Tuesday, May 29, 2007

#8: "Snowboard Academy"

Well, they're not all going to be as good as "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain."

If nothing else, "Snowboard Academy" earns the distinction of being the dirtiest-looking film ever filmed in blinding fucking sunlight on a ski slope. The entire thing looks greasy, dim, barely in focus - and before I begin talking about where "Snowboard Academy" went wrong, I ought to at least give them credit where credit's due. It takes a special kind of skill to make a movie look this unsightly.

The plot is almost an afterthought in a movie this half-assed, but I'll give it a shot. Corey Haim, looking like Brad Renfro after a heroin bust and in dire need of a highlight touchup, plays a cocky snowboarder who makes - and then breaks - his own rules. His strait-laced brother, played by some idiot whose agent should have known better, is the general manager of the ski resort, and resents his brother's no-good snowboarder friends. Haim and his buddies, in turn, seem to treat this as a rich snobby kid vs. scrappy snowboard punk situation, even though the leader of the ski gang and the snowboard gang are brothers, and everyone in the film seems to be equipped with incredibly expensive arctic survival gear and very shiny brand-name snowboards. Their father, played by Joe Flaherty with a permanent look of dread etched upon his face, keeps trying to mediate the situation when he isn't distracted by the spectral visage of his wife, Brigitte Nielsen, constantly swilling vodka in an underlit bar, and seemingly unable to decide from which Eastern Bloc country she should purport to be when refusing to divorce Flaherty, which she does like a dozen times in an hour and a half. Fall of the Iron Curtain or not, perhaps a loveless marriage to the owner of a failing ski hill is a real item of allure compared to whatever awaits her back in Dnipropetrovsk.

And then there's Jim Varney1, around whose shtick this movie basically exists as a rocketsled to infamy, and yet who's entirely inessential to the aforementioned goings-on. Hired despite his near-total lack of qualifications to provide cabaret-style entertainment and supervise mountain safety, Varney spends most of the movie trapped in a rickety lookout tower, and it's a testament to the power of bad movies that this one manages to steamroll on without its putative star really having to interact with anybody other than Joe Flaherty. At one point Varney yodels while reading announcements over the lookout tower's PA system, and by the aggressively pained reactions of the skiers within earshot, you'd think they'd found themselves transported to the front row of a Mindflayer show. That's a hell of a yodel.

Despite his repeated soliliquys, Varney manages to set himself on fire, be nearly dragged to death by a Skidoo, be run over by a slope-grooming machine, fall down several mountains, snowboard while (literally) handling a (literally) ticking time bomb, and coo over the Bedazzler more than a roomful of soccer moms at a Pampered Chef party. Varney actually uses the Bedazzler as the focus of a stand-up routine at one point during this movie. Multiple characters wear hastily rhinestone-encrusted articles of clothing. During the credits, just as you've convinced yourself it's all a bad coincidence, there it is:

THE PRODUCERS WOULD LIKE TO THANK: THE BEDAZZLER.

It's product placement so blatant to make the creators of "Mac and Me" weep. Well played, "Snowboard Academy."

Anyway. Haim and his brother are at loggerheads over allowing snowboarders to traverse the hills; rather than settle the situation by realizing that it's NINETEEN FUCKING NINETY-SIX and "snowboarding's in the OIympics" (sic), Flaherty chooses to wager thousands of dollars of revenue on some sort of unspecified skier vs. snowboarder race, in which World Cup skiers will do battle with a Japanese caricature2 who learned to snowboard not fifteen minutes ago and a Shaggy-esque stoner caricature whose bro-speak is usually subtitled, in what this movie hopes will register with its hollow-eyed audience as a running gag.

Wild fucking guess who wins.

This despite the saboteurial machinations of Brigitte Nielsen and the recently-deposed safety supervisor, a none-too-crafty French-Canadian who looks startlingly like Carlos D from Interpol. At one point early on, Carlos macks on a female skier with an implausibly large booger hanging on his upper lip; the movie's first attempt at a joke is his mishearing of the phrase, "No...it's snot." Screenwriters Rudy Rupak and James Salisto certainly love puns; if it isn't Corey Haim's evil brother using the CB alias "Head Cheese," it's a heavily accented female tourist brightly asking directions to Mount Happiness: "I want to go mount...a penis!" Snow bunny knows the troubles I've seen, indeed.

