This past Tuesday marked one of the most important days in the history of home video, as the long-lost cult classic The Legend of Billie Jean FINALLY made it to DVD. Despite being one of those new-fangled burnt-on-demand titles, the studio acknowledged the film's importance by adding several extras to the disk--an extreme rarity for such usually bare-bones releases. My copy should hopefully be arriving soon (I'm warned it takes 5-10 days for the disks to ship, much less arrive in my eager greedy hands), and I shall honour/torture you with an extremely earnest, over-indulgent essay once I've watched it a dozen times or so. In the meantime, here's the music video for the film's WORLD'S-GREATEST-EVER theme song, "Invincible", performed by the incomparable Pat Benatar.
On Tuesday I commented via the Twitter that were it 25 years ago, Lindsay Lohan would have already starred in a women-in-prison movie by now. Back then former A-Listers whose careers were clearly set on self-destruct didn’t spend their days being constantly monitored by celebrity websites, they made the transition to B-Movies! And, oh, what a wonderful time it was!
Thus inspired, I thought it would be fun to look at the kind of films she might have once made, when the option still existed.
It turns out that if you lived in Hollywood and had a decent coke connection, there was a very good chance you could get a BJ from The Brady Bunch’s own “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Suffice it to say, there was a significant time in Maureen McCormick’s life where her career was not her main priority. This explains Texas Lightning, a redneck coming-of-age fiasco written and directed by legendary B-Movie cameraman Gary Graver.
Truth is, I could probably just make this a list of Linda Blair movies and save myself the effort. Like Lohan she was a former child star whose career in the majors was stalled by a criminal conviction (specifically, conspiracy to sell drugs, although it seems to have been more a matter of her being in the wrong place at the exact wrong time), and further crippled by her decision to pose nude for Playboy’s less-reputable cousin, Oui. Still a bankable name because of The Exorcist, she went on to become one of the reigning queens of 80s B-Movies. Her defining role from the period was that of Brenda, a tough New York girl who refuses to take the rape of her deaf sister and the murder of her friend lying down. Grabbing a crossbow, she goes after the hoods who hurt those she loved and makes them pay. She makes them pay hard.
A truly talented young actress, Tatum O’Neal’s career was derailed by the fact that Ryan O’Neal was her father and it takes a shitload of drugs to get over that kind of crap. No, seriously, if you’ve read even a little bit of inside stuff on the guy it’s pretty hard not to conclude that he’s one major league scumbag. That said, I do love him in Zero Effect. Anyhoo, four years after starring with Richard Burton in one of the creepiest January/December romance pics ever made, she made her B-Movie debut in a film directed by Stephen “Jake and Maggie’s Dad” Gyllenhaal. Co-starring Irene Cara, Certain Fury is essentially The Defiant Ones with chicks in the big bad city, which is admittedly a concept just dying for a remake.
Am I the only person who remembers how fucked up Drew Barrymore used to be? Christ, she played herself in a TV movie about how messed up her childhood was! Beat that Lindsay! Ironically, her B-Movie debut in this overheated low-rent “erotic” melodrama actually marked the rebirth of her career. Sure there were a few insanely brief marriages and late-show tit flashes to get out of her system, but once they passed she steadfastly crafted one of the more admirable of Hollywood careers, proving that it is possible to hit rock bottom and rise back up to the top.
Alyssa Milano’s B-Movie escapades (which included a spin in the Poison Ivy franchise mentioned above) appeared to be made less out of frantic desperation, as they were the clumsy results of Milano trying to transcend her status as Tony Danza’s TV daughter into becoming Hollywood’s top choice slut. How else do you explain the softcore fangfest Embrace of the Vampire, a film more notorious today as a result of Milano’s litigious attempts to erase all photographic evidence of it from the Internet than anything in it (besides her boobies, natch). She might have made good on this career trajectory, if it were not for Aaron Spelling and a little TV show called Charmed, which ran for so long people forgot about her implants and B-Movie past. Unfortunately for Lindsay, Mr. Spelling is no longer around to once again perform such a miracle.
“I don’t think you have anything to be worried about, Drake. This isn’t the first time a woman’s threatened you. Remember that Playmate of the Year who was after you?”
“Claudia. How could I forget?”
“Nothing ever came of that, right?”
“She died in a car crash.”
“Oh, yeah, right. You…uh…didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”
“No. I figured you did it.”
“Huh. I don’t think so, but then I was doing a lot of drugs back then.”
“It happened six months ago.”
“Wait? Did you say ‘Claudia’?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, yeah, that was totally me.”
