Farhan Akhtar, who has given us unforgettable films like Dil Chahata Hai and Lakshya, and Don will be fourth time lucky?

Don 2 Trailer

Badi: The Turkish E.T. (1983)

I guess I shouldn't really be surprised that this movie exists.  It's from Turkey, it's a ripoff of a far-superior American film, it came out a year after said film was released, it'd take a board full of psychologists who specialize in deviant thought patterns to decipher its script...and it makes Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam (aka: Turkish Star Wars) seem trite by comparison.

In other words, this is a film for the ages.  Even moreso than Melissa Matheson's little thing I can't even remember the name of right now so it can't be important so let's move on....

Badi (also known as Turkish E.T. for reasons you will soon discover) doesn't give us the same story we were made familiar with back in 1982 - no, this movie has its own agenda and makes huge strides in the world of E.T.sploitation for the fact that we're not dealing with an Xtro that was all over the place in terms of story.  Instead, Badi makes no bones about offering up something that, while ostensibly for kids in its simple story, operates along the same lines as 1971's Willie Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.

I'll get to what I mean shortly (though some of you may already be able to hazard a guess), but for now gird your loins, here's the plot: Ali (Tolga Sönmez) is your typical young Turkish kid who lives in the bombed-out remains of his Turkish hometown where everything - including his school - is in a state of disrepair.  Bülent (Cengiz Sayhan) is another typical young Turkish kid who lives in the bombed-out remains of blabblahblah.... 

The only exciting things about their lives are the fact that Bülent shares his home with a trio of sibs, your typical Turkish Mom and a dad who has a mustache Stalin would have been proud of.  He is also one of those abusive dads that they write sitcoms about.  Yeah.  And Ali lives with his mom and his pet bird, with whom he talks constantly in chirps and whistles and clicks and stuff.  Apparently they have deep, meaningful conversations, too.  Good for them.

Then one night Badi (that's the alien), is left behind by his fellow hideous monstrosities when the Turkish Authorities or investigators or night guards or whatever disturb them and they head outta Dodge.  He is discovered by Ali, who then shows him (or her or it or whatever) to Bülent, and this sets off a whole list of E.T.-ish things to check off until we get to the finale as the Turkish Seti-wannabes come after Badi, then he is pursued by townsfolk who carry all kinds of garden implements to beat the alien and the kids and everybody else with, I guess.  Oh my gosh - what will ever become of Badi??

Nothing too out-of-the-ordinary-sounding, is it?  I mean, anyone familiar with E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial should know the score.  It would be hard to make this something that is a billion light years away from its source, but somehow director Zafer Par and writer Baris Pirhasan seem to specialize in a gritty urban melodramatic face for our kiddie fantasy that involves death, violence and occasional forays into Scooby-Doo territory.

In fact, during the course of a single two-minute scene, we fall witness to Bülent's mustachioed dad getting ready to slap the Turkish off what he thinks is his own kid's butt in a stupid alien costume, only to get blasted by alien crotch smoke (I'll get to that), which makes Dad run around with about 7 or 8 others through a maze of hallway doors and leave a small toddler alone with the alien menace, looking as confused as Turkishly possible.

That's the kind of directorial choices that win you the Turkish Academy Award, folks.

In fact, there are so many incredibly distraught and distressed kids and adults in Badi that for a while you'd be forgiven if you thought you were watching Turkish Requiem For A Dream.  I was thinking such when a scene popped up early on where a Turkish cop shoots a dog that Eli was playing with moments before.  This makes others gather outside the barb wire-surrounded school Eli and Bülent go to in order to witness the spectacle of this same dog lying dead in the street.

...alright, hang on here.  A dead dog is in this movie.  And I don't mean a model or mock-up or a Russian chapka someone teased out to look like it had legs.  I mean someone in this film (I'm guessing) took the trouble of taking this poor defenseless mutt that hurt no one else, offed him, threw him in the street and shouted, "ROLL 'EM!"

That's right, Mister and Missus SPCA; this dog is actually dead.  Unalive. Non-breathing. Passed on. Deceased. Expired. Demised. Bereft of life. Resting in peace. No more. Ceased to be. Gone to meet his maker. A stiff. Pushing up daisies. His metabolic processes are now history. He's off the twig. Kicked the bucket.  Shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.  THIS IS AN EX-DOG!

It would seem there are no Turkish animal rights groups around to make sure anyone who is not a Turkish human is safe and sound, so we are subjected to dead dogs.  I won't say anymore on this, only that Ruggero Deodato wouldn't have gotten into a lot of the trouble he found himself in if he had just filmed Cannibal Holocaust in the wild, untamed jungles of Turkey. That's all.

Then when the scene comes where Badi is feeding Ali/Turkish Elliott #1 some chunks of grayish food-like stuff that he chews and spills from his mouth as he speaks...I felt (un)comfortably certain of what happened to that same dog not long after its last scene.

As far as the human acting, it's about as good as to be expected, seeing that everyone is performing their lines around the bombed-out shells of downtown London during The Blitz.  Or that's what it LOOKS like; never have you seen so many crumbling walls, rubble-strewn streets, piece-meal houses and run-down city blocks in your life.  At least not since the last documentary on World War II.  Near as I can tell, producer Serif Gören wanted to get as much realism into this project as he possibly could, so decided to forgo sets and just roll cameras after the results of a particularly bad instance of friendly fire or something.  Thank God this guy didn't film the 1982 E.T.; California would have been bombed clear into the ocean.

But neither is this Turkish Hope And Glory, so expect no ironic, life-affirming commentary.  Rather, the Turks here just handle things like another day at the office.  The bombed-out, crumbling, collapsing-into-itself office.

Again, the acting - at least in physical terms - is fine; you get the sense that Ali and Bülent (our tag-team Elliotts) really are freaked-out by this crotch-smoking  alien (I'll get there, don't worry...), and the fact that Bülent's overly-mustached Dad is more than willing to beat every living thing into submission at a whip-stitch....but is still horrified by this Badi thing.  Even moreso than at this rolled-up Turkish rug shoved underneath his nose.

That's another thing, though; the family dynamic in this flick is all wrong for E.T.sploitation; in the original E.T., Elliott was living in a divorced household with just mom, older brother and his booze-chugging, pill-popping younger sister(okay, just Drew Barrymore, but still...).  Here, Ali and Bülent have so many parents, siblings and other family members hanging around each house that we have the makings of a Turkish sitcom fit for ABC Friday Night Family!  Ali even has a grandmama, fercryinoutloud!  Eli/Turkish Elliott #1 probably hoped and prayed for a divorce so he could get the family unit split up and stand a better chance at getting into the water bucket and coffee can they have for a bathroom.

But such family drama is unimportant in this film.  Come on; we came here to see the alien.

Ironically, this is where the differences show not only between Badi and E.T., but between Badi and Turkish Star Wars.  For Turkish Star Wars, every costume rental store throughout Turkey got raided, and most of the populace from Ankara to Istanbul was fitted with a fuzzy suit, Halloween mask, gladiator armor, flowing robe, or any combination of same.

In Badi?  One costume.  Period.

And what a costume it is - Carlo Rambaldi may have gotten some awards for his work, but it's THIS suit people will remember.

For the greenhorn, let me describe it this way: picture a Don Post E.T. mask that's been turned inside-out and slapped over the head of a child.  That same child is wrapped in a  brown plastic trash bag with a hubcap taped to his chest.  Then the whole get-up is spray-painted with tan and yellow Krylon - 5 or 6 cans - and there you go.  Oh, and jam a fire extinguisher between its legs...then while the spray paint fumes are still making the kid woozy, have him walk around and start filming.  AND EVERYONE ACT ENCHANTED, DAMMIT!

No wonder the adults are so terrified at this thing: being curled in a fetal position and screaming until you're hoarse is a natural response to what looks like a hybrid between Bat Boy from "Weekly World News", a seahorse and the baby from Eraserhead.  That's enough to make Lucy Van Pelt charge more than a nickel for the psychiatric help needed to get over such a sight.

As far as dialogue goes, the copy I have is pure Turkish at its finest without English subs or dubs - rendering me at the mercy of the visuals envisioned by Pirhasan's script and Par's direction of same.  Bizarre is the name of the game, as is evidenced in one scene where Eli, Bülent and all their little Turkish friends use Badi to break into an amusement park at night, turn on all the lights and rides with E.T.S.P. and play to their hearts' delight as we cut back to the folks at home, who continue screaming and/or just being catatonic.  You think it was a close call that David Lynch didn't direct Return Of the Jedi?  Here's a glimpse into what his vision of E.T. would look like.

By the end, various bad guy adults come after Badi with clubs, rakes, hoes, scythes, sticks and other instruments with which to examine the alien then beat him and everyone else in a 50-yard radius. Taking the initiative, all the kids bundle up Short 'N' Smoky and run outside to find an old man with a shopping cart and, instead of taking the cart and running, wait for the old man to lay down and die - which the old man thoughtfully does - then everyone piles in and E.T.S.P. strikes again and the cart flies off into the sky in what has to be the absolute worse special effect of a shopping cart filled with kids and crummy aliens you've ever seen.  Guess that bicycles are hard to come by in Turkey.

Speaking of which, would you be at all surprised that this effect looks less convincing than would the same scene animated with construction paper cutouts of the same scene?  I thought not, but I still wanted to put that out there.

Then Badi is reunited with his fellow ugly mutants and hitches a ride home after a tearful farewell with his Earthbound homies.  I greatly suspect that in order to get the realistic tears for this scene, the director told them that the dog earlier was shot by each of their parents.

And so ends Badi, a movie so damned bad that I'll be switched if I didn't find it entertaining.  Turkey may not be the best country for replicating our movies, but they sure know how to  make such failed efforts interesting.

I guess "interesting" is the right word to use seeing that Badi makes itself such a wild exercise in skewed decisions and misrepresentation that it All but collapses under the weight of its intended E.T.sploitation moniker and exploits more of Turkey and what it believes is movie magic than it does Stevie Spielberg's works.

