Not Quite There: Hell Comes to Frogtown

Going For It:

• Wrestling legend "Rowdy" Roddy Piper
• Frog people with decent make-up/costumes
• That's about it...

The Case Against:

• Severely uneven tone for the protagonist in the writing
• Severely dull
• Severely disappointing

MMG Says:

While we are a proud people here at the Man Movie Guide, we are not afraid or ashamed to admit when we were wrong.  This is one of those instances.  You will have noticed that some time back we posted, on its lonesome, the trailer for 'Hell Comes to Frogtown'.  In MMG-ese, that is our way of saying that we approve of that movie and that it qualifies as a true Man Movie up for review on down the road.

Let us set the stage for you:  Post apocalyptic.  Starring Roddy Piper, wrestling legend and pitch perfect star of MMG favorite 'They Live'.  The protagonist is named Sam Hell, one of the few times we endorse a cute/clever character name.  Sam is an exceedingly rare fertile man in a world that consists only of the following: fertile women, desert wasteland, fertile women, mutant frog people, and fertile women.  Sam is contracted by the government to begin repopulating civilization.  This, dear reader, is a can't-fucking-lose proposition... right?  Not so.  Not so.

The movie starts off nicely enough.  Piper is detained for a crime before the movie begins.  In the initial few scenes he is a wisecracking jokester; and while not every line hits its mark, it is a very good indication that we are getting our hands on the one-liner wisenheimer brand of action hero in this movie.  Only this never really happens.  The viewer must slog through an entire movie as bare and bereft of life as its arid backdrop. The action is few and far between, fairly somnambulent, and Piper doesn't do quite the ass-kicking job that we'd come to expect from either the ring or 'They Live'.  Piper's character even loses his charm pretty quickly; as his 'sit-on-it-and-spin' attitude largely falls prey to a messianic mope routine with occasional bouts of slapstick (centering around his genitals in an electric chastity belt and his ability to cross his eyes... which is oddly not related to his balls' predicament).

As for the supporting cast, it's a mixed bag.  We get a super butch/fairly attractive commando who shows off her tits while escorting Piper.  And if you have a thing for Katey Sagal, then perhaps you can make a case for watching the movie, since there are extended scenes of her bordering-on-malnourished doppelganger prancing around in assorted lingerie.  Then we have poor Rory Calhoun, who genuinely looked and sounded like his handlers had to unhook his oxygen tank between takes (he seemed so close to death that we actually had to check on the proximity of this movie to his actual demise... and astonishingly he held on for another 11 years, and worked another 5).  Lastly, there are the frogs.  There isn't a whole lot to say about them, except that looking at them was one of the scant pleasures this reviewer got from the movie.

This movie, like so many others that fall short, failed to achieve true Man Movie status because it tried to walk in both the light and the dark.  If it resorted to Lloyd Kaufman (Troma) antics?  We have ourselves a winner.  If it went the route of all the killer action movies of the 80s, the Golden Age of the one-liner action film, and focused more on making Piper an ass-kicker who always says something droll after offing a frog? We'd worship it as a direct-to-video masterpiece.  Instead we're left with a movie that gets a passing grade only because we're proud they tried.

Not Quite There: Drive Angry

Going For It:

• A movie about someone who escapes from hell in a muscle car to shoot the shit out of people
• Female lead, Amber Heard, is literally just a walking Maxim spread, replete with witty banter and cut-off jean shorts
• Features the music of T-Rex, Unkle, and Peaches
• Muscle cars
• Car chases
• Violent bloody deaths
• Satanists
• One-liners
• Shot for 3D for maximum in-your-face Xtreme-ness©
• Tits

The Case Against:

• We at MMG are Nicolas Cage apologists, but even that has its limits...
• No movie hero, especially an anti-hero, should be called Milton through the whole movie (we don't care if it is a last name!)
• Did we mention that the movie hero, who escapes hell, is named John Milton?!  Yeah, real subtle...
• The music is jarring and distracting, often with little-to-no place in the scene it's played
• 3D Xtreme-ness© isn't pulled off very well
• Terribly written
• The tits belong to a busted ex-stripper type

MMG Says...

