Escape From New York (1981)

Shoot a cop with a gun
The Big Apple is plenty of fun
Stab a priest with a fork
And you'll spend your vacation in New York!

Rob a bank, take a truck
You can get here by stealing a buck
This is bliss, it's a lark
Honey, everyone's going to New York!

No more Yankees
Strike the word from your ears
Play the roulette
There's no more opera at the Met

This is hell, this is fate
But now this is your home and it's great
So rejoice, pop a cork
Honey, everyone's going to New York!

Hey, it's another movie about how much the future will suck! (What is this, our sixth now?)

And it's our first movie from director John Carpenter! The guy who gave us Halloween, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China and The Fog! The director who often composes the music to the movies he makes!

And it's the movie the Watergate scandal inspired him to make, even though it came out seven years after it happened!

Hey, it's that guy who appeared in four other John Carpenter movies! Including the sequel to this one!

In the far-off year of 1997, the Spice Girls reach the apex of their popularity, an over-hyped James Cameron film becomes the most popular movie in the world, the crime rate in America has increased exponentially, and the once lively city of New York has been converted into the world's largest criminal containment facility. A wall is constructed around the entirety of Manhattan, all bridges leading into the facility are mined, and guards are stationed around the perimeter. Roaches check in, but they don't check out.

I'm not exactly sure why the U.S. government decided to turn the country's largest city, a thriving metropolis with a culture all its own that millions of tourists visit every year, into a massive penal colony. There is a sequel to this film, Escape from L.A., that goes into more detail as to what kind of sick dystopian ruling party would think this was a good idea, but that's a film that wouldn't come out for another fifteen years, so this is the hand that we're dealt.

Worst. White House Easter Egg hunt. Ever.

One day, President Donald Pleasance, the man who signed off on this idea I would assume, is on his way to a summit meeting with the Chinese and the Russians for world peace or something like that when Air Force One is hijacked by terrorists and crashes inside the New York City prison. The President manages to eject from the plane in an escape pod just before it hits, but lands within the walls anyway and hasn't been heard from since. Since Glenn Close isn't here, Police Commissioner Lee Van Cleef decides to hire a felon by the name of Snake Plissken, a disillusioned war hero convicted of robbing a Federal Reserve Bank and played by Kurt Russell, to break into New York, find the Commander-in-Chief and bring him out again before his summit meeting in exchange for a full pardon.

And just to give him that extra spark of motivation, explosive charges are injected into his body that will burst his arteries and kill him within twenty-two hours, and the Commish has promised to neutralize them on return of the President.

(So they close off a whole bunch of tourist attractions--the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, every last theater on Broadway, choking off a major source of economic growth for an entire state--just to build a prison?)

They're Maggie and the Brain, yes, Maggie and the Brain...
One played a radio DJ in a California seaside town, the other a detective investigating haunted-car related murders...

Plissken enters the facility armed with a device that tracks the President's heart monitor and a countdown clock to when the explosives in his body are set off. The signals lead him to the basement of a decrepit theater, where he assumes the worst when he finds the heart monitor on the wrist of a drunken wastrel. When he contacts the police and they refuse to let him back out, a new lead suddenly emerges when Ernest Borgnine of The Black Hole appears as a cab driver who recognizes Snake at the theater, picks him and kindly informs him a gunpoint that the President is being held hostage by a man known only as "The Duke" ("The Duke of New York, A-Number One" to you) played by 70's music man Isaac Hayes.

It becomes apparent that the prisoners of New York City have somehow organized themselves into some kind of pseudo-civilization. We learn they have their own gas and oil supply, they have their own generators with which to produce electricity, and it seems they have some kind of anarchy-built political system going in which the Duke assumes a leadership position and governs the masses through antagonistic means. It also appears that this collective no such thing as social class, as the people who hang around the Duke are just as disheveled as the people who line up on both sides of the road and throw things at cars traveling on Broadway.

(What about the U.N.? Where are THEY meeting now?)