1. Google the clues and you'll be able to figure out--down to the month--when this story is taking place.
(Note: It's late and I'm tired, so I've chosen not to proofread the following post. Please consider any mistakes you might find to be deliberate "Easter Eggs" I left specifically for your amusement)
They don't make TV movies like they used to. Now, that's not me speaking out of any sense of misplaced nostalgia, it's literally true--they DO NOT make TV movies like they did when I was young. That is to say they pretty much don't make them much at all. Beyond the occasional Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, the Big 3 networks have all but abandoned the format in favour of much cheaper reality show programming. This marks a huge change from back when you could count on one or two debuting each week. And, no cable doesn't count. If you can include all of the same shit that you can see in a theater, it isn't a TV movie, it's a movie that premiered on TV. Huge difference. Don't be stupid and make me explain it to you.
When people think about the TV movies of old, they usually remember the soapy, message pictures that seemed to dominate the format. But any B-Movie fan can tell you that many great genre films debuted on the small screen. This continuing feature is dedicated to briefly looking at some classic examples of films that were too big for TV, but way too small for anywhere else.
We begin our examination with a cheesy classic that plays like the redheaded bastard stepchild of the already somewhat disreputable Airport series. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it had originally been written to serve as the fifth film in the series, following The Concorde... Airport '79 (in fact, it was actually released in the Philippines as Airport '85). All of the elements are there--a collection of c-list performers, gratuitous melodrama, and the kind of potential disaster only a ton of drugs could help conceive. It's the kind of film whose utter disregard for anything approaching verisimilitude is so vehement you get the sense that the filmmakers would happily kick you in the nuts if they could, because by that point there's clearly nothing holding them back. Yet, I found this more charming than frustrating--a classic example of imagination refusing to bow down to the petty bullshit of reality. And, believe me, this film bows down to no reality you know.
I am, of course, talking about:
Despite the claims of the above poster, the film originally aired on television in 1983 with the title Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land and it was directed by TV movie vet Jerry Jameson, who--wouldn't you know it--just happened to also make a little film called Airport '77.
Coincidence?
Jameson was also responsible for the mega-bomb Raise the Titanic, so it's amazing he managed to find any work at all, much less directing TV movies like Starflight. Suffice it to say, the budget of the two films bear absolutely no relation to the other.
Like a lot of Jameson's 80s TV work, Starflight stars Lee Majors, which is awesome. He plays a pilot, which is also awesome. He's also banging single mom publicist Lauren Hutten, which would be gap-toothed awesome, were it not for the fact that he's married to someone else, which makes it adulterously awesome.
The reason Majors and Hutton know each other is because he's the pilot of the groundbreaking flight she's publicizing. The Starflight is a revolutionary hypersonic passenger plane that goes up so far into the atmosphere it can travel to Australia in just over one hour. It's so revolutionary that its creator, Hal Linden, is pretty sure the flight is going to end in disaster. Turns out, he's right!
Actually, the flight would've gone fine, were it not for the desperate actions of sleazy businessman Terry Kiser. Flying to Australia for the launch of the satellite he funded, he's devastated by the news that the launch is going to be postponed, as it will ruin him financially. Consequences be damned, he orders that the rocket be launched anyway. His Australian crony reluctantly agrees, but then blows up the rocket midway through its flight. The resulting debris damages Starflight and forces it to gain even more altititude than it already had. The shocking result is that the plane completely leaves Earth's atmosphere and enters the cold, black darkness of space!
The rest of the film is then naturally devoted to the safe return of most of the passengers (you'll be shocked to learn that Kiser doesn't survive the trip), which is mostly accommodated by a space shuttle that travels to and from Earth with the 15-minute frequency of a public bus.
During this long stretch of film there are moments of genuine tension and excitement (Linden is transported from Starflight to the shuttle via a casket), pure unintended hilarity (the expense of constantly shooting everyone as being weightless is taken care of by the stewardesses rolling out a length of rope for the passengers and crew to hold on as they walk across the plane), and classic disaster movie irony (the airplane mechanic who has to go out into space to repair the plane is afraid of flying!).
Even someone as incapable of giving a flying fuck about science as myself will not be able to ignore the constant barrage of implausibilities. If Starflight can't get back to Earth without blowing up in the blazing furnace of the planet's atmosphere, how the hell did it make it past that same atmosphere to get into space in the first place? How is it that the space shuttle is able to touch down right where it needs to be, every single time, at least half a dozen times in one day? Doesn't Earth's orbit make that impossible? Who's paying for all the fuel required for all these fucking launches? Are these 50+ passengers really worthy an investment that even in 1982 had to be in the high millions, if not billions? Why would Lauren Hutton take her 12 year-old daughter on the maiden flight of an unproven aeronautical innovation that was obviously doomed to failure? Okay, so except for that one expensive scene, we don't see anyone weighless because they're wearing their seatbelts and holding the aisle rope--how come their hats and ties aren't floating around?
I could go on, but won't. Starflight doesn't need to justify its vast array of bullshit. It's a silly TV movie! And that's why we love them. Let the "real" movies worry about such undramatic, story-stopping foolishness like science. Starflight is grounded in its own reality--the B-TV Bullsh*t Zone.