So many people are quick to rip on Nic Cage.  We here at MMG will eventually convince you otherwise; he was brilliant in Adaptation, and far more than capable in MMG-favorites The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off. This movie, however, will not convert you to the Church of Cage (which, coincidentally, is on one of his private islands).  He is dreadful in this movie: mostly he drawls sleepily through his lines as if he were just shoved onto the set from his trailer while still in the middle of a Quaalude haze.  His delivery lives on another planet from the other actors, the script itself, and even the scenarios he is put in.  Other times his actions are stilted, jerky, and sudden with no pacing whatsoever, such as when he creepily mouth-rapes a once-raring-to-go diner waitress.  It's difficult to tell if he picked this role and this movie and this acting style for any reason other than to further his own legend as an eccentric with no real place on film.  Mission accomplished, Mister Cage. Mission accomplished.

The movie itself is written a pair of fellers (one of whom doubles as director) who knew they wanted to make a Man Movie.  Unfortunately for us, the viewers, their resume features a lot of dreck with the same failings.  Their heart seems to be consistently in the right place, and we as lovers of all things Man Movie laud  any return to grindhouse, exploitation, and cheeseball horror... the problem is that they are just not very talented.

And so we find ourselves with a movie full of ripe premises and promising situations, that falls completely flat.  This could have been the movie that every father would show to their sons on their 13th birthday.  Instead, this is just another 90+ minutes relegated for an eternity of dollar bins at Wal-Mart and liquidations at video stores everywhere.

One last plea to the writers, Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier.  Guys, we get it.  You like Stephen King and Sam Raimi.  You think you're clever for being able to work in a wink and nod to an epic poem about the devil and the fall of man.  But do us a fucking favor and don't name your characters King, Raimi, and Milton.  It's pretty sophomoric, and that's saying something... considering what your movie is about.

Not Quite There: Dredd 3D

Going For It:

• Not the Sylvester Stallone/Rob Schneider vehicle
• Good balance between one-liners and violence
• Decent writing
• Couple 'splosions
• 3D because it was actually originally intended for 3D; not some crappy post-conversion
• Managed to explain away the gorgeous slow-motion sequences by way of a street drug called "Slo Mo"

The Case Against:

• For being a violent, jokey romp of a movie... really rather joyless
• The bad guy was nearly completely generic and bland
• Despite over-the-top source material and an R-rating, it did not get ultraviolent enough
• Suffering for lack of nudity (see R-rating comment above)

MMG Says...

Dredd 3D is based, like the Stallone disaster, on a British comic about a cop in a dystopian future America in which overcrowding forces the police to act as judge, jury, and executioner with no real due process.  This  backdrop, combined with an R-rating, really should have meant consistent over-the-top violence in glorious 3D.

The biggest problem with this movie was that it suffered from something of an identity crisis.  It was almost as if it were purposefully toned down to try to get a PG-13 and appeal to more people.  There were moments where, in slow-motion, body parts rippled and exploded from bullet wounds and droplets of blood flew through the third dimension straight into the audience's popcorn-burdened laps.  And then there were the wasted opportunities; the moments where limbs would explode but wouldn't really be shown off, or the moments where sex was shown in the most abstract and oblique ways with nary a nipple or buttock.  

The movie really had only one option: fully embrace, even bear hug, the source material and the camp factor.  They should have reveled in the notion that they didn't have to do a whole lot of explaining: future cop, has to shoot stuff for his job, too many people, life worth less...we get it!  To have performed its shootout through the mega-slums with the same sort of zest or zeal of a Machete or a Planet Terror, it would have punched its own golden ticket into the hearts of countless viewers (of course it would have put off just as many people... but better to be loved and loathed than completely forgotten).  Instead, the movie was nearly as muted, dingy, and tepid as its color palette.

