Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 18. The Fell Civil War (Part 2)!

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Theme: Snake (Slip On) - Elektradrive

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tango & Cash!

May we all have as much fun at our respective trials.

Few genres are as uniformly mediocre as the 80s buddy cop flick, in which an odd couple of cops (or one cop and one crook, etc.) team up and bicker over differences until they learn a valuable lesson and defeat the villains of the day. Most iterations had a black guy and a white guy, and ranged from benign pleas for us to all-just-get-along to, well, Lethal Weapon 2.

This movie is why South Africa now has 70 murders a day and a government that proudly declares it doesn't have to provide its people electricity if it doesn't want to.

Others made the difference in backgrounds something else, like Red Heat (American cop meets strongman late-stage Soviet cop) or overlooked 90s variant Showdown in Little Tokyo (ethnically Japanese cop meets ripped weeaboo cop). Finally the genre mutated into prestige HBO drama with True Detective (good ol' boy chudjak meets fedora nihilist), with strangely kino results.

Spoilers: this show trolled atheoids so hard by making their Shadow the Hedgehog stand-in the coolest guy ever and the nominally Christian hypocrite a weak-willed slob only to have the fedora find Christ in the last scene. Neckbeards still jiggle with rage-filled sobs about it to this day.

But it is 1989's forgotten populist masterstroke, Tango & Cash, that most classically hearkens back to the original odd-couple formula, with the snob-meets-slob dynamic at its core. Sylvester Stallone gamely sends himself up as an erudite, fashion-conscious cop who plays the stock market and calls his own Rambo character a pussy, while Kurt Russell is his rough-around-the-edges foil, who spends most of the movie hitting on Stallone's sister (Teri Hatcher, Tomorrow Never Dies). 

Mid female lead of 1989 (colourised).

The plot is simple: supercops Ray Tango (Stallone) and Gabe Cash (Russell) get framed by arch-villain Jack Palance after interfering once too often with his drug empire. They're sent to live in general population in a maximum security prison full of scumbags they've previously busted.

Soap-dropping jokes are made.

Our heroes receive a warm welcome to the big house.

This shot says a lot about the duality of man.

Never mind that we've clearly seen that they're guilty of violations both technical and egregious, including brutality that would make Dirty Harry raise an eyebrow, which Palance could easily have leveraged against them. The movie breezily skips over that little detail, perhaps because the script was being constantly rewritten on the fly during a troubled production presided over by giant-spider-in-Superman-demanding Hollywood folktale Jon Peters.

The end credits freeze-frame literally telling you to disregard objections to the nonsensical plot would be a red flag if the movie weren't so much fun.

Realising their days are numbered, the eponymous duo break out of prison and begin pursuing their revenge against Palance's minions, including Requin (Brion James), who shrugged off the shackles of a stock role as scripted to make his character speak solely in Bri'ish clichés.

Actual dialogue.

Finally, with help from a shameless ripoff of James Bond's Q, Cash and Tango storm Palance's hideout and defeat him, owing largely to Palance and Requin's classic bad-guy blunder of forgetting to announce they have a hostage until after their small army of faceless thugs are already dead.

In another blatant Bond nod, Palance has pet mice. However, while Blofeld just idly strokes his cat while dealing with his underlings, Palance really seems to adore his little pets.

Tango & Cash was the last movie released in the 1980s and feels like the perfect sendoff to an era. As uneven, derivative and poorly paced as it may be, it's completely satisfying entertainment. The whole movie is peppered with male bonding banter that could kill the tone like Marvel's jokes-per-minute mandate, but it never does because it is the tone and is completely unselfconscious about it. Watch this movie; you will grin like a tard from beginning to end.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Warriors of the Apocalypse!

This title font looks like something from a straight-to-DVD Barbie movie from the 90s.

Just as Albert Pyun used the marketability of the post-apocalyptic genre in the 80s as a springboard to explore his noir detective and Walter Hill fantasies, so Warriors of the Apocalypse, AKA Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain, quickly veers off in the direction of lost-civilisation discovery flicks like Siren of Atlantis, Hammer's She, or The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak. This article contains spoilers, but since the movie makes no sense it would be more truthful to say this article contains non-sequiturs.