“Well, what can I say about Stevie Schmendrick? He had a funny last name that’s for sure. I always used to think he made it up as some stupid joke, but then one night I was real drunk and I needed his wallet to pay my bar tab and I took out his I.D. and I’ll be fucked if that wasn’t his actual name. He must’ve been a Jew. We didn’t talk about religion much. ‘Cept when we was in the ambulance, of course. Then he wouldn’t shut up about it. Luckily he didn’t talk about it for too long....”
“Okay kid, here’s your chance to prove yourself to the producer. You do that and you’ve got it made in the stunt business.”
“I dunno, Drake. It doesn’t seem safe.”
“That’s very perceptive of you, Stevie. This stunt isn’t safe at all. In fact I’m pretty sure it was designed to kill whoever does it.”
“WHAT?”
“Turns out our producer is a big crybaby who thinks big fancy breasts are more important than the bonds of true friendship. I’m pretty sure he wants to murder me.”
Rip (no last name given, no last name NEEDED) is the heavyweight champion of the World Wrestling Federation and a thorn in the side of Brell, the sociopathic network president of WTN. Unable to convince Rip to jump to his channel through bribery or violence, Brell decides to make a star out of Zeus, a demented ex-con behemoth who quickly becomes a national sensation fighting in anything goes “No Holds Barred” matches. Rip succumbs to Zeus’ taunts for a match when he cripples Rip’s beloved younger brother, Randy. The night of the big match, Brell kidnap’s Rip’s girlfriend, Samantha, and orders him to give Zeus a good ten minutes before throwing the match. For a time it seems like Rip won’t have to throw anything, but when he sees that Samantha is safe, he finds the inner-strength he needs to defeat his opponent and ensure that Brell never hurts anyone else ever again.
Like most children of the 80s, I fully embraced the lovably theatrical world of professional wrestling. With their inhuman bodies and high-flying acrobatics, professional wrestlers were the closest we ever got to watching real live superheroes in action. The best matches had a beauty, drama and grace to them that was as compelling as any movie you could name. I can still feel the pure joy I experienced when Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat finally pinned Randy “Macho Man” Savage during Wrestlemania III, after the most tense and excruciating 15-20 minutes of my life. Even though I first saw it on videotape months after it actually happened, I clapped and cheered so loudly I’m sure Steamboat must have heard me wherever he was in the world at the time.
But despite the enjoyment I derived from wrestling, I can honestly say that I never really understood the phenomena of Hulkamania. Even at a very young age I appreciated the fact that the “professional” part of “professional wrestling” was pretty much synonymous with “bullshit” and therefore enjoyed watching the wrestlers who I thought told the best stories in the ring and made it seem almost-kinda legitimate. For all of his enormous popularity, Hulk Hogan was clearly not one of these wrestlers. While many of my peers marveled at the size of his “pythons” I couldn’t help but notice how slow he was, how few moves he seemed to have and how predictably tedious it was whenever he came back from the brink of defeat by feeding on the cheers of the crowd.
It didn’t hurt that as the smallest boy in each and every one of my classes, I was naturally inclined to be suspicious of those whose only claim to fame was that they were bigger and stronger than everyone else was. Hulk Hogan clearly benefited from the phenomenon that causes most young kids to assume a nickel is worth more than a dime, because it seems ridiculous that the smaller coin could ever be the more valuable of the two. I, however, knew bigger did not mean better and therefore had little time for those wrestlers who brought nothing else but bulk to the table (although that didn't stop me from loudly cheering for Andre the Giant that same night I cheered for Ricky Steamboat).
I’d like to say that by 13 I had grown too old for all of this, but that would be a ginormous lie. I was still a faithful fan when the Hulkster’s leading man debut was released to theaters (hell, I even occasionally bought the fucking magazine), but my disdain for him kept me from seeing it. If they had released a movie starring Randy Savage, Jake Roberts or (most especially) Miss Elizabeth, I would have probably been there opening day, but I had no time for No Holds Barred, especially since even at that age I could tell that there was no way it could be anything but awful.
Twenty-two years later and my relationship with pro-wrestling is now exactly like the one I have with hardcore pornography—I find the actual product to be mind-numbingly tedious, but the industry itself endlessly fascinating. I can’t get through more than five minutes of any episode of Raw, Smackdown or Impact, but I still enjoy reading the behind the scenes stories about the men and women who made wrestling famous and those who continue on the tradition today.
For this reason I decided it was time to check out Hogan’s famous folly, a film supposedly so terrible that it somehow tarnishes the filmography of the man who starred in Mr. Nanny, Santa With Muscles and Three Ninjas III. Before I even pressed play on my AppleTV remote, I knew I was in for some serious pain, but I never would have dreamed what I would feel when it was over and the end credits began to roll.
Admiration.