Another big waste was with the setting.  The idea, and this really isn't a spoiler, is that Dredd has to fight his way up the levels of a mega-slum the size of Wilmington (yes, really).  In setting things up, the movie shows off a handful of colorful gangs (this reviewer guesses they are from the comic) that controlled the different sections of the building (the slum is all one massive building).  Apart from a montage, however, they don't show off the other gangs.  This could have been a vertical The Warriors... but no.  The reason for this, is that they don't exist anymore... they were all wiped out by the Mama Gang.

Yes, the bad guys are the Mama Gang.  Yes, the leader of the gang is named Mama.  Yes, the word Mama sounds so juvenile that this reviewer cringed every time he heard it uttered.  No, Mama was not cool.  You would think with a name like that, she would either be some absurdly obese woman barking orders while spitting up chunks of fried chicken, or at least an actress in heavy prosthesis to make her look ancient.  Instead what we get is Lena Headey, nonchalantly limping through scene after scene.  She is supposed to be maniacal and bad-ass, but the delivery was flaccid and she didn't have a catch phrase or M.O. for hurting people that set her apart from anything whatsoever.  There were several extras with more pop that were more memorable than the main villain; that's never a good sign.

That all being said, the movie is not by any stretch of the imagination a bad movie.  It was entertaining, if a tad too long.  It was fun, and not entirely forgettable.  There are some very good sequences and visuals that you will not see in any other movie.  Karl Urban, the titular Dredd, pulls off a very admirable performance that had to be done through a silly-looking helmet while still looking and acting tough.  This reviewer enjoyed the movie.  It was pretty good, it was just not quite there...

Predator

      When we were polling folks for Man Movies that absolutely had to be reviewed, one of the movies that kept coming up again and again was Predator. It seems to occupy a similar hallowed ground for nearly everyone we spoke to. So when it came time to review it (yes, we'd all seen it before), it came as quite a shock to this reviewer. You see, dear reader, you probably haven't seen it in quite a while (beginning to end). It is not as good as you remember it. Don't mistake that inflammatory statement for dislike. The movie is good, and very deserving of a review on the Man Movie Guide. It is just a very flawed film that is airbrushed into classic status by nostalgia and a distance from actually having seen it.
      Predator is a roll call movie that is partially derailed by the sheer star power of a mid-80s Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold plays "Dutch" (likely a way of haphazardly writing off the fact that a US Military officer sports an accent more Colonel Klink than Sanders). His team of special ops falls flat due to a lack of screen time for each of them, but most of them get at least one chance to shine and show off their machismo before being offed as fodder. Sonny Landham plays stoic Native American tracker "Billy", who is so hardcore that he mutilates himself before standing up to the titular alien hunter. Jesse Ventura (yes, that makes two future governors in the movie) isn't a very good character, but he does have one of cinema's all-time coolest guns in the movie: a mini-gun with an overhand joystick-esque trigger fed by a metal backpack full of bullets. And Apollo Creed himself, Carl Weathers, plays a one-time operative turned pencil pusher who gets it in the coolest/funniest scene in the movie [Note: This movie is about an alien hunter that picks off people one by one. Not many people survive. That doesn't count as a spoiler so get over it.]
     So the pacing of the movie is off due to bad editing. So the music by Alan Silvestri sounds as if it was written for an entirely different movie. So the continuity of much of the action is uneven and subject to interpretation. Predator will not soon be mistaken for high art. But let's talk about what it does have going for it. This is vintage Arnold, where he is kick ass and spitting one-liners like only he can. It is a 7 foot alien with dreadlocks blowing the shit out of people with lasers in a jungle and taking pieces of them as trophies. It is explosions and machine guns and a dense and verdant jungle belonging to some anonymous South American country. It is a popcorn movie at heart, and will never allow you to treat it as anything else. The movie is damn fun; and that's probably why you remember it more for what it is than what it isn't.