I'd watch Badi again in a minute, and more than willingly inflict it on friends and acquaintances without warning or provocation.  It's just that much of a charmer.

A neurotic charmer, yes, but a charmer anyways.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to write a scathing letter to Harry Bromley Davenport, the writer/director of Xtro, to tell him that when it comes to E.T.spolitation, he best turn his eyes and intentions further East.

As must we all, dear Badi.  As must we all.

Movie Review: Chillar Party is enjoyable

A motley group of kids. An endearing
canine companion. A waif busy washing
cars to earn a living. Middle-class families
who are insensitive to both human beings
and animals. Politicians acting in an inane
and obtuse manner. And kids who feel
they can take on the world. All the
ingredients necessary to create a
melodramatic potboiler have been sourced
and secured into the script. Is this one
more 'childrens' film with morals woven
into the script hoping to see the audience
in tears?
Thankfully no. Chillar Party may not be free
of the obligatory good versus evil theme
which persistently makes its way into this
genre (at least in Bollywood) yet it aims at
generating laughter, without punching
you in the gut.
Starting with the ubiquitous nicknames
sometimes provided by parents or colony
mates, Mumbai's [ Images ] Chandan Nagar
Society has its band of bratty boys named
as encyclopedia, secondhand, panvati etc.
The reason for these names could be as
varied as a personality trait to the family's
financial status. A white Pomeranian
owned by a cranky senior citizen turns
them into dog-haters for the rest of their
life. In this scenario enters Phatka, a skinny
lad with determination and attitude. Both
traits imperative for children who work on
the streets of Mumbai and survive by their
wits alone. His only companion and friend
in the entire world is Bhidu a lovable black
and white pariah.
Phatka survives largely on a diet of tea and
glucose biscuits and keeps to himself. He
sports a ragged yellow t-shirt, doesn't
crave for anything but he's devoted to his
pooch. The kids direct their anger on both
Phatka and Bhidu, but Phatka remains
resilient not wanting to give up this job --
his only means of survival.
Then the bratty middle-class kids realize
the extent of their nastiness and try hard
to make amends. But Phatka isn't a
pushover. Will he relent? Or is this
senseless feud likely to continue?
Our protagonist Phatka played by Irrfan
Khan [ Images ] doesn't have much to say
for himself. When he speaks it's 'tapori
language' picked up from watching the
latest movies. Even as one laughs at his
philosophies about life it's the expressive
brown eyes which speak volumes about
his anguish and loneliness. One sequence
when he fears his beloved pooch has
disappeared he breaks down but with
quiet restraint.
The rest of the brats are on the verge of
adolescence; where they're old enough to
question their parents, too young to rebel
openly. Pre-pubescent, their lives revolve
around cricket and not the opposite sex.
They're real (unlike the kids we've seen in
YRF and Dharma productions), they
grimace, they grumble, but they remain
kids.
The co-directors Nitesh Tiwari and Vikas
Bahl successfully recreate a poignant and
touching tale about the bonds children
forge among themselves, their casual
indifference towards school, parents and
academics and their ability to stay focused
when somebody they deeply care for has
become the casual victim of an adult's
manipulations.
The film has a few really fun moments,
especially when a chance remark such as
'Toh chadddi mein ghoomu kya' invokes a
'chaddi march' with a few hundred kids.
Or the shameless way they manipulate
their parents sans any qualms.
Many 'values' and 'morals' have been
woven into the script. Such as how people
employ child labour without batting an
eyelash. Or how there is no respite for a
daily wage earner even when he's
shivering with fever. Although it could
have been handled in a subtler fashion, but
it forms an integral part of the film.
If the screenplay suffers it is due to the so-
called climax (is any kiddie film complete
without it) which seems foisted. The
children morph into young adults abruptly.
As they mouth dialogues which don't seem
to come from their heart, they lose their
charm which is what attracted us to them
in the first place. The politician and his
goon don't just appear absurd to a child,
they are bizarre villainous caricatures who
ideally should have induced fear but they
turn into mere irritants.
Chillar Party is an enjoyable film with plenty
of laughs. Do watch this, unless of course
you hate kids.

King Kong Escapes (1967)

Now, here we have an archetype. A landmark. The kind of a movie that would set the tone for these same kind of movies to come.

I already know that this is probably one of the most reviled, most hated movies centering on Merian C. Cooper's 1933 creation known to modern man. Why is that? Simply put, because it is a story that really doesn't need, doesn't depend on and doesn't even care about the ape of the title - a King named Kong.

Like so many told and twice-told and thrice-told tales, versions get so diluted and re-imagined we don't even get a sense of who is the main headliner of the piece. Kinda like the King James version of the Bible.

In fact, between 1933 and 2005, we've had no less than seven variations on a theme about-a dees beeg monkey. Of course when it comes to Japan, once they get wind of an idea, they will retell the ever-lovin' heck out of it. Not only have they done this with giant monster stories, but also with war stories, cop stories, crime stories, Star Wars stories, invading alien stories, and any other movie that involves large-scale miniature sets and at least one out-of-place-looking American.

When it comes to King Kong Escapes, the problems are many, the solutions few and for as much as Toho Studios wants to pretend otherwise, this is one beeg monkey that is just a beeg prop.

A prop in a story that involves Bond-like villains, nefarious dames, explosions, deadly gadgets and wide-eyed Americans.

And did I mention this is also based on a cartoon show?

Oh yeah; Toei Company created a short-lived cartoon series in 1966 for Rankin-Bass that utilized the beeg money into a beeg playmate for Bobby Bond and his family. Of course, when this live-action movie tie-in came to be, the Bonds were totally excised from the story and a whole new storyline was substituted, featuring nothing that involved cartoons, save for the acting level.

Forget about it, Jake; it's TohoTown.

Story time: the evil Doctor Who...no, not Tom Baker; this is a white-haired, leering evil guy (Hideyo Amamoto) in a black suit left over from Blofeld's last garage sale. He is hot to mine a radioactive element called - oddly enough - Element X. For what? It's not important; it's for evil world-taking-over purposes. In order to mine it from the frozen lands of the North Pole (presumably without Santa's permission), he constructs a gigantic mechanical King Kong to do so...because he can, is the best answer. However, Klang Kong (as I call him) is unable to dig very well (cheap Japanese crap) and Doc W's little helper Madame X (Mie Hama) kidnaps the real Kong from Mondo Island (not Kong Island, don't be silly...). So, a real ape to replace a mechanical one who didn't even work in freezing temps in irradiated conditions. Good job, X.

As an insurance policy, W and X kidnap Lt. Susan Watson (Linda Miller), Lt. Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada) and Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason). Seems Big 'N' Hairy developed a crush on Susan when she and the boys went native on Mondo Island, and he does what she tells him to. After much ne'er-do-well plotting, scheming, threatening and other stuff, Real Kong escapes and hightails his banana-lovin' keister for Tokyo (as if there were a doubt he would). Susan and company also break out of North Pole oppression, but W and his minions follow with Klang Kong, Susan is grabbed up by the faux-bot promptly and taken high atop Tokyo Tower (since it would have cost too much to get The Empire State Building overseas) and a battle ensues between Kong and his robotic replica.

Ishirô Honda rears his directorial head yet again! The man responsible for lensing epics such as Gojira (that's Godzilla if yer nasty), Rodan, Mothra, Gorath, Varan The Unbelievable, Atragon, Dagora The Space Monster, Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster and War Of The Gargantuas yet again brings us another clash of rubbery titans. Give you this much: Honda knew to stick with what he did best. Not one location looks real - from islands, to arctic wastelands to downtown Tokyo. In fact, I was disappointed they didn't leave a tube of model glue lying at the corner of the screen.

With our beeg a-boy, though, they had to do more skimping than they did on their sets. Lazy, glazed-over eyes and a face that combines Joe Don Baker and Ernest Borgnine with a crew cut are the least of our ape's problems, though. Eiji Tsuburaya and company made it look like Kong (both metal and non-metal versions) had a lot wrong in the moving-and-realistic-interpretation department. Even if this isn't a stop-motion version like we grew up with, I still have a lot of trouble believing they're giving us The Eighth Wonder Of The World here. More like something you'd see on a platform in that amusement park KISS performed at that one time.

Klang Kong at least has a better time of it in terms of looks. If you're gonna make a mechanical robot version of Kong, then this is the version you'd want. Those glowing eyes sold me, as well as his stiff movements every time he attacks. I guess it makes sense that you should expect Klang Kong to move like that. The real deal, though? Not so much.

dubbedly possible. A shout-out goes out to Amamoto as Doc Who. What? WHO! White hair, Casey Kasem good looks, arched eyebrows and a face that goes from zero to Snidely Whiplash in point-six seconds, he takes evil to a whole new level with a mean voice that lends itself to a sneer. Everyone else is just a bit playa and even Mie Hama as X to his Who can't best him.

A word about Hama - you probably know her best as Kissy Suzuki from You Only Live Twice and/or Fumiko Sakurai in her 1962 go-around with Fuzzy Boy, King Kong Vs. Godzilla. You may even know her from her pictorial layout in Playboy - the first one to feature a pretty Asian lady such as herself. She certainly has a special something, that's for sure. But even playing up her evil villainess role to the hilt as she does, she just doesn't make anyone forget who the main villain is...or who the kids are here to see.

The Americans cast here...well, to be honest, I'd never heard of them before this and I don't remember seeing them anywhere else. Of course, I'd never seen Rhodes Reason's many TV Western appearances nor Linda Miller's sole other movie appearance in If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do? - of course after being in a movie with a bovine-eyed ape, anything else is bound to be a letdown.