Now before you assume I’m writing this while trying to fatally overdose on crazy pills, please understand that I never for once thought that No Holds Barred was a good movie, but instead that I quickly realized that what I was watching wasn’t terrible as a result of filmmaking incompetence, but instead the result of a phenomena I myself know only too well.
There were two groups of people on the set of this film when it was made. The first group consisted of Hogan, producer Vince McMahon and—I’m guessing—leading lady Joan Severance. They believed they were making a real movie—one that would entertain and excite a large mainstream audience. The second group consisted of everyone else who worked on the picture, including director Thomas J. Wright, (the unfortunately named) screenwriter Dennis Hackin, and—especially—co-star Kurt Fuller, who played the part of Rip’s evil network president antagonist.
The folks in the second group did not share the first group’s delusions of grandeur. They knew full well that they were trapped in the middle of a ridiculous vanity project that had no hope of being anything approaching good, so they all said a collective “Fuck it!” and decided that if it was going to fail, it might as well fail on their own spectacular terms.
I came to this conclusion when I finally realized why the film felt so familiar. There was something about its tone that felt so oddly recognizable. It was only a few minutes after Hogan’s character so completely terrified a potential kidnapper that he literally shit his pants that I realized I was watching the greatest film Lloyd Kaufman never made.
As the co-owner of Troma Studios, Kaufman is responsible for such films as The Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, Tromeo & Juliet, Terror Firmer and Poultrygeist. His films are (in)famous for reveling in bad taste, but in such a way that feels deliberate and—almost—artful. There’s a rebellious quality to his nudity, violence and scatological jokes—each film serving as a cinematic middle finger to what he sees as mainstream Hollywood’s embrace of mediocrity in favor of originality. “You want terrible?” he asks. “I’ll fucking give you terrible.”
As bizarre as it may sound, I finished watching No Holds Barred convinced that it was made with this same attitude in mind. And I completely understood why.
I’ve written before that few, if any, artists, whatever their medium, take on a project expecting it to fail, but it doesn’t take long for the signposts of failure to become impossible to ignore. And once you’ve seen enough of them, you have two choices—succumb or rebel. Succumbing means biting a bullet and creating something that you know is shitty and nothing else; rebelling means becoming subversive and creating something that’s still shitty, but on your own terms and not in the way the people paying your paychecks expected.
Whether it’s an artist who plants a subliminal penis in a Disney movie poster or an author who writes a ghost story called “A Boy and His Instrument” in a book called Haunted Schools that’s all about masturbation if you read it correctly (hey, that was me!), these acts of rebellion often go unnoticed by even the most perceptive of audience members, who simply assume that the artists lacked talent and nothing more. But we brave few who have been in these situations ourselves know deliberate, subversive shittyness when we see it and have no choice but to salute and admire it when we do.
It definitely helps my case that the film bears little relation to those found in Group Two’s various filmographies. Although Wright only got the chance to direct one other feature, he’s still managed to amass an admirable amount of credits directing some of the best (The X-Files, Angel and Firefly) and most popular (C.S.I. and N.C.I.S.) episodic shows found on television. Hackin began his career with the critically acclaimed Clint Eastwood comedy Bronco Billy and Fuller remains one of the funniest character actors working today (his crowning achievement being his role in The Tick, where he played Destroyo, a genocidal supervillain whose hatred for mankind derived from the cruel taunts of “Dance, Fatboy, dance!” he received when he was an overweight ballet prodigy. I still quote the line he delivers to Liz Vassey’s Captain Liberty—“You’re not needy, you’re wanty. There’s a difference!”—whenever I can get away with it).
This is not your standard collection of deluded, untalented assholes. These are skilled professionals who found themselves caught in an absurd situation and decided to not go gently into that good night in order to deal with it.
The question then is how did Group Two manage to make a movie that was deliberately and subversively hilarious without Group One noticing?
To answer this, I’m going to go back to the connection I made between wrestling and hardcore pornography a few paragraphs back by looking at two films that were doomed in their conception due to the inability of their directors to appreciate how much their perspectives had been shifted by their previous work.
Starring Clint Howard as the serial killing title character, 1995s Ice Cream Man sets itself apart by being a violent, r-rated, nudity-filled slasher movie whose reliance on pre-pubescent protagonists makes it feel like the most socially irresponsible kids movie of all time. Too violent and profane for its target audience and too juvenile for adults, it was a film that could have only been made by someone whose sense of what was and was not appropriate had been lost a long time ago.
Norman Apstein was just such a someone. Before making Ice Cream Man, he had—as Paul Norman—directed over 120 hardcore adult movies, including Edward Penishands (in which Tim Burton’s famed romantic hero was reimagined as dude with penises where his hands should be) and Cyrano (in which Edmond Rostand’s famed romantic hero was reimagined as a dude with a penis where his nose should be--sense a theme here?).
