SHOOTING FROM THE HIP: "THE HAMMERER"

SHOOTING FROM THE HIP - EPISODE 2

A famous scene from the low-budget, cult hit "The Hammerer."

http://youtu.be/zkEji6UCheU

Check out our first episode, "Smackin' Cheese!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkEji6UCheU

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (17 OF 100)

"The Warriors" (1979), Dir: Walter Hill

 

$7 Million in Budget vs. $22,490,039 in Gross

 
It's funny to watch a movie like The Warriors, laugh my ass off, and then realize that the guy who made actually this has quite a dinstinguished career behind him. On top of this film, Writer-Producer Walter Hill had a hand in all the Alien films (Prometheus included), both of the highly underrated 48 Hours films, Tales from the Crypt (1989-96), the subsequent movies (the good and the bad), the little known Perversions of Science, and notably HBO's Deadwood pilot (as director), as well as Stallone's most recent attempt to prove he's not 67, the box office flounder Bullet to the Head... Not bad, not bad.

 
In its time, The Warriors was not well-received by critics, and there are clear reasons for that. In terms of its acting, yeah, it's pretty bad. The characters talk to each other without the slightest hint of human emotion. And the realism is a bit questionable. I mean, I live in a pretty rough neighborhood myself and I've never seen gangs dressed as both cowboys/Indians (The Warriors), KISS/Roberto Alomar (The Baseball Furies), or Roller Girl/Super Mario Family (The Punks, apparently)... So yeah, not exactly an accurate on the pre-Reagan youth...

 
And for that matter, the social commentary (if any) is a little shallow. I refer you to the subway scene where the gang encounters a bunch of rich kids coming from their prom (I assume). The rich girl looks at the poor girl's shoes and everyone goes silent. It's possibly one of the more empty, awkward, and blatant social commentaries I've seen in a movie and doesn't really create the social landscape as I think Hill intended...
 

So, for all these bad qualities, why even see The Warriors? I tell you. Because the first fifteen minutes of The Warriors deserves to be studied in f&%$ing schools. The topic should be "How To Execute a Perfect Story Set Up And Do It Right!"

The movie opens with a series of flash-cuts of all the city's street gangs informing one another that Cyrus, leader of the Gramercy Riffs (and a very Third Man-esque character), wants all the gangs to meet in Van Cortlandt Park, unarmed. Cyrus proposes a truce amongst the gangs so that they can start working together and take over the city. Swaying the crowd, Cyrus proclaims (in the movie's most quotable moment) "Can you dig it?!" The gangs all cheer Cyrus on as a born leader... that is, until a psychotic little punk named Luther (a young Uncle Jerry from Twin Peaks) shoots Cyrus and kills him..Chaos ensues and Luther and his gang (The Rogues) pin the murder on The Warriors, making them the most hated gang in the city and target of everyone's wrath...

Now that, folks, is what you call "a set-up." Within a small amount of time (exactly 13 minutes and 44 seconds), Mr. Hill makes sure the audience knows who is important (Cyrus), what is at stake (the truce), and what causes that to come crashing down (that asshole Luther); putting our characters in grave peril and smack in the middle of a situation that seems impossible to resolve... Ah, jeez, how they gonna get out of this? Well, if you're asking yourself that question, then Mr. Hill has done his job. Doesn't matter if the film sucks for the next hour or even ends with some stupid musical number, the set-up worked. Like a contractual agreement between the audience and the filmmaker, what was being sold was also purchased, even if it runs the risk of not being completely satisfactory. The potential is more attractive than the reality in the end.

 
The only two other movies I can recall having set-ups as tight as The Warriors are Die Hard and Winter's Bone. From its set-up to its climax, the movie offers some great and not-so-great action sequences, some interesting characters along the way, and most importantly, a constant need to see how these bad actors dressed in Chip 'n' Dale vests get out of this situation. Modern screenwriters could learn a thing or two from 70s cheese like The Warriors.

For your viewing displeasure, an ironic song choice for this sort of movie...