What about the writing, though? Scripter Takeshi Kimura gave the world such well-loved entertainments as The H-Man, The Mysterians, The Human Vapor and even Godzilla versus The Smog Monster, versus Gigan, versus Megalon and versus All Monsters, too. It's not like he doesn't know his stuff, but the choice to play everything like it was a spy movie is one of those things that makes you wonder why, indeed, they bothered. Seeing how popular spy flicks with dark cackling villains and sinister tools of destruction were at the time, I guess it made sense to put everything in gigantic hairy ape terms WITHOUT Sean Connery. And I'll bet you a golden gun that Mie Hama's involvement was just one of those cinematic co-inky-dinks that happened to happen. You know how The Biz can be.

Still, with all of this and all of the large-scale-small-scale action, King Kong Escapes comes up a disappointment. Why? Because of one simple factor - it wants to be two different types of movies and never mixes into a whole. Espionage capers and giant monster rampages never seem to do very well when mixed - even with Doctor Who cackling and arching his brow at every provocation, he is not enough of an anchor to give the viewer a reason to think everything is coming together just fine and dandy. It's like getting the film reels mixed together when you're not sure if they should even be in the same multiplex, much less on the same screen.

And with all of the other intrigue and stuff going on, something happens that should never happen in a King Kong movie - Kong is sometimes forgotten about for moments at a time!  HOW CAN YOU FORGET ABOUT A GIGANTIC MONKEY?  This is the movie that answers that question.

Kong purists usually rank Escapes on the far low end of their scale when it comes to what they will accept their King in. Badness is all but guaranteed for your monster movie, though, when its premiere in North America is on a double-billing with that classic Don Knotts comedy The Shakiest Gun in the West. Gotta wonder which one played first.

As far as I'm concerned, if you have movies like King Kong Vs. Godzilla, Godzillas' Revenge, Destroy All Monsters and so forth in your collection and love them like your own children, Escapes is just another addition to the family...even if it is the red-headed stepchild of the group. It's still one of the gang, so you let things slide.

Not that the rest of humanity is as forgiving; after the critical drubbing it got in its initial release, Escapes didn't exactly make the most of its pedigree; director, writer, FX and everything right down to the cinematography may have been the same if not similar, but it just didn't have the one thing that every other Kong movie had: a sense of fun.

And no, pointing and laughing isn't the same as "fun".

Waterloo (1970)

I'm about to slip on my water wings and tread on into touchy international waters with the following declaration: not every foreign war movie is good, or important...or even necessary.

And one of the worst offenders of this idea are The Napoleonic Wars.

Who cares about The Napoleonic Wars anyway?  Well, the French, I guess.  And anyone else who just has to watch anything that has Napoleon in it...or anyone with a big funny black hat.

I don't know what it is but it seems every incarnation of Naploeon "The Little General" Bonaparte and his campaign for military immortality collapses under the weight of its own subject matter.

No, you're right: movies like Time Bandits and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure had our short superior officer in it, and they were more than successful.  They were generally comedies, though.  I guess it stands to reason that any film that refuses to take Napoleon seriously is in the right.

Why?  Apparently we've been conditioned to believe that because every delusional nutcase in a  movie, TV show or cartoon is going to think they're ol' Boney, walking around with those big funny hats and their hand stuck in their shirt, the characterization of Nappy as an insane-with-power megalomaniac is a given.

Therefore, any movie that tries to take him seriously is going to fail because we - the audience - are going to go in and expect a comedy...and we're gonna be quite disappointed when we don't get one.

Oh, I've seen a couple of serious meditations on our Military Crepe Suzette in films like the 1955 French film simply called Napoléon, a film with a big cast and so well-revered, apparently, that I was able to find a copy at my local dollar store.  It wasn't very good. 

Then there was a 1927 silent film directed by no less a master of the craft than Abel Gance, also called Napoleon.  It was re-released in the early Eighties and was a smash hit because, from what I gather, of the virtue of it being a re-discovered and re-released silent movie.  Never saw this one.  It might have been good....

However, for all I know, Abel might have been able to pull off a rarity in a world where the norm is the movie that I present to you today.

What makes Waterloo such a fallen souffle?  A couple of things: for one, we have another international co-production on our hands, this one between Italy and The Soviet Union (that's Russia, for those of you born after perestroika), which has the feel of both Laurel AND Hardy directing the same short subject.  Blindfolded.

And also, the star is a man for whom moderation and restraint were just the extra-point words in Scrabble: one Rod Steiger.  Yes, he was a fantastic actor. Won awards and dazzled in The Pawnbroker and In The Heat Of The Night.  However, his casting as Napoleon Bonaparte became one of the most....

Well, I'll get to that, but right now let's get to the matter at hand: After defeating France and imprisoning Napoleon (Steiger) on Elba, ending two decades of war, Europe and Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) are both shocked to find The Bone Man has flown ze coupe and caused the French Army to defect from the King back to him.  Whoopsie.  The best of the British generals, the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer), had previously defeated Nap's best generals in Spain and Portugal, but has never faced The Short Soldier himself.  With a rag-tag makeshift conglomeration of an Anglo-Allied army to lead along with armed Prussians, Wellington stands between Napoleon and Shorty's supremacy, whereas an allied victory could bring long term peace to Europe. The deciding battlefield: Little Big Horn!  Nah, just kidding - it's Waterloo...but the comparison's the same.

Now there's nothing like a straightforward war story - even historic ones can give us the quality of a  well-mounted history lesson that would certainly give students enough to take notes on in class.  And director Sergei Bondarchuk manages to give us a lavish, spacious view of war and epic battles on the scale of Gone With The Wind or Doctor Zhivago (probably more of one than the other).

The problem is that Sergei is best remembered as the director who gave the world (or at least The Soviet Union) the massive seven hour-plus adaptation of the classic Leo Tolstoy book War And Peace, technically one of the most expensive movies ever made - cha-chinging in at $100 million dollars (which was a lot of rubles back in the Sixties).  However, it doesn't count because it was all subsidized by the Soviet government, meaning they picked up Sergei's tab and everything...you know, like Canada gave their film-makers tax breaks to create masterpieces like Gas, Utilities and Falling In Love Again.

Bondarchuk, however, didn't have such a luxury this time out since Big Comrade wasn't watching and able to keep everything under wraps.  See, way back when, War And Peace was a home-team project not meant to be scrutinized for all its bookkeeping practices outside of Red Square.  Waterloo, also having to be shared with La Italia, became a somewhat more public affair, with its budget looming near $25 million - still only a quarter of War And Peace's bill, but nevertheless a huge amount for any movie in 1970, especially when being shared by The Boot Country...where would they get their money to make the next 15 peplum epics? 

Bondarchuk also co-wrote this, along with writers Vittorio Bonicelli (who also worked on Barberella, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and a pretty interesting 1986 movie about Jesus' trial and resurrection called The Inquiry) and H.A.L. Craig (Anzio, Fraulein Doktor, Lion Of The Desert and The Message...yes, I know; another movie for another time).  So along with the idea that there were three people wiriting this movie, it works about as well if they each wrote theri own version of the same story, then mixed up the pages.  Dramatic disjointment comes and goes, dialogue made up of historic soundbytes and broad characterizations make for a story that seems more like a "greatest hits" collection of scenes than an actual film.

Anyway, this was $25 million buckaroos being spent on big-scale battles, intricatlely-choreographed troop movements shown from high overhead shots, gigantic crowd scenes and armies shown in all their lavish widescreen glory, along with men in ornate uniforms and ladies in detailed ball gowns talking about various government-and-war-related topics in meticulously decorated rooms....think it made back its budget?  Nyet; over-compensation meets over-budgeting and duke it out for supremacy, and no one wins.

Thing is, we have a pretty good cast here; including such respected actors as Dan O'Herlihy (whom most readers of this blog will more readily remember as The Old Man who owned most of New Detroit or the lizard-skinned alien who helped Alex Rogan to battle Zur and the Ko'Dan Armada) and some guy named Orson Welles (who was also featured in the 1955 film as a bit player...he did that a lot).  No slouches as far as acting goes; especially seeing as how these men took their responsibilities seriously, treating Waterloo as a serious subject.  Bless their trusting little hearts.

None more so that Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington: this was a good part for any actor, seeing as in real life this particular Duke had quite the interesting life with many a battle fought against those Frenchies.  Not to mention the fact that all this clash of politics, ego, detailed planning and incredible amounts of fighting, in-fighting, disagreements and final controlled chaos made up quite the interesting little story about a man who would later rise to prominence in England's world of politics and leadership.  To say that Plummer embodies such a man is only scratching the surface; after all, he could pull of being The Emperor Of The Universe in only a day's worth of performance (StarCrash) - to be an actual historical figure is a snap.  And Plummer does a smashing job.

Then we have the matter of Rod Steiger.  At this point in his life, having won Oscars, BAFTAs, Davids, Globes, Laurels, Sheckys and Lulus, there was no living with him or the over-inflated opinion of his own creative soul.  He demanded much of his films and those who dare cast him in them.  He had a craft to hone, and creating Napoleon as he does here was apparently a 24/7 job.  A real hard one too, seeing that it looks like he's on the verge of suffering a major aneurysm every moment he's onscreen.  Intensity in your role is usually a good thing...but not when it's your over-riding performance!

Don't get me wrong; Steiger does a good enough job as he dramatically addresses the troops at Elba before departing, and there are small quiet moments here and there where he doesn't say a word...but then he opens his mouth and hams out more effectively than Porky Pig, Babe and Gordy in a sausage factory.  I don't really know a better way to put it, seeing that Waterloo doesn't even care enough about its star's performance to bother keeping enough film in the camera to record him.  But I guess that's more the fault of producer Dino De Laurentiis than it is the fault of....

Wait.  Wait, WHAT???

Dino De Laurentiis produced a war history drama longer than 90 minutes?  Based on his involvement, I would have expected Charles Bronson to play Nappy, Martin Balsam as The Duke Of Wellington and a special cameo by Grant Cramer (you don't know him, never mind...).  Besides which, this is one of Dino's grabs at respectability, producing a film that has more bankable elements in it than your average direct-to-video cop action drama.  Oh, he did this more than once; look at Battle Of The Bulge, The Bible, Serpico, Three Days Of The Condor, Ragtime...oh, and he also produced Bondarchuk's War And Peace, too! 