Having spent so much of his life focusing his frame on the most intimate of human acts (and putting penises where other body parts should be), Apstein had lost all sense of what did and did not work in the context of a mainstream film.
The same thing happened to Shaun Costello, another hardcore filmmaker, who in 1977 attempted to break into the mainstream big time with Water Power. Intended to be a gritty crime drama, Costello crucially misunderstand the limits of mainstream tolerance by making his villain an obsessed rapist who kidnaps women in order to give them enemas, which Costello showed in close-up pornographic detail. Rather than be hailed as a breakthrough in crime cinema, it was retitled The Enema Bandit and played in exactly the kind of grindhouse porn houses Costello wanted to break away from.
In the case of No Holds Barred, I believe the members of Group One were too immersed in the world of professional wrestling to see how inappropriately it translated into the medium of long-form narrative filmmaking.
Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes watching anything the WWF produced in the 80s, can appreciate how Hogan and McMahon would have developed this blind spot. They worked on a spectacle designed to appeal to the folks in the cheap seats, who did not demand—and thus were not given—anything approaching subtlety. Pro-wrestling during the Reagan era was a time of black & white and good & evil. The babyfaces were brave, virtuous men who said their prayers, ate their vitamins and loved America, while the heels were capricious cowards who lied and cheated and—worst of all—saluted the communist flag.
You can only produce this kind of entertainment for so long before you either a) buy into it wholeheartedly or b) become so innately cynical that you lose all sense of perspective of what is and is not appropriate. I can’t say for sure which applied to Hogan or McMahon, but if I had to guess it was probably a combination of both.
The reason why people my age loved the WWF in the 80s was because it was squarely aimed at 10 year-old audiences at the exact moment when we were 10 years old. This was a departure from previous decades, where wrestling was considered a largely adult entertainment—boxing with a bit more flair and drama. Yet this change in direction did not drive adults away. If anything wrestling reached its highest peak of mass popularity during this period (Hogan forever supplanting Gorgeous George in the public’s consciousness).
You could be generous and say that the WWF’s 80s product reflected the innocence and simplicity of the era, or you could say that it was adored by morons who wouldn’t know quality entertainment if it set its testicles directly upon their faces (Tea Party reference totally intended). To be fair the exact same thing could be said about the majority of low-budget action movies produced during that time (see, for example, Invasion U.S.A.). I think in order to successfully produce this kind of product you really have to believe in it and disdain it at the same time.
While it is popular for artists to suggest that they are no different than the audiences they work so hard to entertain, I think most know in their hearts that this is bullshit. The difference between creating and consuming product is that the creator has no choice but to be aware of everything that goes into the process required to make the art happen. At the time No Holds Barred was produced the wrestling industry still practiced the tradition of kayfabe—keeping up the pretense of wrestling’s reality into everyday life so as not to betray its essential artifice. That’s why the industry’s slang word for fans was the exact same one con men use for their victims—mark, a term synonymous with “sucker”.
(Kayfabe, more than anything else, is the most fascinating part of wrestling’s history. Imagine if Laurence Olivier had to pretend he was a Danish prince every time he went to a town and played Hamlet. Or if Joan Collins and Linda Evans had to catfight in a water fountain whenever they were spotted somewhere off the set of Dynasty. The only real Hollywood equivalent would be all of the gay and lesbian performers who have pretended to be happily married heterosexuals over the years.)
McMahon and Hogan clearly made a film they thought the “marks” would love, demanding that it be filled with the same black and white moral dramatics that made them so rich to begin with. Hogan’s “Rip” character had to be virtuous to the point of audacity—proclaiming that he was far more interested in charity than self-promotion, gentlemanly setting up a privacy curtain when circumstances force him to share a one-bedroom hotel room with one of the most gorgeous women in the universe, and heroically spending all of his time rehabilitating his injured brother instead of training for the most dangerous match of his life.
At the same time his opponents are as venal and mindlessly evil as any ever seen onscreen. Made just a year after Ted Turner bought Atlanta’s NWA promotion with the intention of turning it into the nationally televised WCW (and thus become the first non-regional competition that the WWF faced in years), it doesn’t seem like an accident that the main villain is a network president with the moral compass of a dung beetle. That said, Brell bears no signs of Turner’s distinctive manner or personality. I’d say this was to avoid a potential libel suit, but I remember a few years after No Holds Barred was released McMahon aired a series of skits featuring a Turner clone behaving like a redneck buffoon, so it’s not like he wasn’t afraid to go there.