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (16 OF 100)

"Nemisis" (1992), Dir: Albert Ryun

 

Unknown in Budget vs. $2,001,124 in Gross

Sometimes, it's great to be a man. When I first saw the movie Nemesis, I realized that this movie pretty much had everything: action, robots, bewbs, explosions, robots fighting other robots. What more could a horny, raging, adolescent teenager ask for? Well, maybe a touch of story for one... a little less narration telling us the character's inner-feelings... some acting not so bad that literally every line had to be dubbed... a better ending maybe (that isn't exactly like the first Terminator), or even a satisfying one? Yes, these are the things the movie lacks and makes it arguably bad, but for what it offers in terms of overwhelming, action extravaganzas, one has to sacrifice any expectations of intellectual satisfaction to enjoy this film.

Rising from the ashes of the legendary Cannon Group and coming off Cyborg, a very similar film, Albert Pyun's movie opens with our main character Alex bringing back a hooker to his hotel room. The hooker insists on checking him to make sure he's not an undercover. Well, turns out Alex is, popping her one in the face -- BOOM! -- and thus revealing that she is actually a cyborg posing as a woman (awkward!). She then says to Alex, "Goddamn cop!" and Alex rebutts "Goddamn terrorist," quickly finishing her off -- BOOM! And that's how the movie begins. Yes, indeed, the perfect man-movie.

Picking up from that sequence, the title character Alex (Olivier Gruner, the poor man's JCVD) runs from a group of terrorists dressed like 1980s Havana vacationers into probably the most excessive, outlandish action sequence I can recall. The terrorists and Alex exchange endless rounds (which a co-worker pointed out to me that their guns never recoil) and then up the anti with explosives, causing probably more explosions in the first 10 minutes than T2 had entirely (I counted 16 at least). But for all it's awesomeness, I think there's been only six lines of dialogue spoken at this point, or even less, so there's not much story to follow...

I can't really tell you what the story to Nemesis is because it's very confusing. Alex is partly machine, but seems to have come to terms with the fact; so you can't really say it's about man vs. machine, or even a man vs. himself because being part machine is what gives Alex the ability to fight the other cyborgs, and fighting cyborgs is what makes his character so f*&%ing awesome, so we just whatever is thrown at us.

Back to story: So after surviving his battle with the Havana terrorists, Alex goes forth to hunt down the only survivor on their side and guns her down months later... Well, there's another plot-line out the window. What now? Well, what happens next is he quits the LAPD to become a freelance trigger-man, but the LAPD wants him for one last mission: to find and kill a terrorist named Jared. Later, we discover that Jared is actually a woman, and not only a woman, but already dead... except that her memory core survived somehow, so to keep those memories safe, they must be implanted into Alex's cybernetic eye...

 
Okay. Yeah. You know what. Even trying to type out this plot-line confuses me, and it doesn't stop there. If you haven't figured it out yet, the story is not the point. Similarly to other over-stylish 90s action-films, like The Replacement Killers or anything by John Woo, Nemesis' story means nothing. Now, that brand of thinking sounds kinda bad and, yes, the rejection of any form of intellectual stimulation is probably why most modern movies just plain suck ass these days; but in the case of this low-budget, low-brow Terminator knock-off, what really are one's expectations? Simple: action, style, soundtrack, and Mira Sorvino with her bewbs hanging out the whole movie. Shameless, yes, but this is why you watch these movies, to satisfy the simpleton in you, to give a high-five to that former teenager who just wants pure excess and wants it right now.

Unfortunately, that means that most men will probably watch this film alone. Women will have no interest, guaranteed, and especially after the tasteless nude scenes with former USA Beauty Queen Deborah Shelton and Fitl On Film's blog favorite -- you guessed it -- Tom Jane, and not Coolio. So for all the guys, go grab yourself a six pack, go to your local video store (or youtube), get some chips, and let Nemesis just take over your mind.   

And for your mindless viewing pleasure, an opening scene that I don't think any man can say no to... minus the hack voice-over narration...

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (14 OF 100)

"Tammy And The T-Rex" (1994), Dir: Stewart Raffill
 

$$ Something in Budget vs. Nothing in Gross $$

Most filmmakers walk into a project with an intention. They usually have an idea what kind of movie they are trying to make or at least what audience they are aiming towards. But with the sci-comedy-disaster Tammy And The T-Rex, I don't think Director Stewart Raffill could even answer those questions. Coming off his screaming success Mac And Me (that was sarcasm by the way), Raffill brings us a movie that embodies three very distinctively genres, but fails at achieving anyone of them.