I guess it was all because Dino wanted to be taken seriously...the man who gave us 1976's King Kong, Amityville II: The Possession, Dune and Orca.  He wanted to be taken seriously with an overblown 2-hour PLUS movie about a battle where the lead actor wanted more attention to him than to the story itself.

No prizes for guessing that this movie didn't even make back HALF of its budget.  Waterloo didn't even earn $2 million of its $25 million tab, and there's a good reason for that: being released in 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam conflict, the last thing anyone wanted to see was a movie that gave the viewer a detailed account of YET ANOTHER war.  In fact, the only movies that did well in the same time period were Robert Altman's M*A*S*H and Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton.  Of course, I have the feeling that they succeeded where Waterloo failed due to the fact that its makers realized heroism and bravado in the face of certain death is not a subject that can be taken seriously...especially when bueracracy is a governing factor.

Everybody moved on (especially De Laurentiis), but maybe not Bondarchuk and Steiger.  One of them would never again direct as large a movie as this and certainly would never be trusted with as gargantuan a budget, and another would never again have their star burn so hot.  This wasn't just a fall from grace, it was a nose dive off the Sears Tower.

Then again, maybe Steiger read the whole script all the way through first, and then realized the only way for this movie to succeed was to downplay the story.

Or maybe Rod was just a raging egomaniac who believed in his own awesomeness, no matter what the circumstance.

Either way, Waterloo had at least one thing going for it: it was aptly named.

Orgy Of The Dead (1965)

You don't want to get me started on Edward D. Wood Jr.; trust me, you do not.  We'd be here forever if I ticked down every reason why I watch his films...and also why I shouldn't.

Incompetence as an art form is only a small part of it.  This is the man who created movies that celebrated Tor Johnson, rambling dialogue, stock footage, transvestism and Bela Lugosi...not necessarily in that order.  Wood had this unusual approach to films, where ADHD is the message, since scenes will flash by onscreen with little or no connection to what came before.

When the only thing that links a series of movies about aliens, zombies and phony psychics is Kelton the Komedy Relief Kop, you know you're in the presence of...something.  Something that may not necessarily be good, but it would at least be memorable.

And for as much as Wood is remembered for his directorial efforts, he was even more prolific as a writer.  Yep, not just scripts but books, dime novels, short stories - a lot of them autobiographical but mostly stories full of action, adventure and ...well, pornography.

Okay, maybe more of some than the others.  But when you've written 26 scripts, 5 books and 9 short stories, then the casual viewer tends to contrast and compare between works to find common threads.

And believe it or not, there were some scripts that came from Wood's pen which he never even bothered to direct.  That's right; some of the stuff Edward D. Wood Jr. scripted ...he outsourced.

Which is what we've got for our example this time out for, you see, Orgy Of The Dead is a story that, apparently, was good enough for Wood to concoct but when the time came to set up the camera, he passed the lensing responsibilities to someone else.  Stephen C. Apostolof, in this case.  Never heard of him before?  No wonder; you're probably not familiar with his other works like Office Love-in White-Collar Style, Lady Godiva Rides, Drop Out Wife and Five Loose Women.  How many of those contained orgies, the dead or any combination thereof?  Who knows?  But at least he was able to work 'em in here, thanks to Eddie.

With a title like this, is a plot really necessary?  It is?  If you insist: Bob (William Bates) and his girlfriend Shirley (Patricia Barrington) go in search of a cemetery in order to inspire Bob for writing his next horror story. After they crash the car, they wander into a nearby graveyard and encounter the dancing (female) dead, a full moon spectacle overseen by the Ruler of the Dark (Criswell) and his beehive-hairdo'd assistant The Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver). Before long the couple is spotted and taken prisoner. Tied to stakes and forced to watch the dancing of various jiggling females, they await their fate....

As you no doubt can tell, this i a story that has Wood's fingerprints, DNA and other undeniable connective evidence all over it.  Topless dancing women!  Cheap sets!  Cut scenes that make no sense!  Lousy costumes!  A vamp lady!  Criswell!  All that's missing is an alien ship on a string and a 300-pound Swedish wrestler stumbling around.

Don't be misled, though; Wood's hand is not on the camera here, which was a detriment to a latter-day film based on an unfinished script of his named I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, which came out in 1998, some 20 years after the day Wood himself died.  Chalk it up to a lost opportunity, much like Orgy, which could only have benefited from Wood's manic desire to film everything, and when he couldn't, at least pad it with filler.  Therefore, you know his absence could only hurt this affair.

Anyway, back to Orgy Of The Dead; all this movie consists of is strippers staring blankly into space as they wiggle about, sans costume tops, their pulchritude on full display.  I hesitate, though, to refer to them as strippers, seeing as how they lose their tops in the first minute or so of their "choreography" and spend the rest of their...routines, let's call them...just wiggling.  Oh, they have costumes they wear - one is dressed as an (American) Indian, one as a skeleton, one like a Hawaiian (which isn't really as Hawaiian as one would think), another like a Mexican, others like zombies, street walkers, slaves, kitty cats - but when it comes to creativity, this is like the first round of eliminations on "America's Got Talent": good for laughs, period.

Criswell, what happened to you since your glory days in 1959?  There was a time when he could effortlessly sit behind a desk or in a coffin and speechify like the grandest of all community theater leads, vying for the year's most overwrought vocal performance.  In Orgy, Cris wears a Dracula cloak (that might just have been Bela Lugosi's but who knows) and sits there in the Styrofoam cemetery, feigning interest and looking more like a lost derelict struggling to stay sober but failing miserably.  Those bleary, squinted eyes suggest that there wasn't a full booze bottle in the immediate vicinity for the duration of shooting.

Again, talentless stripp... uh, semi-naked dancers... are the bulk of this 92-minute flick.  There are occasional cutaways to our Brad and Janet writhing in agony as they witness this "orgy", Criswell orating as if he were a drunk King Lear and this Black Ghoul lady standing around acting more like Vampira's unemployable layabout daughter, and these guys dressed up as a mummy and a wolf man, standing off to the side, nudging each other and pantomiming that, gee, they wish they could get in on some of this "orgy" stuff, but that would mean they would have to have either unwrap or shave themselves, and be female.  But soon, when our talentless boy and girl end up alone in the end with a twist ending that isn't really all that much fo a twist, that's it - and not a moment too soon, believe me.

Yes, this is all but touted as an Edward D. Wood Jr. film, with the script and story being his, but in the end, Orgy Of The Dead could have been so much more one of Wood's ruminations of society and horrific transgressions if he had lensed it as well.  Stampeding buffaloes during a striptease?  A two-fisted brawl between Bob and the Ruler of the Dark, Ed himself as one of the dancers, maybe?  Some improv from Tor Johnson?  A token cameo by Kelton The Komedy Relief Kop?  Could only have helped.

So Orgy Of The Dead tries, but it's a near-miss.  Too bad; it had the chops but was missing the soul.

I notice this review is shorter than a lot of my most recent, even for a sordid affair like this one.  But what can I say; I was distracted.  Perhaps I was thinking more of The Bride of Frankenstein getting jiggy with it, and The Creature From The Black Lagoon with a beer in his hand and a $20 bill to stuff in her g-string. 

Ahhh...what could have been.... Poor Eddie.

Krull (1983)

This is probably one of the most infuriated reviews I've ever written in my life.  And do you wanna know why?  Because it is also - I'd lay money on this  - one of the most expensive movies ever made that was based on a lazy gimmick.

I know I'll get a lot of flak for this but bring it on, naysayers: Krull is the laziest excuse for a movie ever and I'll tick down the list of every reason why here in a bit, don't worry.  However, it is also a movie based on what's probably the most incredibly dull, slow-witted plot ideas since dealing with any giant rubber-suited monster close to a major city.

And what is the stupid premise of Krull?  Are you ready?  Three simple words - and they're not "I Love You" - ...they're Dungeons And Dragons.

Yep, geeks with 12-sided dice and their own hand-made chain-mail vests wrote Krull and they're gonna make sure you know it. 

Oh boy, are they ever.

Look on this script, ye mighty, and despair: The distant planet of Krull -

(okay okay okay, so it's set on a different planet.  SO WHAT??  It still has the same conceits as your average evening of D+D, just sit there and read on...where was I?  Oh yeah...)

The distant planet of Krull has been invaded by an evil creature called The Beast (gee, how original) and his army of marauding armor-bound guards known as The Slayers (now opening for Ratt at The Muncie Citadel - call Ticketron now).  Because of all this invading and slaying the two rival kingdoms of this world -

(Huh?  Kingdoms?  See there?)

have formed an alliance against these terrors, as Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall), son of King Turlord (Tony Church) marries Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony), daughter of King Eirig (Bernard Archard), hoping to unite the two kingdoms by their joining.  But before they can cut the cake or whatever they do in medieval outer space, The Slayers attack and kidnap Lyssa.  Colwyn must then set out to re-claim his bride-to-be in an epic quest

(You read that one, didn't you?  Just checking.)

and in doing so he is joined by a Seer named Ynyr (Freddie Jones), a band of escaped convicts led by Torquil (Alun Armstrong), a one-eyed giant called Rell (Bernard Bresslaw), a cowardly magician named Ergo (David Battley), another Seer - this one blind - called Emerald (John Welsh), and a young boy by the name of Titch (Graham McGrath). 

Together this motley band of cloak-wearing +1 armor-bearing ne'er -do-wells set off to The Black Fortress to find Lyssa, seeing as The Beast intends to marry her and rule Krull and rule the galaxy and so on and so on and so on. Armed with The Glave (a disc with five blades, and admittedly the coolest thing in this whole stupid movie) Colwyn finds out this Black Fortress changes its location with every sunrise (of course - why wouldn't it?), and struggles to find it as he makes his way past vicious warriors, The Widow Of The Web (Francesca Annis), deadly traps and sinister monsters to claim his prize.