Inside this aesthetic are two wolves. One is Rob Halford. The other is the cop from the Village People. But I'm not sure which is which.

Our protagonists are a Mad Maxian rabble of post-nuke leatherbois who seem to tool around the desert wasteland aimlessly until, as luck would have it, they run into a mysterious immortal who intervenes in a fight with an enormous fatass and his parasol-bearer, apparently over the plight of two black guys he keeps as slaves and feeds on scraps. Like everything in movies, this was probably meant as brown-nosing progressive sociopolitical commentary but ended up hilariously raycist instead.

I have a dream that one day little black filmmakers and little white filmmakers alike will stop embarrassing themselves with this crap.

The mysterious immortal leads our heroes into a lush jungle that apparently exists right next door to the desert, where they are immediately attacked by a succession of tribal hunter-gatherer types ranging from Pygmies to Amazons to this guy:

Remember Star Wars Kid? This is him now. Feel old yet?

At first the Village People easily defeat their attackers, since they have firearms that appear to shoot explosive projectiles, while the hunter-gatherer bros have spears and aren't much good with them. They run into more trouble with the Pygmies, whose leader, this vaguely androgynous shaman type in spoopy makeup whom I shall call Marilyn Manlet, has the ability to heal them back from death with psychic powers.

*Eric Cartman voice* neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh-neh, pewwwww

This leads to ROUND TWO, in which the Pygmies catch up to our heroes and proceed to beat on them with wildly improbable success.

It doesn't seem to occur to this guy that he can just pick up his assailant and throw him literally about twenty feet with no effort at all.

Finally the Village People reach the Land of the Yik-Yak, or to be more precise, the land of Sheila, whose name might be a sly reference to She, and her underappreciated high priest, Julian Assange.

Sheila has kind of a Brazilian drag queen thing going on. She more like >she amirite?

Much like the real Assange, this character does nothing wrong but gets destroyed for it anyway, making this B-joint oddly prescient.

The Village People find their new home is a paradise of plenty, with all the food and female attention they could want - only they can't leave. Since everywhere else in the world seems to be a post-nuke desert, I'm not even sure why this condition strikes them as a problem, but they have to pull the thread, and soon all manner of secrets about the Land of the Yik-Yak are revealed, such as that Assange has managed to make everyone eternally young and have psychic powers by harnessing an underground reactor, because at least one 80s screenwriter was still going by the 50s B-movie consensus that atomic energy is basically magic.

The aesthetic shifts from Mad Max ripoff to jungle adventure to Dr No lair hit like a Mr Bungle song.

The movie comes to a head when Sheila seduces the leader of the Village People and openly plots with him to team up to get rid of Assange right in front of Assange, prompting a showdown in which Sheila and Assange shoot lasers at each other from their eyes. During this confrontation, radioactive mutants show up and revolt, causing Sheila to go full Samson option and blow up her entire compound with a cannon hidden in her throne.

Boy, that escalated quickly. That really got out of hand.

Perhaps, as in greatest movie of all time Zardoz, the idea is that the phony utopia bred in its spoiled rulers a desire for self-destruction; that the essence of fulfilling life is found in struggle; that Howard's triumphalist normative barbarism trumps Lovecraft's neurotic death-grip on the guard rails of civilisation as the height of man's potential. Maybe this movie is actually profound and great. And wouldn't that be the most shocking twist of all?

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: they seem to be incorporated in most of the Village People's character designs.

CUSTOM CARS: not even one.

MUTANTS: some guys with radiation burns who limp around in the underground lair.

GOGGLES: we're counting gas masks so yes.

TOTAL: 3/5 - the most post-apocalyptic Henry Ryder Haggard pastiche ever filmed.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mothman Prophecies!

Cryptid flicks might well be the most bargain-bin of all genres. Abominable was a neat riff on Hitchcock that memorably featured Tiffany Shepis being yanked spine first through a (rear) window, and Willow Creek was a top shelf Blair Witch Project ripoff that did little to disguise its plagiarism. But you've never heard of either, and it's way downhill from there on in, with one remarkably kino exception.