Given the preponderance of surf guitar licks, rim shots, canned applause, bass zippers, "Hey Dude"-style riffs, and the bowling pin sound that accompanies the shot of a snowboarder being blindsided by a giant snowball being used as a weapon by Carlos D3, it's apparent that "Snowboard Academy's" sound designer had access only to a Mel Waldorf best-of and a copy of "101 Wacky Royalty-Free Sound Effects" when doing post-production work. It bears mentioning that these effects are an improvement over the movie's actual soundtrack listing, most of which appears to have been handled by a band called Fuzz Aldrin. (Of fucking course Fuzz Aldrin is a band from Quebec; in fact, most of the extras and much of the cast speaks with incomprehensibly thick French-Canadian accents, or at least in simulacra of what the Quebecois think American ski bums sound like. Lots of guys yelling, "Yippee!" when doing seriously unimpressive big-air 180s on a hastily-constructed halfpipe, in other words.)

Attempting to describe every actor's function in this plot is almost impossible. It looks like it was cold as fuck, this being filmed at Mont Tremblant and all, and in a movie with so many nameless minor characters who vaguely resemble each other, the parkas, goggles, and toques only serve to confuse. And yet, there's something oddly refreshing about the fact that this is one of those movies that attempts to shoehorn twenty actors into a plotline that'd be overly convoluted if there were three of them. It finds time for the construction of something called a "Babesicle" and a long shot of a pretty female snowboarder's reputedly shapely ass (albeit concealed beneath layers of arctic survival gear). And it isn't above a tacked-on subplot involving an insurance inspector who gets stuck on a broken ski lift with Flaherty while snowboarders manage to make it up the hill without much difficulty between runs, or giving a great deal of screen time to a mustachioed sysadmin-type who's one pair of zippered pants away from a gig at the Electronic Frontier Foundation; even though he's clearly got a Snorlax somewhere to level up, he spends his days tending the dankest, loneliest bar in rural Quebec, his only jollies coming from skimming loonies from a Save the Whales jar and pouring Brigitte Nielsen a "double wodka" that's been soaking in Jim Varney's Bedazzled sleeve. If the real moral of "Snowboard Academy" is that drinking dulls the pain of an inescapable situation, I can't say I disagree with this movie. I couldn't have endured it sober.



1And here I oughta point out that it's just total coincidence that the first two of these movies feature the late Ernest P. Worrell in key roles, although it's a useful coincidence; if you're going to watch terrible movies in a serious way, you've gotta get really comfortable with Jim Varney onscreen.
2Named, for some needlessly confusing reason, "Sonjai," and played by a pretty terrible Chinese-Canadian character actor named Russell Yuen.
3(the more dastardly Nielsen later skips the Wile E. Coyoteisms entirely and attempts to detonate an IED during a giant slalom - this is that German/Russian/Danish/whatever ingenuity you keep hearing about, if you've ever taken a graduate-level business course)

Thursday, May 24, 2007

#16 - 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain

This movie, as you may have guessed, does not actually feature a mountain. It takes place in a theme park, which is a decent enough place for teenagers to get into some great scrapes. Here, a group of criminals and/or terrorists have decided to stage an enormous hostage crisis, demanding ten million dollars in exchange for the safety of the parkgoers -- not from the relatives of the people trapped inside, or from the government, but from the park's owner, who is successfully threatened by the prospect of dozens of whiplash lawsuits. The criminal team includes Loni Anderson, resplendent in pleather and ugly earrings, and a truly unfortunate Jim Varney, who looks remarkably like John Waters. Also on this strike force: Several incompetent goons, most of whom get kicked square in the balls by six year-olds, a pack of riflemen, all of whom are talented enough to fire into a panicked throng and avoid hitting a single person, and approximately seven hundred ninjas, who are instructed to wait in the park's basement until the last fifteen minutes of the film.

The 3 Ninjas, incidentally, are all brothers, although I suspect the middle brother, who somehow manages both an underbite and an overbite, is adopted. The oldest of the three has a girlfriend, who will later be tied to a set of rollercoaster tracks, and who later still will star in "Caitlin's Way," a show on Nickelodeon which I appear to have been alone in watching. The youngest brother, judging by how much candy he eats in the first five minutes of the movie, and how little candy he eats thereafter, has convinced himself that he is hypoglycemic. The middle brother doesn't really do anything. The middle brother, in all honesty, really doesn't have a lot going for him.