Predator Trailer

Tango & Cash

by TheDavidMo

At first blush, Tango & Cash seems just like another paint-by-numbers buddy cop movie from the 80s.  More than that, it almost seems as though the makers of the movie were adhering to some sort of guy movie checklist  when coming up with it: gratuitous tits shot?  Check.  Pointless series of explosions?  Check.  After-punch quips aplenty?  Check.  So what does this movie offer that others of the same genre don't?


The answer is-- aside from Sylvester Stallone's ridiculous wearing of smart-guy glasses-- not much.  But this is just it: within T&C's rigid formula is a kind of purity that sets us free-- inviting us to have some beers, relax with some friends and hurl insults and wise cracks at the alternatively absurd, illegal, implausible, gay, and downright suicidal antics of Stallone's Tango and Kurt Russell's Cash.  Many a conversation will there be about "what would really happen" if a human being tried to do the things that Tango and Cash attempt throughout the course of the movie; from sliding down a high-tension power line with a belt to being lowered into a drum of electrified water (the dangers of electricity is, inexplicably, a recurrent theme).  And it is guaranteed that the room will puzzle over the various plot holes and absurdities encountered along the way... such as why the LAPD has a lavishly funded research and development arm whose only purpose seems to be the attaching of guns to things, or why Teri Hatcher drums during her stripper act, or why the newspapers in LA seem to have some kind of ranking system in place for cops (as in, Tango is the number one cop in LA, and Cash-- whose bust is featured below the fold-- is the number two cop).
Most of the actual elements are incidental: the by-the-book cop wears glasses, the loose cannon wears Hawaiian shirts.  The bad guy is Jack Palance, and the whole story revolves around a frame-up or a drug cartel or something.  And that's all you need to know, really.  The rest is taken care of by the steady drumbeat of one-liners supplied by Tango, Cash-- and you and your buddies.

Cliffhanger

by Christopher D'Anna

      Snow-covered mountains. Clear blue skies. Automatic fire. Heroic climbers. Sadistic villains. A mid-air heist. A human bobsled. Swinging. Running. Jumping. Climbing. Falling.... Hang on!

     “Cliffhanger” is a shameless entry into the “Die Hard on a blank” Hollywood oeuvre, but is so spectacular and enjoyable that it earns a seat on action movie Mt Olympus next to the original “Die Hard” and not beneath it. (“Speed” has a throne too.) Sylvester Stallone plays Gabe, a rescue climber with a tragic past who happens to be in the wrong place at the... (say it with me) wrong time. An accented John Lithgow leads a group of brutes who have crash landed in the Colorado Rockies and are searching for million dollar briefcases scattered across the terrain. The gang coerces Gabe and his friends into helping them locate the money. Gabe and company have no history of violence and must outwit, outrun and out-climb the terrorists if they want to make it out alive. Sporting unmatched action sequences, the film’s breathtaking scale and Stallone’s star power all make for a great movie ride especially on a big screen.

     Most modern action is derivative of “Bullitt” or “The French Connection”; being gritty urban detective stories. And today you have the ridiculously shaky Bourne franchise, which everyone else, including Bond, is emulating. “Cliffhanger” features no car chases, and the protagonist never uses a gun... in the traditional sense. Sure, the movie is wrought with cliches. However, the actual stunts and sequences are exclusive to this story and this setting. The heist is wild, involving a zip line transfer of money and men between two planes midair; and it’s real. There is another scene where Gabe, first engaged in hand-to-hand combat with one of the baddies, ends up sliding down the slope of a snowy cliff. In the name of self preservation, Gabe slams the head of the creep into the snow and rides him like a bobsled. A pickaxe comes into play a couple of times, and a handy-dandy bolt gun gets Gabe out of a few binds. The most salient moments of uniqueness include actual climbing or repelling. Sure, those moments are shot in ways to hide the faces of the stuntmen, but acknowledging that it isn’t Stallone doesn’t take away from the audacity of the men actually performing those daring feats.