Even more hilarious is Zeus, who plays the same role Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago did in Rocky III & IV, but without any of their depth, subtlety or nuance. Tommy (“Tiny” to his friends) Lister’s performance is so perversely over the top that it takes on a kind of absurdist genius. With his crossed eyes, tatooed head, and penchant for uncomfortable metallic clothing, he actually seems too over the top even for wrestling, which turned out to be true when the character was unsuccessfully transplanted into the real WWF to promote the movie (it didn’t help that Lister had no professional wrestling experience and managed to be even clumsier in the ring than Hogan). Amazingly, out of all the performers in the film, he’s probably had the most consistently successful career, having not only worked non-stop since his appearance in No Holds Barred, but also making his mark in high-profile productions like The Fifth Element, Jackie Brown and The Dark Knight.
That said, the bad guys are at least given the chance to develop actual onscreen presences, which cannot also be said for Rip’s friends. The brother who inspires him to win all of his matches is just a handsome blond guy with a goofy 80s haircut (who would, funnily enough, go on to become Jacob, Lost’s mysterious protector of the golden spring). His trainer is just an old black dude and at least two of the other people who hang with him are never even introduced onscreen.
The film’s only other character with a personality is Sam (short for Samantha, which just boggles Rip’s mind), Rip’s new business manager who has to work harder at her job than a man would because she looks just like Joan Severance and everyone within a hundred mile radius wants to have crazy-hot-monkey-sex with her. There’s no doubt that Severance is astonishingly attractive, but in such a way that detracts rather than adds to her credibility. She’s one of those actresses who is simply too good-looking, since it becomes impossible to imagine her in any other role than that of model or actress. It doesn’t help that she’s precisely the kind of limited performer required to make sure that Hogan doesn’t get wiped off the screen.
As I’ve already said, there are two films at play here, although sometimes the lines do seem to cross. The film’s bizarre penchant for scatological or inappropriately sexual jokes(turns out the bed’s noisily jiggling is the result of Rip exercising, not furiously masturbating) has a direct connection to similar material that has shown up on McMahon’s wrestling shows over the years, but at the same time they are taken to such perversely extreme levels that they extend beyond the realms of mere bad taste to that of deliberate transgression.
This is most evident in the moments Hogan and McMahon obviously did not intend to be funny. I’ve complained in the past of films that were so badly made that they transformed into inadvertent self-parody, but in the case of No Holds Barred I am certain this is only half the case. Hogan and Severance are clearly sincere, but everyone else around them is just as clearly cognizant of how ridiculous the whole enterprise is and they show it.
For someone like me the result is fascinating, but for the average wrestling fan for which it was intended it was clearly bewildering. For most people deliberately shitty is still just shitty and a waste of time and money, which explains why the filmmakers’ efforts here went almost completely unnoticed.
I say “almost”, because I know the film has at least one acolyte out there. Back when I was 19, I was in my second year of university (the last that would actually count, as my third and final year was pretty much a write off) and taking a film studies course that examined the auteur theory by looking at the films of Dreyer, Bresson, Fuller and Kurosawa (among others I may have forgotten). Among the students was another young man, whose name has been lost to time. He suffered from Down syndrome and was there as part of a program that allowed those with special disabilities to enjoy the university experience. It was a noble idea to be sure, but in practice it meant we all had to listen to his loud snoring after one of the boring foreign films or lectures inevitably put him to sleep.
Near the end of the year, he finally lost his patience during a lecture and threw up his hand. Professor Beard (who would go on to write The Artist as Monster, an excellent analysis of the films of David Cronenberg) asked him what his question was and it became clear that he had spent all of this time in class waiting for the subject of his favourite film to finally be discussed and he could no longer wait for this to happen organically.
With the floor now his he proceeded to describe in detail the climatic match between Rip and Zeus. Everyone listened patiently and it was only when it became painfully clear that he wasn’t about to stop that Professor Beard interrupted him and explained that he couldn’t answer the “question” because he hadn’t seen the film.
In retrospect, I wish he had. I would have vastly preferred to debate the symbolism of Rip’s “Rip ‘Em” T-Shirt than hear another word about Diary of a Country Priest ever again.
Of course, the greatest irony of the film is that five years after the failure of No Holds Barred, Hogan did what Rip would not and jumped over to Turner's WCW following the promise of a bigger paycheck. As the innocence of the 80s turned into the cynicism of the 90s, Hogan eventually abandoned his babyface image and became Hollywood Hogan, the leader of the renegade N.W.O. He would eventually return to McMahon's company, but by that point he was purely a nostalgia act. Though he would gain fame as a reality tv star, his film debut clearly represented his jump the shark moment. No Holds Barred was supposed to be proof that he was more than a mountain of muscle, but it ended up being proof that he was little else. The lesson being that it's better to be the biggest of all fish in a disrespected pond than the asshole who's crying while everyone else is trying not to laugh out loud.
So, as I announced this past Monday, today’s post marks a transition away from THE WYNORSKI PROJECT (which had unfortunately become a joke I no longer found amusing) into an enterprise I hope will turn out to be much more personally fulfilling. By broadening my focus to the vast world of low-budget, independent genre cinema in general I will be better equipped to write the kind of essays I enjoy.