Firstly, Tammy And The T-Rex is supposed to be a teen comedy. The majority of the cast are 90s teen actors with the lovely (but talentless) Denise Richards playing Tammy and Fast & Furious' own Paul Walker playing her goofy boyfriend Michael. Immediately we learn that Tammy fears for Michael's life when her psychotic ex-boyfriend Billy won't leave her alone. Michael tells Tammy that he is not afraid of Billy and confronts him. The two proceed to grab each other's balls in probably one of the funniest teen movie confrontations I've ever seen ("What we got here is one of them testicular stand-offs!").

But from there, Billy and his cronies kidnap Michael and drop him off at a zoo to be lion-lunch. And surely enough, Michael is mauled and killed by a lion... This is where the film takes a sudden turn, casually becoming a teen-comedy that also happens to be revenge-film...? Hmm. So Paul Walker dies (in a very funny hospital sequence), but his brain is left in tact, even if his body is not. Meanwhile, a mad scientist named Dr. Wachenstein (played by Weekend at Bernie's own Terry Kiser) has built a giant robotic Tyrannosaurus Rex... for whatever reason. All it needs to be functional is an unsullied brain, making Paul Walker's now useless brain the perfect suitor. And yes, this is all the same movie...

So the mad scientist steals Paul Walkers's brain (in a lab sequence that looks a lot like Simpsons Treehouse of Horror II) and transplants it into the robot dinosaur. And within a few seconds of becoming a robot dinosaur, Paul Walker sets out to exact revenge by viciously slaughtering Billy and his gang in some rather gory PG-13 moments. So essentially, at this point, this so-called teen-comedy that just recently became a revenge-film now also features sci-fi special effects of about the caliber your see in the picture below.

Ridiculous plot aside, the most off-putting thing about Tammy And The T-Rex is the blatant disregard for human life that the film tries to treat humorously. There's a sequence where Denise Richards and her super-gay friend Byron (Theo Forsett) go to the morgue and start picking through corpses to find Michael's potential replacement body. Leaning the bodies against the window so the giant robot dinosaur can see them, Tammy rejects one because apparently his c$%k is too big for her... Yup. She's not that kinda girl, but is the type that will desecrate a corpse.

Now I know this is an attempt at humor, but the popular brand of 90s dark humor (typically found in era classics such as Pulp Fiction) doesn't work here. Especially not when paralleled with some imitation 80s bubble gum schlock. They do try comedy with the dinosaur like having it trying to make a phone call, but this weird playfulness seems out of place when just moments ago the T-Rex ripped a guy's guts out and crushed him in front of an old lady.

As a director, I think Raffill deserves study. His career includes two films that attempt to tap the youth market of a particular time without having any idea what that market wants or why they even exist... Or maybe it's as simple as Raffill wanted to make a movie about a T-Rex (in light of Jurassic Park's success the previous year) and the name Tammy just happened to start with a "T." Wow! Marketing genius at its finest!

The only thing that makes Tammy And The T-Rex worth seeing is Denise Richards. Simply put, she's young and gorgeous. And I assume the striptease she performs for the camera at the end was the filmmakers half-assed way of apologizing for making the audience put up with whatever the hell this was, while also exploiting Denise Richards for being very attractive at the same time. Poor Denise... She may never have had much in the way of acting talent (even slightly), but the Charlie Sheen years really look as if they took a toll on her pretty face and that's a real shame.

Enjoy this movie for the few laughs it has (mostly among the human characters surprisingly) and to see Denise in a better place, even if that better place is a world where Paul Walker's brain can be kept in salad bowl so that he can enjoy a daily striptease from Tammy. 

And for your viewing displeasure, the off-putting violence I was speaking of, accompanied by some really, really bad special effects.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (9 OF 100)

 

"Mac And Me" (1998), Dir: Stewart Raffill

$13 Million in Budget vs. $6,424,112 in Gross

Watching movies from the 80s, I realize how it easy it was to sell things to children back then, or at least get children to convince their parents to buy it for them. But even back in the 80s, Mac and Me would be a tough sell, to anyone, including its sponsors and McAffiliates who abandoned the project shortly after it's abysmal inception. It's also become a regularly featured joke on Conan O'Brien.