     The movie’s stunning backdrop and soaring music queues create a near-epic sense of scale reminiscent of the German mountains films of the 1930s. It’s an appropriate setting for a film starring a legendary muscleman. Those old German films featured daring feats of strength and will, the subtext being: behold the superiority of the Germanic race versus nature. There must have been some conscious effort here on the part of Stallone and the filmmakers to emulate the metaphor while avoiding the philosophy. It works. The central conflict is man versus man much more than man versus the environment (even though nature is both beautiful and a bitch). The film is truly sweeping and really odd among the action genre. “Cliffhanger” gives audiences an immersive experience which can be attributed to both the amazing location shooting, and Trevor Jones’ score. Jones goes big and orchestral with the music which create a senses of timelessness and grandeur. It’s really quite elegant at times... and seamless at others. It is a perfect score.

     Stallone was a great leading man. The Rocky series, particularly the first, is his ultimate contribution to American cinema. Unfortunately, each entry lost heart as they went on. The Rambo movies fulfilled a mindless action film obligation every Hollywood muscleman has to fill. And yet again, each was worse than the last. In the early 90s, Stallone was getting old and had to reinvent himself. He tried doing comedy and it didn’t resonate with audiences the way Arnold’s movies did. “Cliffhanger” was his big comeback. Stallone’s screen persona works best when he plays the underdog. Here is no exception. Once again, the odds are against him and that’s the majesty of Stallone. When John Lithgow orders “Take his jacket for insurance,” as an audience member you think he’ll freeze out there! Another henchman screams “FETCH” into Stallone’s ears, you think hey man, he doesn’t deserve that. Stallone has these beautiful, sad eyes that create so much empathy with audiences that you can forget, for just a moment, what kind of movie you’re watching. Schwarzenegger always wins. Stallone always wins too... although, he can make you think that maybe he won’t.

     The movie is chock full of gasps, funny quips and moments worth cheering. I’m surprised I haven’t seen “Cliffhanger” on a revival theater bill because it plays really well on a big screen and with a crowd. It does pop up on basic cable from time to time but check it out uncut if you can. It has a nice hard R-rating. And if you think this film is just Hollywood action nonsense, think of a movie formula as being the framework to a roller coaster. Just because you can see it and know what’s coming, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the ride.  

Army of Darkness

     There is no way that a movie featuring shotguns, chainsaws, knights in armor, and muscle cars could be left off this list. Army of Darkness is a movie that just never lets go. Starting with a concise and entertaining recap of what led wise-ass protagonist Ash to his current predicament as a slave bound for a gruesome death in the medieval times, the movie blends H.G. Lewis gore, Harryhausen-esque skeleton fight scenes, 3 Stooges slapstick, and a liberal dose of one-liners into one of the most beloved midnight movies around.

     Army of Darkness turns the traditional messianic tale on its head by handing over the responsibility to a suaver-than-thou meathead amputee in Ash. Handled hammily and ably by Bruce Campbell, Ash is the absolute centerpiece of this movie; and it is easy to get the feeling that something as simple as picking up dry cleaning would be entertaining and adventurous in Ash's hands (or hand, waka waka).

     Finding himself transported by the same deviltry that haunted his cabin, Ash becomes the purported “Chosen One”, tasked with retrieving the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis from its cemetery home. Bungling the whole ordeal as only Ash is capable, all hell breaks loose when the titular army rises from the grave to steal the book back.

     Fueled by Sam Raimi's emphatic, Looney Tunes-informed directing style, the over-the-top action scenes underscore lessons of finishing what you started and finding friends in the face of danger. Ash, almost by accident, becomes a machismo role model in his ability to spit quips while kicking ass and sweet-talking any girl that happens by. Look to the blacksmith for a highly underrated performance as exactly the kind of bad-ass we would love on our side in a fight.

Army of Darkness Trailer