If you’ve ever found yourself tempted to check out one of Bookgasm reviews found in my link section, you might have guessed that I’m not someone who thinks of criticism as a kind of artistic consumer protectionism. Rather than pretend that I’m Ralph Nader on a mission to protect the public from poorly made movies "unsafe at any speed," I prefer to use criticism either as a form of autobiography (see my recent “review” of Hal Needham’s Stuntman for probably the best example of this) or as a means to entertainingly discuss an interesting quirk of pop culture (see my “review” of Evil Laugh, in which the film isn’t actually discussed until the final paragraph).
The truth is that more often than not, the essays/reviews I write are not actually inspired by their subject, but were conceived with the hope that I might someday find a subject that justified my writing them. This is why I have to admit that THE WYNORSKI PROJECT proved to be such a disappointing failure. I simply am not capable of being interesting, funny or even fitfully amusing if the only point I have to make is, “This movie sucked.” It’s only when a movie’s specific suckiness allows me to discuss a much larger and more interesting issue that I find myself inspired.
So, with B-MOVIE BULLSH*T I hope to give myself the freedom to do what I do best—write overly-long, self-indulgent celebrations of terrible movies that random people across the globe might read a sentence or two of while they search heroically on for “HEATHER LOCKLEAR SWAMP SEX”.
That said, let the BULLSH*T begin!
B-MOVIE BULLSH*T
PART ONE
Invasion U.S.A.
(1985)
Synopsis
Matt Hunter thought he was done with “The Agency” for good, but then his old Russkie rival, Mikhail Rostov, decided to kill his Native American friend, John Eagle, and lead a terrorist invasion of the good ole U.S. of A. Once certain that his killing days were done, Hunter has to leave the Everglades and become a one-man-army dedicated to avenging his friend and saving a little freedom-loving land called AMERICA!
FUCK YEAH!
After watching seven of these movies, one after another, I can definitely answer,“Yes. They’re for boys only.” And not even eighth-grade boys in the case of Chuck Norris, whose films had obviously been made by the fourth-grade boys who follow the eighth-grade boys around, awestruck.
--Merrill Markoe, “Evolution of the Species. Not.” What the Dogs Taught Me
Leave it to the creator of Stupid Pet Tricks to come up with the best and most succinct evaluation of Chuck Norris’ filmography I’ve ever come across. I was 16 when I first read it and even then I marveled at its accuracy. As a young boy who eagerly played “guns” as much as every other red-blooded Canadian pre-teen male, I knew there was always something slightly off about Chuck’s movies, especially in comparison to the ones that starred Arnold, Sly, Mel and Bruce. They never seemed to feel like fully formed “real” movies. Instead of being a genuine action movie hero it always felt like Chuck was just pretending to be one and everyone let him because he seemed to be really good at karate.
Now that’s not to say this was unique to Chuck. Replace his name with Steven Segal and “karate” with whatever Asian kickamaboo he mastered and that previous paragraph’s last sentence remains equally accurate. Hell, their onscreen careers were so identical both of their “best” movies (Code of Silence and Under Siege) were directed by the same guy!
Still, it does seem clear to me that when Chuck's legendary "toughness" became a popular Internet meme a few years back it was less a direct reflection of his talent or charisma, but instead the fact that--more than any of his peers--he perfectly represented the kind of absurd machoismo that irony had long since banished from polite society.
Last summer a lot of folks got excited about The Expendables because they felt it marked the return of a kind of movie that had vanished from the screen—the 80s action movie. And despite their half-hearted protests otherwise, they left that movie disappointed because they were looking for something that simply cannot be replicated. The 80s action movie is as much a product of its time as the original silent films of the early 20th century. No matter how hard you try to mimic one, our modern sensibilities will always mar the brushstrokes, ruining the authenticity.
The major reason for this isn’t hard to figure out. The 80s action genre was defined by the conservative politics of the era. Reagan was president; the cold war was still a thing that totally existed. People still believed in stuff and—with the exception of some folks on the east coast—didn’t pepper their conversations with invisible quotation marks.
In retrospect it seems incredibly obvious that nearly all of the action icons from that period would go on to become the most vocal Hollywood conservatives of today. Arnold, the ultimate immigrant success story, became the Republican governor of California. Mel won an Oscar for directing the nearly pornographically violent depiction of the martyrdom of a largely-fictional historical figure with Braveheart and then got really crazy after that. Sly would go on to suggest that the nation’s first black president was a Manchurian Candidate inserted by a foreign power to take down America from within and Bruce appeared in North, the film that marked the beginning of the gradual creative decline of Rob Reiner, the most liberal member of Hollywood’s liberal elite.
These guys didn't fit perfectly into the 80s action mold because they were strong, capable actors, but because their personal philosophies allowed them to act like mindless, gun-toting killing machines without any shame or self-consciousness. They happily killed commies without irony because commies needed killing and they made bad jokes after they killed bad guys because bad guys didn’t deserve good ones.