Never having watched any of the previous films in the series, I find myself left with a lot of questions: How is it possible for these ninjas to have a wizened Asian grandfather when the film is nearly exclusively filled with upper-middle class Caucasians?1 Do special-effects engineers really come home with satchels of throwing stars shaped like playing cards, which can then be packaged in Tupperware and gifted to one's daughter? Who let the middle ninja have such a terrible haircut? Is there really a party in the back of his head -- and a party in the front?



(See what I said before about this guy? The poor bastard!)

But all of these questions are secondary to this one: Would any self-respecting ninth-grader actually be so afraid of being yelled at by a guy with a neckbeard that he'd actually piss his pants?



Anyway -- here's what I really want to talk about. There's a beautiful moment in the middle of this film where three things happen, one directly after the other. A roller coaster is frozen mid-loop, revealing some truly great half-assed terror from the five extras aboard; a bafflingly choppy rack zoom closes in on the shy sidekick's face; Hulk Hogan gibbers in terror. It's an unintentional nadir, but it neatly divides the movie into two parts, the former of which deals with exposition (although nothing relating to the previous movies, including who any of the characters are, or why they look nothing like the previous sets of 3 Ninjas), and the latter of which is insufferable and packed with call-backs to the former. Here, let me show you this moment:





After this moment, the suspension of disbelief drops out as the screenplay attempts to give the terrorists (or whatever) a reason to focus on the 3 Ninjas rather than the police and FBI, who have surrounded the park and have guns (but not helicopters, apparently) -- and still afterwards, the 3 Ninjas force themselves to care about their boring grandfather and the unity of brotherhood2. Some might say that this is the earmark to a cheap cash-in sequel, but I'd like to believe that somewhere, somehow, the director saw those three shots in sequence and realized he wasn't going to top himself, and so just stopped showing up. I wouldn't blame the guy.

(One last thing: Here's what the rollercoaster scene probably looked like when they were filming it, before they flipped it upside-down. Look at the guy on the left! He's having so much fun!)



1 Exceptions: The excruciatingly Jamaican hacker; the oldest ninja's girlfriend's best friend, who appears to be around exclusively to say "Giiiirl" a lot.

2 Also, the film implies that if you can manage to do this, you will spontaneously learn echolocation. That was new information to me.

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

#16: "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain"

The fourth and final film in the "3 Ninjas" series, 1998's "High Noon at Mega Mountain" appears to view context and backstory as mere impediments to pre-pubescent boys kicking grown men in the crotch. Thus, we are plunged directly into the action, as the 3 ninjas - Rocky, Colt, and Tum-Tum, all three, cf. Menudo, being played by different, younger actors than their counterparts in the other "3 Ninjas" movies - conclude months of intense martial arts training at their stroke-addled Japanese grandfather's mountain hideaway, only to singlehandedly rescue thousands of confused amusement park-goers when a team of terrorists led by Loni Anderson and Jim Varney take over Mega Mountain, a theme park which appears to be on the California seashore.

You gotta hand it to the mid-90's sometimes. This movie is most definitely a product of its time - dated "Seinfeld" references, dated Buzz Lightyear references, and that particular moment in history when Loni Anderson, Jim Varney, and Hulk Hogan's careers intersected. I counted at least a dozen kids with bowl cuts in this movie; some of them even had rattails. The 3 ninjas are aided by their new neighbor Amanda, a gadget-obsessed sidekick (think Penny from "Inspector Gadget" with a Wonderswan) who amazingly doesn't materialize as a love interest for the randy Colt or take off her glasses and instantly become totally smokin'. Who does share a chaste kiss with the 15-year-old Rocky is his high-maintenance girlfriend Jennifer, who's one of those girlfriends who always calls you by your full name ("Samuel," in this case). Girls like that are underrated.



Anderson herself teeters in spike heels and a leather dress that does little to disguise the ravages of time, hooker-thick makeup "giving the dads something to do" while they accompany their awful children to this miserable debacle. It's unclear why her character's nickname is Medusa or how she managed to assemble a crack team of criminal masterminds a month after escaping from maximum-security prison, but assemble and bemoniker she did. Jim Varney - Jim Varney Jim Varney - plays Anderson's henchman Lothar Zogg, who somehow manages to simultaneously possess a thick Appalachian accent, a name ripped off James Earl Jones' character in "Dr. Strangelove," and a thin enough mustache and thick enough eyeliner to resemble Ron Mael in bondage pants. Zogg's high point in the movie comes when he fights a child atop a roller coaster. At least it's supposed to be a child. I can't help thinking that this movie's stunt coordinator deserved higher billing; it's thankless work sending out casting calls that can be summarized as "Find me a jockey who can do backflips!"