Almost identical in plot and score to E.T., it's about a family of aliens (who get more and more frightening with every scene) that accidentally get sucked into the vacuum system on a probe (which happens more than once), and end up on earth. While on earth, they get separated from their youngest child (nicknamed Mac, I'm assuming after McDonalds because they were a heavy sponsor) as he wanders the country until adopting a human family. Eventually, Michael (Johnathan Ward), a wide-eyed young boy bound to a wheelchair, befriends Mac and decides to help him find his alien family. Sound familiar?

Yeah, well, that about sums up the plot or anything relevant that happens in the movie. The rest is just a string of events that drift from one product placement to another. For example, Mac leaving Coke cans with flowers in them for Michael to find. Subsequently, Michael starts noticing his remote control cars are acting strangely. When they discover Mac, he's ill and the kids have to nurse him back to health using -- you guessed it -- Coke. From there, they then dress him similarly to a Talking Teddy Ruxpin, if you remember those, and this all leads to the birthday party scene... Oh, the birthday party scene... set at the local McDonalds... featuring rappers dancing by the drive-through, Ronald McDonald himself, and a complex choreographed dance (contest) sequence that I'm sure the employees of McDonalds just winged, much like an 80s McDonalds Commercial. It's an appalling sequence that makes you feel... exploited. (As a side note, explain to me how an alien from another planet knows how to do the same f*&%ing dance as everyone else in the restaurant.)

From there, they rip off the famous flying bike sequence in E.T. with a wheelchair instead. This takes them to the Sears where Michael's mom works, and where more remote controlled cars are employed to distract the agents. Losing them, the kids drive Mac to the desert (explain to me how kids can drive a van across states and not be noticed) to find his family. When they do, the family (that looks like relatives of Sloth from The Goonies) are dehydrated and dying. But no worries! They got more Coke! And use it to revive Mac's creepy family... seriously.

**Spoiler Alert** To save you the pain of enduring the last twenty minutes of this giant commercial flop, the movie ends Mac and his alien family (dressed like suburbanites and even more terrifying now) being made into American citizens as appointed by congress and then driving away in a pink caddy with the tag-line appearing, "We'll Be Back." Thank God they never were! We can all just hope that that pink caddy crashed and then someone went to jail for thinking that aliens would somehow know how to drive a human car. 

This movie is worth watching not to remember what it was like being a child, but rather to see how McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and countless toy companies viewed you at that age. And I'll repeat, the aliens are absolutely terrifying. 

Yep. That's the trailer. And for your viewing displeasure, the infamous birthday party scene, which makes me realize now why nobody ever came to my birthday as a child. I didn't have no creepy dancing teddy bear.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (8 OF 100)

 

"Death Wish 3" (1985), Dir: Michael Winner

$9 Million in Budget vs. $16,116,878 in Gross

A milestone of the legendary Cannon Group, I remember reading an article on Death Wish 3 in university once, to my surprise, shortly after seeing on television. I never really considered Charlie B. the subject of academia before. I don't remember the said article's title, but the subheading was "Whitey's Comin' To Get Ya." It discussed the Death Wish films as archetypal examples of the 80s conservative backlash. I read it, having only seen one of the Death Wish films, and wondered to myself how anyone got that from a film that features Alex Winter (Bill from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) as one of the main villain's lackeys.

In his prime, I'm sure Charles Bronson was one scary mother. But by the third Death Wish movie, he just looked... well, tired, like he needed a nap... maybe a drink as well. His presence in this film was far less action hero and far more melting candle. (There was a little more spark in his return-performance in Death Wish 4. In that film, there's a scene where he plants a bomb in a fish dinner.) This addition to the depraved adventures of Paul Kersey has Paul visiting an old war buddy in a crime-ridden neighborhood, only to find his friend murdered and the local police pinning the crime on him... 