And of all the unironic 80s action movie stars, Chuck was easily the most unironicist and has proven only too happy to display his conservative bona fides on his sleeve. He occasionally subs in as a guest host for the notorious FOX NEWS spew-meister Sean Hannity, “wrote” a whole book about his right-wing political views and starting syndicating a weekly newspaper column that frequently features him taking creative cut & paste liberties with other people’s work.
Incapable of actually playing a three-dimensional character, he instead devoted himself to being the living embodiment of “the hero”, which his own conservative values defined as “the guy who could kick other guys the hardest.” And he was especially happy when the guys he was kicking were philosophically inclined to support the political rhetoric of Marx, Engals, Lenin, Trotsky, Mao and Streisand.
The first film for which he took a writing credit, Invasion U.S.A. is easily the most archetypally 80s action movie he ever made. No cliché goes untouched. No character gets developed. Stuff never stops ‘sploding. It’s kinda racist. The hero is so ambivalent about the hot reporter who keeps popping up around him (for reasons the plot never gets around to justifying) that you start to wonder if he even likes girls. He also has a cool holster-vest-thingie for his machine guns that lets him walk around without his arms getting tired. And he drives a pickup truck!
Based on the title and advertising, I suspect most folks went into the movie assuming it was essentially the previous year’s Red Dawn with ass-kicking Chuck in place of a bunch of wimpy teenage pretty boys, but the invasion in Invasion U.S.A. is much more small-scale and—based on what we’re shown—apparently limited to Florida, which you’d think is the last place an invading army would want to descend. Truthfully, it would kinda have to be, if the whole thing is supposed to be stopped by one bearded dude with a mullet and a pet armadillo.
In perhaps the film’s most prescient move, it presents the possibility of America being taken down not by a huge military force but instead by a series of strategic terrorist attacks. Posing as police officers and soldiers, the film’s ragtag group of commies (shown in both Russian, Chinese and Cuban varieties) attempt to sow distrust amongst the citizenry towards the actual authority figures they must depend on during such a crisis.
Problem is, the people don’t really seem to notice. We’re told that they’re freaking out on a massive scale, but whenever we see them they don’t actually look overly concerned. We’re also told that for every attack Chuck prevents, 100 succeed, but we only actually see the ones he prevents, so it’s kinda hard to accept the enormity of the situation. Based on what we’re shown a more accurate title might have been Inconvenience U.S.A. (ZING!)
But this lack of urgency could easily be ignored if the film’s action scenes made up the difference. They don’t, though, so it’s a wash. The problem, once again, is a lack of scale. A lot of stuff ‘splodes in Invasion U.S.A., they just don’t ‘splode big enough. The bomb the psycho commie tries to leave in a crowded shopping mall barely has enough juice to blow up a single kiosk. The other bomb used to blow up a whole church manages to only randomly scatter a few commies when Chuck throws it back at them.
Plus, screenwriter Chuck is too patriotic to even hint that anti-American terrorists might show even the tiniest measure of competency. Sure, he’ll show them firing a rocket at the house of the adorable little girl who we just saw place the ornament on top of the Christmas tree, but he’s also going to make sure that he shows us that the little girl and her family are okay despite the whole fiery inferno and everything. Same goes for when they try to blow up a bus full of kids being evacuated to the countryside. It’s kinda hard to take the bad guys seriously as a threat when the only time we hear about them successfully killing a bunch of defenseless kids is when Chuck visits a burned out carousal at an abandoned carnival site.
That’s not to say that we don’t get to see the bad guys kill people, but the ones they do actually get to kill are drug dealers, sleazeballs, an old guy and a bunch of desperate Cuban refugees destined to become illegal aliens sucking greedily on the teat of American exceptionalism, so obviously their deaths have no emotional impact whatsoever.
It also doesn’t help that screenwriter Chuck clearly abhorred the notion that hero Chuck might even show a single moment’s worth of weakness. At a certain point his ability to always get the better of his opponents seems less like skill and talent and more like deluded vanity. Dude doesn’t even get his clothes messed up. Arnold, Bruce, Sly and Mel all let their clothes get messed up. They even bled on occasion.
As noted above, Invasion U.S.A. is like the majority of Chuck’s movies (the notable exceptions being the already mentioned Code of Silence and the multi-genre oddity that is Silent Rage) in that it feels less like an actual movie than an overly-earnest facsimile of one made by folks without much talent and even less self-awareness, but rather than make the film feel less authentic, it only makes it more so. Absent of the skill and guile that helped disguise the absurdities of other, better-produced 80s action movies, it stands out as the (extremely im)perfect exemplar of the wholy ridiculous phenomenon.
In the wise words of Courtney Love, Chuck fakes it so real, he’s beyond fake.