We're going uncharacteristically classy this Halloween.

What makes The Mothman Prophecies go so hard is the effortlessness with which it transcends its lowly underdog status as cryptidcore. If such cryptozoological heavyweights as the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot can barely scrape together more than one watchable title, who would have thought the fucking Mothman movie would be any good?

The schizo art coffee table book market remains sadly underserved.

Yet Prophecies is not content to meet us halfway with a blend of gory shlock and the odd good scene thrown in as a treat. From start to finish, it's a slickly shot and edited, oddly philosophical mood piece, taking the 1960s sightings of a winged, mysterious creature and the book from which it takes its title as a springboard to delve into realms of atmospheric kino more akin to David Lunch's oneiric ouevre than your average horror fare. Richard Gere stars as the everyman drawn into the rabbit-hole of Mothman lore by a fateful encounter that leaves him with questions and traumatic memories and troubled dreams. Laura Linney is the local cop who introduces him to the Mothman witnesses in the town of Point Pleasant, WV. In the movie's most audacious twist, the West Virginians themselves are not portrayed as the monsters.

Average West Virginian according to average Californian (Wrong Turn, 2003)

But I shall say no more about the plot because it's the atmosphere and visual style that retain their brooding impact. Questions linger. Closeups portend. Airborne cameras circle. Electric lights suggest.

A bird's eye view...or something else???

If you want a beer & popcorn flick for Halloween, you have a string of options, from the enjoyably retarded to the great. If you're alone and want to ponder the cosmological nature of the unknowable, watch The Mothman Prophecies.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Lifeforce!

If random stills from your movie don't look like Frazetta paintings, you are doing it wrong.

As we've discussed previously, vampires have been played out for a long time. Lifeforce (1985), directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), however, neatly sidestepped the clichés and pitfalls by reframing the vampire as an extraterrestrial shapeshifter which hacks the Jungian depths of human psychology by posing as a naked hottie to extract the precious Lifeforce (1985) from unwary man.

Me when a random 7 smiles at me bc she thinks I'm learning disabled.

Steve Railsback (not a porn name) plays the hapless astronaut who alone survives the wreck of the spaceship Churchill (for this movie is set in Bri'ain) to find himself forever bonded to the vampiress (Mathilda May) who stalks the streets of Merrie Englande in the buff. Though the bravura opening sequence is set in spehss, to anyone unfamiliar with Bri'ish TVkino Yes, Minister (and it's diminishing-returns sequel Yes, Prime Minister), it's 1980s Bri'ain that makes for the more offputtingly alien setting. Fortunately our un-dead Stacy makes short work of most of that unfortunate country.

Neat detail: Thotsferatu has cool spiral eyes.

SAS Colonel Colin Caine (Peter Firth) enlists Railsback to track down the spehss vampiress in much the same way half-bitten Mina helps track down Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel, but in Lifeforce the vampires can body-hop like Jason in The Final Friday, so this section of the movie leads us on a merry dance around the soggy Bri'ish countryside and a sanitarium run by Patrick Stewart (Star Trek The Next Generation), who engages in Exorcistesque shenanigans as he channels the exhibitionistic vampire chick.

Young Patrick Stewart reacts to Old Patrick Stewart making Picard (Currentyear+whatever the fucc)

This chews up much of the second act before being handwaved away as mostly the distraction it is, before we plunge headfirst into the borderline non-sequitur that is the third act, in which London becomes overrun by zombies, causing explosions somehow.

Mostly Peaceful Protest or football hooligans? Hugh D. Syde!

But, like all trve kvlt KNHOs, we're not here for a coherent plot, but for the experience. The best way to describe Lifeforce is like if 2001-era Kubrick directed a Heavy Metal segment. The slick widescreen photography, random fish-eye lenses and frequent left-turns into bad-trip psychedelia make this easily the best 2001 pastiche since Star Trek The Motion Picture, while the visual effects by John Dykstra leave most of its contemporaries in the dust. Sadly audiences in 1985 overlooked this gem so now you have to watch Captain Thormerica and the Wasp 2: Multiverse of Gayness every year.

Nooo my worst fear: sex with a beautiful woman. I'm going insaaane nooo