But knowing that Paul is a vigilante, the police captain (Ed Lauter, who always played the police captain) releases Paul in hopes that he will murder the bad guys and save his officers from actually enforcing the law. From there, the movie goes back and forth between Bronson killing crazy punks with clever booby-traps (pre-Home Alone and much more funny) to just straight-up shooting them. Eventually, the punks push back, going after Broson's retired senior citizen friends. Not satisfied, they murder Bronson's sorta love interest (Deborah Raffin at her most redwood) and just after the two have just finished a nice chicken dinner. Bronson's reaction to this is very much a "Well, sh&*%."

This slowly leads to one of the greatest cinematic battles (pre-Braveheart). The Elderly vs. The Young Punks. Grandmas and grandpas alike breaking out their old rusty guns (some of them being what I assume is an M2 Browning Machine Gun) and murdering punks in masses. There is one particular scene where the old people trick some of the punks with a booby-trap, making them trip over a chain, and then shooting them to death while they're in the street and can't get up... It's amazing. See the whole thing here.

But the fact remains that Charles Bronson seems half-asleep during the whole film, making even scenes where he's kicking ass and taking numbers play out like he were Grandpa Simpson (and not Hell-Fish Bonanza Grandpa Simpson either). Watch for the comedy because there's plenty of that.

For your viewing displeasure, Charles Bronson buying a ice cream bar and then murdering somebody, and giving the neighborhood a new-found sense of hope.

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (6 OF 100)

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BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (5 OF 100)

 

"The Room" (2003), Dir: Tommy Wiseau

$6 Million in Budget vs. $1,800 in Gross

Inspired by the dramas of Tennessee Williams, watching Tommy Wiseau's The Room, one feels a lot like Stella in A Street Car Named Desire... And by that, I mean brutally getting the crap kicked out of you by Stanley... Oh, man, where to begin? We could talk about Wiseau himself, and what the hell is up with that guy? Namely, his weird, unhealthy-looking body that you unfortunately have to see naked several times throughout the movie. (In my own cowardliness, I made excuses to duck-out during those parts.) We could go on for days about his poor decisions as a movie director, such as shooting the film in both 35mm and video at the same time and then cutting the two together later. (The cost of film vs. video never really entered his mind apparently with the film's $6 million dollar budget.) With that kind of brand of thinking, I suppose it makes perfect sense why his script makes absolutely no sense at all. Characters flip-flop at the drop of a coin, no one is quite sure of their motives for anything, and everyone says "hi" whenever a character enters the room. But when it comes down to it in the end, it just seems to me that Wiseau's whole reasoning for making "The Room" was to put himself in gross sex scenes with poor Juliette Danielle and subject his audience to really awful R&B. Yes, these are all signs of a horrible filmmaker (and person I might add), but the thing that gets me the most is why Wiseau would want to have rooftop scenes in a movie and not use a real San Francisco rooftop. Instead, the roof is obviously a green-screened cityscape and badly at that. Why not just film on a real rooftop, goddamn it?! Why?! See if you like bad movies, but avoid if you like sex.



For your viewing displeasure, The Flower Shop scene, which I would argue is probably the stupidest and most senseless twenty seconds of cinema ever. I showed it to a co-worker and his reaction was "It's like watching a Commodore 64 programmed to make a movie scene, or interpret the most fleeing of human interaction."

BAD MOVIES THAT SHOULD BE SEEN (3 OF 100)

 

"Death Race 2000" (1975), Dir: Paul Bartel

$300,000 in Budget vs. $5 Million in Gross

Whoever thought that Death Race 2000 would make for a good franchise of serious action movies obviously never saw the original, and they missed out. Watching Death Race 2000 in all its B-movie glory, what you essentially have is David Carradine in a gimp suit, Sylvester Stallone so high on coke that you can't understand a word he is saying, and a whole bunch of ridiculous-looking cars trying to rundown innocent people to score points. Question is, what more could you want?? A sardonic sports film with cheesy production values, ludicrous violence, and silly social commentary, Death Race 2000 is a milestone in the exploitation genre with howls of laughter never ceasing. Who would have thought that of Carradine and Stallone that Sly would come out the less sleazy at the end of his career, having started out as a porn actor? Probably the gem of the Roger Corman collection, Death Race 2000 is the perfect bad movie to get drunk to and watch with your friends. It's a fiesta of bad taste that was never meant to be taken seriously.



For your viewing displeasure, Sly's best moment in cinema.