You tell me: is this Dungeons And Dragons?  Is it Wizards And Warriors?  Is it Serfs And Sorcerors?  Is it?  HUH??!?  All that writer Stanford Sherman did was record a D+D session, write it down and base a movie on it - I swear, that's what this looks like for the life of me! 

We have the roguish hero, the damsel in distress, the old wizards (or Seers, whatever), the rag-tag army, a friendly monster (a cyclops in this case), a trek filled with danger and magic, assorted tasks and battles to complete along the way...oh God, I hate this movie. 

Peter Yates knew better than to direct a movie like Krull.  I mean; he directed Bullitt!  He directed Mother Juggs and Speed!  He directed Breaking Away!  He directed The Dresser!  He directed Eleni...which was the very first movie I mentioned in my months-long rant against anything 1985, so I guess that stands to reason, seeing as how he had more than one bad directing decision in his name.  It looks epic and regal and pretty and all, but it also looks shallow, gaudy and stupid, with a few touches of artistry that have nothing to do with the storytelling process at all.  Nice going, Pete; at least he passed on early in 2011 before they could tag him to do a Krull 2.

Every single person in this movie acts as if they think they are starring in the greatest movie ever made; something that could stand alongside Excalibur.  Krull couldn't make it on a double-bill with Bert I. Gordon's The Magic Sword. 

You wanna know what star Ken Marshall starred in before Krull?  A promising NBC miniseries based on the life of "Marco Polo", with Marshall as the title character.  You wanna know what Marshall starred in after Krull?  The Stay Awake.  FOUR YEARS LATER.  Yeah.  Some of you already know what I'm talking about and are slapping your own heads in disbelief.  The rest of you, go visit Night of the Creeps and see what the rest of us are crying about.  And after 2003, seems that Marshall has completely dropped off the radar; see what a movie like Krull will do to you???

The others in this thing have fared better than Marshall, comparatively.  Lysette Anthony has had steady work in lesser films (yes, even lesser than Krull) thouigh none of the other films dubbed her voice like they do here - more on that in a second, Freddie Jones is still enjoying a long career in films and TV (in spite of this and 1984's Dune; the man's a trooper!), and this was even a stepping stone for such latter-day heavy-hitters as Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane, amazingly enough. 

Even Belinda Mayne makes an appearance here - who, you ask?  Come on; she was our psychic spelunker in Alien 2: On Earth!  Yeah, wotta step-up, huh? 

Then of course we have the matter of two very well-respected actors whose last major moments in film were this movie.  Let us hang our heads in remembrance of British actor Tony Church (who was also in the classic 1979 Roman Polanski film Tess) and Ireland-born John Welsh (most famous for roles in Konga, Francis of Assissi and the 1978 remake of Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps).  Good men, all of whom suffered for Krull being their latter-day swan song.  Alas.

Look at some of the random carpola they throw at us during the course of this thing; why does this Black Fortress have to change location every sunrise?  Because writer Sherman thought it would be cool to do it and also help stretch out the running time, most likely. 

Why do we have to have little wriggly creatures pop out of the helmets of these Slayers once someone kills them?  It doesn't really serve a purpose other than something to look at and distract us. 

What difference does it make that the cyclops thing (whose name I forget and I really don't care enough to check my notes and confirm it) can foretell his own demise?  So it can make an heroic sacrifice later...duh. 

Why do the horses Colwyn and Company ride on have hooves of fire so that they leave a fire trail when they ride across the land, only to leap across a wide chasm and safely land on the other side...with the fire trailing in the air after them?  That is REALLY stupid and it doesn't make a difference if the horse you ride has fiery hooves, a cloud of dust or a hearty "Hi Yo Silver", either.  It just doesn't matter for anything but a neat-looking effect and nothing more.

And what, indeed, was the deal with The Beast thing?  It looked like a stop-motion claymation whatever filmed with a heavily petroleum-jellied lens to make it look other-worldly/hide the cheap effect.  What in the hell; it's like they couldn't be bothered with having anyone to act alongside the others and be all evil and menacing and stuff.  Besides, this being set on outer space (as if that was really a concern first and foremost), they had to have The Beast look like Jabba The Hutt's unemployed brother or something.

As far as The Glave goes, this is the main thing anyone remembers from Krull.  You ask someone  - ANYone - about Krull and the first thing they'll say is, "oh yeah; that movie with the five-bladed knife/disc thing!"  It's cool; it kind of acts like a boomerang with knives as it returns to its thrower after slicing and dicing its target.  I guess it's Krull's version of King Arthur's Excalibur, only no one had to pull The Glave out of a rock to claim their place as the King of Krull.  ...and that's really more thought than I wanted to put into a boomeranging 5-bladed knife/disc.

In the end, this was one of the most expensive films made in 1983, costing some $27-or-so million to make and ended up earning back less than $17 million, which should have told its producers something as far as producing ill-advised outer-space D+D ripoffs....

Uh, this was just handed to me; the creator of Dungeons and Dragons himself, one Gary Gygax, went on record as saying that no one from Columbia Pictures, the producers or even one of the janitors who swept up during filming ever approached him or anyone connected with D+D to license use of the game, its characters, scenes or situations for this thing.  In other words, this is a ripoff that didn't even have the nerve to approach its source material for permission to rip it off.

Yes, I am well aware that Krull has earned something of a cult following in recent years, from both sci-fi and fantasy contingents for whatever reason - maybe because it has Freddie Jones and Francesca Annis from Dune in it a year before the British Empire struck back.  Who knows what reason there could possibly be for anyone following Krull - cult or otherwise?  Edward D. Wood Jr. has a cult of enthusiastic followers, too.  Well, Ed I can understand following.  Krull, not so much.

Speaking of following, the president of Columbia Pics at the time followed figures (as studio suits will do) and figured that this "sure thing" would stand an even-better chance at the world box office by giving a couple of the actors American-dubbed voices; you know, just to give us big dumb Yanks a focal point that doesn't sound like they should be asking for a quick crisp in the dustbin at the lorry straightaway.  So they dubbed Lysette Anthony's voice with that of American actress Lindsay Crouse, whom you'll remember more fondly from such class acts as Slap Shot, The Verdict and Iceman.  Needless to say, this came as a shock to Lysette.  Think of how Lindsay felt.

They also dubbed Scottish Robbie Coltrane with another actor's voice...who happened to be from England.  Uh...why?  That's like switching Ian McKellen's voice with Chrisopher Lee's.  Or switching a bagel with a muffin.

Or switching Krull with a blank screen.  No one's gonna notice.

Over The Top (1987)

The more I look back, the more it's shaping up that 1987 was the SECOND worst year for movies.

Especially if you consider that the largest amount of releases came out of left field.

Now normally I wouldn't have a problem with that, since a lot of good films come from this segment of the field.  But Over The Top is not your average "out of left field " film.  No: this was the result of a summit meeting between two of the biggest money-making camps of the 1980s.

Sylvester Stallone and Golan/Globus.

And in a bit of irony that would have William Shakespeare smacking his Elizabethan head, this would also lead to one of the worst products ever released by both parties.

Think about that for a second: this was the worst film released by the men responsible for Paradise Alley and Treasure of the Four Crowns, respectively.  Over The Top is worse than these.

It seems that Sly, wanting to be taken as more than the big dumb lug who won his way into peoples' hearts by boxing (Rocky) and fighting wars (Rambo), took it upon himself to expand his repertoire and become a more verbose, thoughtful hero for big, muscular Italians the world over to look up to.  So one of them ended up being 1986's Cobra, where he plays a lone cop who kills hundreds of slimy criminals.  Another film was supposed to have been a remake of Angels With Dirty Faces starring him and Christopher Reeve... unfortunately, the powers-that-be (whoever they are) decided not to have Sly and Supes sully their intellectual property and nixed the project.  I guess they figured it was okay for Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn to sully it up a few years down the road, but whaddyagonnado?

My focus on this review, however, is a film in this mega-franchise that not only was a money-loser, but was also one the absolutely worst -conceived, worst-written, worst-acted and worst-received films ever from these same individuals.

Again, worse than Paradise Alley and Treasure Of The Four Crowns.

And this is coming from someone who absolutely loves Cobra , which actually should have had less going for it than Over The Top!

Not coincidentally, at least Cobra was based on a book ("Fair Game" by Paula Gosling).  This movie?  It's based on Rocky.  The difference this time is that we're set squarely outside of the squared circle of professional boxing and instead deep into the world of professional...arm wrestling.

Arm.  Wrestling.

Yeah.  You know that game you used to play at recess or during study hall when the teacher wasn't looking?  THIS is the organized sports version with big cash prizes and high-level sponsorship and promotion. 

And YOU got a job as a doctor or a lawyer, figuring that was where the big money was?  SUCKER!

Okay, enough of this, let's wrestle with the plot now.  Lincoln Hawk (Sly) is a struggling independent truck driver who's trying to rebuild his life after a divorce from his wife Christina (Susan Blakely). As she lay dying, her final wish is that she reclaims his son Michael (David Mendenhall), who has taken the last name of his grandfather Jason (Robert Loggia), a rich and powerful man who had been instrumental in keeping Lincoln and Christina apart. Lincoln does his best to mend fences but Michael is a stubborn military school-bred brat who doesn't think much of being abandoned for the open lure of the road.

...then he finds out that old dad is also an arm-wrestler and picks up extra money going here, there and everywhere by defeating opponents with his mighty arm.  That doesn't change their relationship much but hey: his dad arm wrestles.  Wow.

Possession of Michael becomes key between Lincoln and Jason with everything coming to a boiling point at the National Arm Wrestling Competition in Las Vegas, promising a big payoff to the winner, just enough for Lincoln to pay his debts, regain full possession of his son and live happily ever after.  Gee, I wonder how things will turn out?