In a nice twist, another of Anderson's henchmen is a guy named Zed, played by an actor named Brendan O'Brien who looks alarmingly like G'n'R-era Tommy Stinson. Zed isn't merely content to fight children atop roller coasters. He fights children on Ferris wheels, in carnival midways, aboard the teacups, and in the bowels of factories that seemingly make nothing but steam. Although you'd think he could easily deliver one more dose of thunder to a boy half his size, Zed's ninja skills are no match for the awesome power of Tum-Tum's crotch kicks. (To my dismay, it isn't the same Brendan O'Brien who produced all those Pearl Jam records - although the fact that he also produced a couple of crappy Paul Westerberg solo albums can't be dismissed as a total coincidence.)



As for Hogan, he plays the host of a children's show that seems to combine the best parts of "Thundercats," "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers," cable-access backyard wrestling shows, and the oeuvre of Nick Nolte. Hogan's making his "final public appearance" at the amusement park this fateful day, his shitty kids' show having been given the hook; after his performance he stares wistfully at his blond wig, his sagging, cellulitic chest creased and pockmarked like Seal's face, knowing something deep and meaningful about old age that we haven't learned yet. He always looks like he really needs a good night's sleep for some reason; I understand there isn't much in terms of hooks in "High Noon at Mega Mountain's" script, but where's the je ne sais quoi that made "Suburban Commando" such a rollicking farce?

Numerous questions are left unanswered. Was video phone technology this advanced in 1998? Why do so many of the henchmen, even those employed as snipers, carry nunchucks? Why is Loni Anderson holding an amusement park for $10 million ransom, when her criminal syndicate seemingly had no trouble raising funds for an armada of jet skis, Oakleys, Jim Varney's bondage pants, her own Barbarella-esque pleather ensemble, and an entire "Ninja B-Team" that sort of stands around in the amusement park's submarine entrance for half the movie before being defeated by a couple of children? Who builds an undersea loading dock leading up to an amusement park? Why does so much of Hogan's offensive arsenal rely on easy access to a zipline?

At one point one of the 3 ninjas makes a reference to a (presumably sought-after) "Barry Bonds glove"; hindsight being 20/200 on Barry Bonds references pre-BALCO, it's safe to say the screenwriter wishes he could take that one back. The movie's packaging, on-disc title, and DVD menu couldn't agree whether it was called "3 Ninjas: High Noon on Mega Mountain" or "3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain." Somehow this seems prophetic, or at least metaphorical; I'm not totally sure why. This is the kind of movie where rich men literally kiss bundles of money goodbye before dropping them out of helicopters, where terrorists suspend people from upside-down roller coasters, where you can hack into the amusement park's mainframe via Wonderswan/video phone technology if you know that the password is "God." Of course it is.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Intro, Revisited

So we're going to watch and chronicle IMDB's bottom 100 movies; we have already watched one of them already. (Oh, god, did we ever.) Given all that, it might be prudent to note this: Of the two of us who'll be watching all these movies, I am not the one with any sort of background in film. I forget important plot elements moments after they occur; I never learn the names of characters; I go take smoke breaks halfway through and then get distracted and forget I was watching a film in the first place. Writing about these movies is going to be an interesting exercise, since I'm not sure I'll be able to actually summarize any of the plots.

On the other hand, I am ripe for punishment and I learned how to make animated .gifs. I figure that about evens things out. So: Shall we? (Hell yes.)

Friday, May 18, 2007

Intro

I'm not sure how it started. Maybe it was when we both signed up for Netflix accounts within a week of each other, even though we live in the same house. Maybe it was when I had to walk out of a screening of the unspeakably bad "Ator: the Fighting Eagle." (Check out the circa-2001 Swift comments on IMDB!) But somehow, we got it in our heads to do the unthinkable: watch and write about the entirety of the IMDB Bottom 100 (as of May 18, 2007).

Larry the Cable Guy. Paris Hilton. Shaquille O'Neal. Jamie Kennedy. Hulk Hogan. Icons of cinema all.

Here at Turkey Time, we'll subject ourselves to the worst of the worst. You'll laugh. You'll cry. If you're Uwe Boll, you'll probably challenge us to a fistfight. But we're in this for the long haul. We're going to watch every single one of the 100 worst films of all time, however long it takes. Not that we have any idea where we're going to find copies of "Dünyayi kurtaran adam'in oglu" or "Keloglan kara prens'e karsi".

We hope you enjoy the ride. It's turkey time. Gobble, gobble.