I have no idea what Sly was thinking here; he already wrote and/or starred in some huge successes with the Rocky and Rambo movies and even scored what could be called a major independent hit (meaning not dependent on the name Rocky or Rambo) with 1981's Nighthawks.  He even knew that his persona was silly enough to poke fun at himself with appearances on "The Muppet Show" and his delightfully self-effacing interviews on any given talk show of the day.  However, Sly plays Lincoln Hawk as the second coming of Jesus, returned to Earth as a truck-driving, arm-wrestling sensitive guy who specializes in soft-spoken monologues and bellowing war cries as he brings down his opponents' arms.

Really, Sly - come on: Rocky Balboa, John Rambo, Marion Cobretti and even Deke DaSilva were typical tough guy fodder.  But with Over The Top, you've essayed a man whose only character development trait is turning his ball cap backwards on his head before stepping into the arm wrestling arena.

Did I really just write "arm wrestling arena" in one of my reviews?  Yep, I did.  My God....

I was hoping for a scene where Sly had a crisis of confidence because he lost his hat and couldn't arm wrestle without anything to turn backwards on his head.

We have dramatic impetus enough, though, with the introduction of his son Michael, as played by David Mendenhall, whom the astute will happily remember as Peter from 1983's Space Raiders and the voice for many popular Eighties cartoon series, including that of Daniel Witwicky from the early animated "Transofrmers", both the TV series and 1986 movie.  At least in Space Raiders he had the benefit of acting alongside Vince Edwards and Patsy Pease.

I hate seeing spoiled brats in movies even if they're less bratty by the end due to the shared events in the story.  The only purpose spoiled brats in movies serve is to is to get what's coming to them.  Michael doesn't, of course, but I guess that would have required better acting and an improved script that added a scene behind the woodshed.

As the mom whose only purpose is to lie in bed and look paler with every scene, Susan Blakely actually deserved the honor of being first to pass on this project.  Blakely has been in such worthy films as The Towering Inferno, The Concorde...Airport '79 and the actually-classy 1983 Frances Farmer TV biopic "Will There Really Be A Morning?", which earned her a Golden Globe nomination.  I mean, she's an honest-to-goodness actress with talent and everything.  Here, all her dramatic highlights consist of her literally phoning in her performance; she has the phone to her ear and is speaking with Lincoln or Michael or both while staring off in the distance looking all pale and sickly.  Damn it; Hollywood did the same thing to Faye Dunaway as detective Frank Sinatra's dying wife in 1980's The First Deadly Sin.  So, does Blakely at least get a good, dramatic final death throe just to prove what a fantastic actress she really is?  Nope, she dies off-screen.  Not every movie can be Terms of Endearment, I suppose.  Sorry, Susan.

And then we have Robert Loggia.  Big Bob.  Every movie like this needs a villain, and I guess Loggia fits the bill as one, even though he basically plays the evil stepmother who keeps the princess (his daughter) away from her one true love (the truck driver).   It's not like Loggia doesn't do a good job: he shouts and screams and makes the veins bulge on his neck and his temples just like any role being filled by Robert Loggia would come to be known by.  However, the problem here is Loggia's Cutler character just isn't "Robert Loggia" enough.  He needs more scenes where he's screaming, his veins are bulging, his voice is shaking with rage.  This is like Robert Loggia Lite we're witnessing here and it just isn't enough for a movie named Over The Top.

Even wrestler Terry Funk - who was one of the absolute highlights of Paradise Alley as far as I'm concerned - is about as muted as Loggia, if not moreso.  In Alley, playing the dumb brutish pug Frankie The Thumper with a heavy verbal dosage of Damon Runyon's colorful thugs, every one of Funk's scenes was a highlight and well worth watching for the delight Funk seemed to take in playing such a great part.  Here, as bodyguard Ruker, all he does is wear a suit and get punched by Sly in a scene.  Nothing else.  Maybe there was a sense of being upstaged feared by someone?  Gotta wonder....

As a matter of fact, the only one who really brings any sense of "over-the-top" acting to this piece is the secondary villain - Bob 'Bull' Hurley, played by Rick Zumwalt, who was himself a professional arm wrestler...

(what, did you think I was making that stuff up about professional arm wrestling?  Google it, I dare ya...)

...anyway, Zumwalt gives his all: eyes bulging, voice roaring, bald head sweating and coming very close to ripping off a few peoples' arms a few times.  Now why couldn't HE have been the star of Over The Top?

I'll tell you why: because this was Sly's (and Golan/Globus') movie and, for better or worse, Sly was going to headline it and see it through to the bitter end.  Sure, he'd come up against huge, hulking foes with wild hair, pointy beards, arms bigger than your legs and voices you could hear bellow in the next county, but overcoming huge obstacles was his specialty.  He did it all before..he'd do it again.

As director, Menahem Golan himself channeled a lot of Sly's directing flair in this movie.  Lots of fast-moving camera sweeps, flashing lights, sweaty close-ups of men in battle, loving setups of our main man mouthing dialogue from scribes Gary Conway, David Engleback, Sly himself (SURPRISE!!) and veteran writer Stirling Silliphant, whom you may remember as the man who made a bet with Harold P. Warren about getting a movie made...and we all saw how well THAT turned out.

(Sylvester Stallone as Torgo.  Hmmm...)

But in the end, this movie cost $25 million to make.  Yeah, count 'em: twenty-five million bucks, all for a movie about guys arm wrestling.  Unfortunately the big arm wrestling contingent didn't come out in full force (must have had to have washed their ball caps or something) and Over The Top earned back a little over $16 million.  Ouch.  Not even a Giorgio Moroder soundtrack featuring Sammy Hagar,  Asia, Eddie Money, Frank Stallone (natch) and Kenny Loggins could help earn any more than this back to help Sly and company turn their epic into anything less than a mis-step of gargantuan proportions.

Okay, wait a minute; what in the hell is Kenny Loggins doing contributing a song to A MOVIE ABOUT ARM WRESTLING?  I can understand a golf comedy, a Navy recruitment film, that's all well and good... but this is A MOVIE ABOUT ARM WRESTLING.  Did we really need a chart-topping song about meeting people emotionally at a middle ground in A MOVIE ABOUT ARM WRESTLING?  I'd think not but hey; I'm not Kenny Loggins.

After professional arm wrestling failed to catch the world on fire like professional wrestling or even professional tiddly-winks, it seems Stallone and Golan-Globus parted company, none of their other collective works moving on any further than the planning stages thereafter.  Oh yeah, he'd go on to do more Rambos and Rockys and a few Oscars and Lock Ups and Cliffhangers and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoots after this.  But as far as trying to create new sports rages, Sly laid low on that front.

However, not as low as Over The Top eventually plumbed.  Then again, what can you expect from a movie where the toughest guys in the room can't use their thumbs?

Quicksilver (1986)

A funny thing happened in the Eighties: for as much as we want to believe there was a multitude of good - even great - movies being made, there were also as many, if not more, movies made that could very well have been called disposable.

In considering this was the decade in which multiplexes, video rental stores, and 24-hour movie channels were booming and blossoming all across the land, I remember watching HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and The Movie Channel (The Big Four) and noticing, though they showed some great old movies and some cool current ones from the previous year, they seemed to repeat a lot of them.  I swear one day I watched Sometimes a Great Notion no less than four times on the same channel.

And that was the norm; I know I've seen the same thing happen with Under The Rainbow and Pandemonium, and even more to be sure, but something happened at the studio level with some movies being created, filmed, produced and distributed, too.

If these channels and rental places and all are doing such a bang-up business with showing our movies, the suits thought, then if we make more movies, we can get more hard-earned scratch by giving these guys more movies of ours to put out there.

In other words, the more movies they make, the more movies they can sell rights to show on Cinemax or rent at Blockbuster.

Smart.

This certainly made for a lot of programming and rental choices for John and Jane Public to choose from, which also meant lots of pocket money for all those poor little rich producers and distributors out there, too.

Of course, this also led to The Great Video Glut Of The Late Eighties.

From 1985 to 1989, we had literally thousands of video choices from the United States and abroad.  So much so that video stores had to build extra shelves in order to display all those VHS tapes.  And there were lots of them, too.

However, the drawback to this influx of material was that not every one of them was something that was very easily memorable - if they all tended to look the same, have the same people in them and recycled storylines time and again, well, that's what happens when you release 400-500 titles a month.  So it was with the "Underdog Rising Up From Adversity" storyline, which was ancient by the time Rocky Balboa realized his dream back in 1976.  Certainly we've seen it recycled many many times since in terms of bowling (Dreamer), rowing (The Boy In Blue), horse racing (Champions), jogging (Running), dancing (Flashdance, Footloose), and more than one football and basketball movie.

Then, we get the same storyline recycled as applied to bicycle messaging.  No, not bicycle racing; we had that in Breaking Away and American Flyers.  This is messaging.  And this is Quicksilver.

Talk about disposable...Kevin Bacon or not.  This is probably a degree to him he wouldn't mind erasing.

Check this: Jack Casey (Bacon) was at one time one of the best traders on the stock market. But after losing all of his and his parents' finances on a reckless investment gamble, Jack's spirit is broken and he drops out, tunes out and decides he will improve his lot in life far better by becoming a bicycle messenger for an independent delivery service.

Granted it's not exactly a step up but it's no worse an idea than dancing around in a barn, I guess.

Besides which, there's no better a place to meet many colorful, unique characters.  Like the jovial Tiny (Louie Anderson), the budding businessman Hector (Paul Rodriguez) the token colored fellow Voodoo (Laurence Fishburne) and the expected lithe and lovely love interest Terri (Jami Gertz). Oh, there's more to be sure in this group, but it's to be expected in a messenger service that seems made up of the members of The Best Pals/Second Bananas Club.

And then there's Gypsy (Rudy Ramos), a nasty drug dealer scumbag who is using some of the messengers to courier his drugs clandestinely.  Danger, intrigue, dancing routines with bikes and a hefty rock soundtrack all compete for time until we get a climax that includes stock trading and a bicycle/car chase to the death.  Who dies?  Who lives?  I think we all pretty much know the answer to those questions, don't we?

If you've never heard of director/writer Thomas Michael Donnelly before or since, don't worry - neither has anyone else.  He's only written eight films and directed four since 1980, Quicksilver being the one that most people have ever heard of, let alone seen.  And not just because it has the most durable set of cliches of any of his other works...but I think mostly because it has the best soundtrack.

Looking at the music to Quicksilver, it has everything a right-thinking Eighties movie soundtrack should have.  Including one song produced by Giorgio Moroder, several others written and performed by Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks, others with vocals from Tony ("St. Elmo's Fire/Man In Motion") Parr and Ray ("GhostBusters Theme") Parker Jr., and a lead song sung by Roger Daltrey.  Add a Peter Frampton song and there you have it: Grade A homogenized Eighties.

Brother, and does Quicksilver know it: in fact so much so that most of the scenes in it are edited and cut so quickly in time to the beat that you'd think you were watching a co-production with MTV.  All it's missing are songs by Oingo Boingo and Mr. Mister.

That's another thing about Eighties movies; if they were going to make any money at all they figured they had to have hip, cool catchy songs the teens would tap their feet to and rock out with their JuJuBes out right there in their theater seats.  Unfortunately, anyone who wants to hear a good rock song is going to watch a movie that teenagers will respond to, like being stuck in a town that won't allow you to dance (Footloose) or go to a school for talented students (Fame), even if there are a mountain of cliches and stereotypes...but few teens want stories that deal with stocks and bonds.

This isn't even the only movie in the Eighties aimed for a younger audience that had a stock market subplot.  Remember Hiding Out (1987), where Jon Cryer witnesses a murder and has to hide out from his stockbrokering job and lay low in a high school as a teenager?  No, neither do I.

We have moments here and there that are kind of endearing for a movie like this.  One good scene involves Bacon's character trying to explain to his father that he lost both his own and his parents' money that's touching and well-played by all involved.  There's a scene later that has Bacon explaining to Rodriguez why he shouldn't go to a business meeting wearing a light blue prom tuxedo that has some funny moments.  Another cute scene has Bacon and Gertz dancing to a soundtrack song; she in her leg warmers and ballet shoes, he on his bicycle.

These are surrounded on all sides, though, by scenes of the underdog rising up from scripted adversity, fighting vicious drug dealers and benefitting from the most ridiculous of coincidences to win the day, all because everyone likes to see Kevin Bacon beat the odds, come out on top, win the girl and stand victorious.  Who cares?

Not a lot of people, apparently, since Quicksilver earned back a little over $7 million on a budget that most certainly had to have cost more to secure Bacon and all those musicians.  With all of those surefire elements, why did it misfire?  The biggest reason I can think of is because, like I said in many reviews before, this was yet another of those many variations on a theme that added glitz, fancy camera angles, stunts, a rockin' soundtrack and big (-enough) stars to a film that wouldn't have made it past a boardroom meeting without these extra (bicycle) bells on it.

In conclusion, during an interview in 2008, Bacon went on record as saying that being in Quicksilver was the lowest point in his career.  Okay, he didn't say that; actually he said it was the ABSOLUTE LOWEST point in his career.

I don't think there's a better description of this film than that.

3 Ninjas (1992)

Alright, I'll be the first to admit that you got me on this one.

I know that ninjas are a huge part of bad movie folklore, not to mention the fact that they've kept the Asian film market (and Godfrey Ho) in business a long time.  They're swift, they're silent, they're deadly and by the time you see a ninja, you're already dead.

And yet with the advent of 3 Ninjas, none of the regular rules of ninjas apply, because this movie was made for kids.

Colorful costumes, most every scene is shot in broad daylight and every adult in this film is a clod.  How could it NOT be for kids?  (okay, those same attributes still hold true for a Godfrey Ho movie, too, but anyway...)

John Hughes could have wrote this, and I'm surprised that he didn't.  But I guess after writing 101 Dalmatians (1996) and Baby's Day Out, even he figured that he'd plateaued.  And if there's any worse indictment I can make against 3 Ninjas, it's in its plot.

So here goes: Every year, young brothers Samuel (Michael Treanor), Jeffrey (Max Elliott Slade) and Michael (Chad Power) visit their Japanese grandfather, Mori Shintaro (Victor Wong), whom the boys affectionately refer to as Grandpa (for some odd reason) for the summer. Mori is skilled in the fields of Martial Arts and Ninjutsu, and has trained the boys in every technique he knows.  He even gives them outstanding ninja names like Rocky, Colt and Tum-Tum, respectively.

The boys' father (Alan McRae) is an FBI officer and, after an organized crime ring headed by Hugo Snyder (Rand Kingsley) proves to be too much for the Bureau, Snyder makes things worse by attempting to kidnap the three boys - by using three bumbling kidnappers/surfers/idiots who are usually getting battered and beaten in various embarrassing ways - until it all culminates in a final battle where ninjas battle young ninjas and armed officers.  Oh, and there's time for a basketball game and a young girlfriend (Kate Sargeant), and more than one Home Alone reference.

See what I mean?  Director Jon Turteltaub, who would become one of Disney Pictures' most reliable directors (good/bad thing) gives us a world in which the safety of humanity not only rests on the shoulders of grade school kids, but grade school kids named after a horse, a boxer and Asian antacid tablets, sounds like.  This looks like a bad episode of a Nickelodeon series where you halfway expect The Wiggles to show up halfway through as hitmen.

Writers Edward Emanuel and Kenny Kim didn't really do much else in their "careers", except for Emanuel producing a video documentary called Pearl Harbor: A Day Of Infamy.  Of course.  Natural progression, you know.

I don't care who you are, how old you are or how much you enjoy ninjas no matter what the movie, there are some instances when a movie just should NOT have the word "ninja" in its title.  Looking at my own personal collection here by my desk, I own The Ninja Squad, Ninja Terminator, Zombie Vs. Ninja and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze.  So yeah, I have...different tastes.

But even I have my limits when it comes to what I will accept ninjas in.  Yes, I'll even accept movies where the ninjas in question have headbands with "NINJA" written on them.  3 Ninjas, however, would be hard for me to accept even if I was the 8-10 year old demographic this flick was aiming for.

And the worst part: this movie has Victor Wong in it!  Victor Wong!  Egg Shen himself!  A man whose career had some pretty high highs in films like Big Trouble In Little China, The Golden Child, The Last Emperor, Tremors and The Joy Luck Club.  That expressive face, the gravelly voice, the sense that if you crossed him, he could summon a whole horde of Asian demons on you.  Victor deserved better than to have the last film role he would be remembered for was having played the same role as here in 3 Ninjas: High Noon At Mega Mountain (1998).  Not an award-winning prestige film.  Not a Japanese character study.  A movie where lead roles went to Hulk Hogan and Jim Varney.  At least this film gave him a chance to kick butt.

Speaking of butts getting kicked, the three aforementioned bumbling kidnappers/surfers/idiots named Fester (Patrick Labyorteaux), Marcus (Race Nelson) and Hammer (D.J. Harder) have the unfortunate luck to all three channel Daniel Stern after getting hit in the face with four bricks by Kevin McAllister.

All these three dull-witted buffoons do is serve as comedy relief in a movie that's already overloaded with it.  Plenty of "dude"s and "bummer"s and "radical"s are uttered in the course of their appearance, as well as a lot of "ow"s and "ouch"es, seeing as all they do accomplish is share a similar amount of concussions, as served by the three title brats.  When a movie tries to echo the slapstick violence of Home Alone and can't even reach THAT level of shtick, that's a movie which has not learned well, Grasshopper.

As far as the triple threat of mini-martial artists go, we are saddled with three of the most untalented tow-headed punks since the last live-action Walt Disney kids' film went direct-to-video.  These kids' entire personalities are summed up in their nicknames.  Treanor's Rocky likes to be all tough, Slade's Colt acts skittish and Power's Tum Tum...eats.  That's it.  At what time did stuffing your face every time the camera was on you become a character trait in Hollywood?  Long before John Belushi made it an art form in National Lampoon's Animal House, I'm sure.

Other than representing their namesakes, all that these kids do is recite ninja analogies, scream out lame catch phrases ("Let's light this big guy up!") and martial-art any bad guy in their immediate range into submission.  One scene in which Rocky is trying to talk on the phone with a cute girl named Emily and Colt and Tum Tum dance around and chant "Ro-cky LOVES! E-mi-LEE!" was so painful I'm pretty sure I popped more than one Advil the first time I saw it.

The adults, as is par for the course, fare little better.  The only thing evil nasty bad guy Snyder gets to do is sneer, threaten and occasionally hit a guy or two.  Not that I expect Auric Goldfinger in a kiddie film, but this guy would be more threatening dressed in a Chuck E. Cheese costume.  Jerks who double-park their Audis in the handicapped space are more threatening than this clown.

Not even the efforts of the legendary Professor Toru Tanaka provide any entertainment.  Forever cast as the Oddjob-wannabe in more movies than this one, Tanaka doesn't even get to do anything suitably evil; just follow boss Snyder around until unleashed...not that he gets unleashed much as it is.  Come on, though: this is the man who was in movies with Chuck Norris AND Arnold Schwarzenegger!  Who wants to see him get beat up by kids???

I won't mention the boys' parents, only to say that they get involved with their kids' lives to the extent that Charlie Brown's folks get involved with his. Thanks, kiddie flick; that's just the message I wanted to hear - Parents shouldn't get involved with their kids' lives until it becomes a life or death situation.

Understandably, 3 Ninjas was a hit with kids.  NOT understandably, it also became a sleeper hit, earning back $29 million on a $2.5 million budget.  Which only goes to show that people weren't only starved for entertainment back in 1992, they were literally chewing their own legs off to escape the bear trap of such reprehensible films as Unforgiven and Scent Of A Woman, not to mention such detrimental kids' fare as Home Alone II: Lost In New York (co-inky-dink!) and Beethoven.  That's ironic commentary for you.

Three sequels down the road and a personnel change here and there, this was a franchise that went about its business of getting money for its distributors (Touchstone Pictures) then subsiding to make way for the next big thing in children's entertainment, whatever flavor it would be that week.  The thing with 3 Ninjas is, if the only thing it reinforced was the world view that adults are stupid and all kids should learn deadly ninja skills and fortune cookie philosophy, we as a race might as well wander into the ocean and let the dolphins take over.

One thing I noticed about 3 Ninjas is that it was released to different countries at different times.  United States first, of course, then Spain, Argentina, Denmark, the United Kingdom and so forth.  You want to know who the last country was to get hold of this movie?  Japan.  Three years after its initial release.

I would have LOVED to have been there for that premiere party.  Moreso than Victor Wong would have, I'm sure.

Vibes (1988)

I'm not going to lie to you: Vibes is one of the worst movies Jeff Goldblum's ever starred in.  Yes, even worse than 1987's Beyond Therapy.  Yes, even worse than 1986's Transylvania 6-5000.  Yes, even worse than 1992's Shooting Elizabeth.

And if you've never seen any of those films before, then congratulations: you still have most of your brain cells.  Me, I'll still try to get through this... uh, thing... and give you a good... uh... whatchamacallit.

Okay, just got back from watching a couple of David Lean movies to get my brain cells to regenerate, I'm fine now.  Back to business.

As far as Jeff Goldblum goes, the first film I really noticed him in was 1984's The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across The Eighth Dimension.  Of course, as far as that goes, no one can forget anything about that film once they've seen it.  But as red-shirted, white cowboy-hatted New Jersey, Goldblum made quite an impression in what amounted to an ensemble piece.  Then again, it would seem that Goldblum excels at ensemble pieces; 1983's The Big Chill was great.  I loved Silverado, in spite of its 1985 date of release.  Even 1995's Nine Months was something enjoyable due to his involvement.  Never before has any actor whose specialty of stream-of-consciousness dialogue made anything he was in more worth watching.  Well, him and early-Eighties Robin Williams.

Then Jeff got lead roles where his big eyes, six-foot tall frame and whole arsenal of off-kilter tics and mannerisms essayed unique performances in films like The Fly, Mister Frost and the brightly-colored and wonderfully-titled Earth Girls Are Easy.  Any one of those examples will provide you with a great Jeff Goldblum performance that makes the overall experience of watching that given film even more pleasant.

An unfortunate by-product of this kind of thing, though, is the fact that those ever-present Hollywood suits figured if Jeff could be in those films and they turned out good by mere association (though writing, directing and concept may have had a hand in things, too), then he could be in just about anything.

Anything.

Even a comedy about treasure-seeking psychics in South America.

Betcha didn't see that coming.  And neither did anyone else see Vibes coming.

Now here's some ESP (Extra-Stupid Plot): Sylvia Pickel (Cyndi Lauper) and Nick Deezy (Jeff Goldblum) are a pair of what can conceivably be called psychics - Sylvia is in constant mental contact with an otherworldly spirit named Louise and Nick can touch anything and give us a history of who touched it before and where that particular object came from.  Handy attributes to have, I guess. 

They are both approached by the perpetually-rumpled Harry Buscafusco (Peter Falk) to help find his long lost son in Equador. Once they make it South of the Border, all three are approached by the mysterious Doctor Harrison Steele (Julian Sands) and mysterious-yet-prerequisitely-bumbling assistant Ingo Swedlin (Googy Gress) once it is revealed that Harry is really searching for a fabled treasure hidden somewhere in Ecuador...and even then there is more going on than meets the eye...and the brain.

For those of you who didn't know Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper was an actress, apparently director Ken Kwapis caught a few of her MTV videos and figured she was the second coming of Bette Davis...or at least in her case, Bette Midler.  The bad part is that Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper has a cute Noo Yawk accent, but that's it for characterization.  As a quirky hair stylist/psychic friend, you'd expect at least the same level of manic acting and breakout spastic mugging and flouncing about prevalent in her vids for "She Bop" and "Goonies (R Good Enuf)".  Unfortunately, Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper plays it on the same level as she did in such music video classics as "Time After Time" and "True Colors".  Aside from an occasional side glance and smirk, we get nothing.  They even have the temerity to chop off her magnificent Technicolor mane and mute it into a pixie-ish platinum blonde Mary Martin cut.  Too bad.

They also make the mistake of casting Julian Sands as the main villain looking for the MacGuffin treasure.  I mean, come on: you couldn't get any more obvious with your villain than this, and Julian doesn't even seem to hide the fact or mute in any way that he is the Bad Guy.  Not that he does an absolutely terrible job, but just that he doesn't really try that hard.  The worst heresy he commits is speaking with a British accent and glaring.  ANYONE can do that.  Julian Sands is a man who has played an evil time-travelling warlock TWICE.  I expected more, I suppose, from a disciple of Satan.

We are also saddled with the unfortunate casting of Googy Gress as the indecipherably-accented Ingo Swedlin, another psychic who seems a few rungs below the others in terms of ESP.  I doubt he even had ESPN.  All that Googy (if I may) provides is irritation and the ability to contribute nothing to the flow of story or to any possible action in a plot as wafer-thin as this one.  I literally cringed whenever he came onscreen because I knew he would grind things to a halt and give "fingernails scraping down a chalkboard" a run for their money in the irritation department.

There are smaller-still, even-less-important bit-parts for such recognizable faces as Park Overall (the receptionist from TV's "Empty Nest" - remember?), Bill McCutcheon (who played Dropo in that modern-day classic Santa Claus Conquers The Martians) Elizabeth Peña (whose been in just darned-near everything) and Don Bexley - whose name I'm sure you won't recognize but you'd know his face as good ol' Bubba from the classic series "Sanford and Son".  Seeing him made me wish hard for a cameo by Redd Foxx coming in to call everybody a "big dummy".  Could only have helped.

In acting terms, though, I saved the best two for last.  For one, we have the abundantly talented Peter Falk, who made a career out of dishevelment and gravelly-voiced observations.  In fact, he was hilarious playing Harry Buscafusco by the sole virtue of him being Peter Falk, not to mention reading his lines as Peter Falk.  I swear: I'd watch him do The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare Abridged, just to hear him talk.  Just looking at how he interacts with his co-stars: it's like watching Humphrey Bogart in a Three Stooges movie.  A BAD Three Stooges movie (you know, the Curly Joe DeRita years...).

And then there's Big Jeff, for whom we already know linear acting is a given, turning just about any line reading on its ear with his effortless delivery and witty aplomb.  Of course, he can only do his magic with writing that is there.  Meaning?  This is Jeff FREAKIN' Goldblum you got in your movie - PUNCH UP THE WRITING!!!

I can't even believe I have to say that, seeing as how the scribes for this script are none other than Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.  Yes, you know them - how could anyone not remember someone named Babaloo?  They wrote Splash and Night Shift and Gung Ho and other movies that are 100 times funnier than Vibes.

(Just to clarify, the story for this was also co-concocted by a lady named Deborah Blum.  Know what other big movie she wrote before/after Vibes?  None.  Nothing at all.  You wanna see anymore of her work, watch the tube and catch an old episode of Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of..." series.  She'll be writing there, or maybe producing a movie like Clean And Sober.  Nothing else that has to do with Peter Falk looking for psychics, though.  At least she wasn't a one-trick pony....

Matter of fact, Splash, Night Shift and Gung Ho were directed by Ron Howard, who knows a thing or two about what's funny and what good film-making should be.  Why, then, did he executive-produce Vibes?  Near as I can tell, when a director the stature of Howard gets into the old executive-producing game,  he sees a lot of projects pass by his cluttered desk and green-lights some just on the basis of an entertaining synopsis - or by the fact that it was written by people who wrote funny stuff before.  You know, just to expedite the executive-producing process.

I'll bet you an Arnold Burger that Howard kept a closer eye on any and all projects that paused at his office door after Vibes was wrought.

And what about Ken Kwapis?  This guy, directing Vibes like a bad sit-com ep, seemed to in fact specialize in TV sitcoms, when he wasn't lensing such classics of cinema as Dunston Checks In, The Beautician And The Beast, License To Wed and The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants.  You know, I have a few lady friends who have seen that last movie; their consensus is that it is one of the WORST chick flicks since Sweet November or Autumn In New York.  Take THAT, Kwapis!

This movie did so badly and earned back so little (a tad over $1 million for something that HAD to have cost more just to secure the "talent") that I'll bet you didn't even know it came out on DVD a couple of years ago.  Didn't know that, didja?  Took me by surprise, too.

After being unceremoniously swept under the rug with all the other lesser movies that came out in 1988 (yes, there were lesser than this), Vibes went on to curse just about everybody involved.  Ganz and Mandel would never again wrote anything as big as their past hits (except maybe for Parenthood), Kwapis took a hit that kept him away from semi-respectability for years...if he ever had enough to direct something like this, the bit actors herein bit elsewhere though not quite as often as they had before, Falk was still a dependably good actor but perhaps not as dependably busy post-1988, Cyndi "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" Lauper had to depend on her music for her legacy since her bid for Diana Ross super-stardom flopped like a dead fish and even Ron Howard stepped back from comedy for a good long while after this.

The only one who seemed to walk away from this whole mess unscathed was Goldblum, who still has a vibrant career and still manages to elicit a sense of glee with every project he pops up in, giving the viewer hope that what they are watching may be the greatest thing ever.

It's just that for one tiny little moment in 1988, Goldblum gave us the horrific vision of an able-bodied swimmer flailing for his life in the middle of a deep, unfunny ocean.

And under the circumstances, again, I guess he should have seen that coming, as well.