They say this Duke's one bad mother--
Shut your mouth!
I'm talkin' about the Duke!
We can dig it!

Cabbie takes Snake to see a couple of his associates - Christine's Harry Dean Stanton and The Fog's Adrienne Barbeau playing Brain, a former colleague of Snake's who now runs his own oil rig in the basement of the New York Public Library, and his main squeeze Maggie, respectively. They reveal that the Duke is holding the President as collateral to orchestrate a jailbreak across the heavily mined 69th Street Bridge, and also take him to where he is being held (with a little coercion from Snake, I assure) only for him to caught by the Duke and his cohorts.

(No more Christmas trees at Rockefeller Center Plaza?)

This must be what it's like for the President whenever Congress is in session.

Hours pass so as to increase the tension of whether or not Snake will make it out of the prison with the President and save his life and conveniently wind the clock down so that the inevitable rescue will come down to the last minute. The Duke has Snake fight who looks like a Siberian bear wrestler for his amusement while Brain and Maggie suddenly decide that they're good guys and rescue the President, while Snake kills the dude he's wrestling and all of them meet up in Cabbie's taxi for a car chase between them and the Duke. Snake's new friends are all killed one at a time while navigating the minefiend at the 69th Street Bridge while leading the President to the perimeter wall, where once his safety is finally assured, he rains hot vengeful machine gun fire on the Duke, mocking all the way.

(So NBC just cancelled Saturday Night Live? Just like that?)

And THIS must be Congress in session.

As the President prepares for a televised speech to the summit he will now have to miss, the explosives in Snake's bloodstream are neutralized with seconds to spare, and after the President thanks him for saving his life (while snubbing the people who were killed in the process), publicly humiliates him by swapping a very important tape that was in the briefcase he was handcuffed to that had nuclear secrets on it or something for a recording of "Bandstand Boogie" that Cabbie was listening to throughout the film.

(Saks Fifth Avenue? F.A.O Schwarz? Where have THEY gone?)

"Brain, get that paper out of my face, I'm trying to drive here!
Mr. President, you stop kicking Maggie in the shin right now!
Don't you make me pull this car over! I SWEAR...!"

Escape from New York subscribes to a Family Guy-style system of characterization, in that it makes most of its characters so utterly unlikable that it's difficult to cheer for them. In Snake Plissken's case, it's perfectly all right - he's an anti-hero whose only motivation for being put in this protagonist position is the full pardon, AND the people who gave him the job made him a walking time bomb. He probably didn't even vote for the guy. Ironically, his badass factor does make him an action movie guy you can get behind, even though his total kill count is, like, TWO.

(What about the Macy's parade? Is there still even a Macy's?)

Everyone else I'm not really compelled to give two craps about. Brain kinda waffles between whether he wants to be on Snake's side or not until the last moment, Maggie doesn't really do much of anything until she tries to avenge Brain's death without success, President Pleasance turns out to be kind of a dick (which I could also give a pass in a Watergate-inspired movie), and as for Cabbie...okay, I kinda liked Cabbie. He was the fun one, even though he's got a bit of a mouth on him.

If I could recommend this movie for any reason, it's to see Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, a man who is overqualified to enter the maximum-security hellhole of a city-sized penitentiary and come back out again with all his teeth, all his fingers and one and two-thirds functioning legs.

(Where's the ball gonna drop on New Year's Eve? ...oh, right, in their juvenile offender wing)

So what do we call you? "Snake" or "Plissken?" Or perhaps "sir", that works just as well.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (1983)

Caught in a future world, his only escape is back in time!
--the tagline on the VHS cover, which is odd since the film doesn't mention time travel

Why don't you "reconst" your "Flavo-Fibes"?!
-Tom Servo

Is it just me, or have I been getting a lot of movies telling me the world will suck in the future since I started this blog?

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a 1983 TV movie filmed in Canada and bankrolled by public television station WNET in New York. It was intended to be part of an ongoing series of PBS-funded productions adapting various sci-fi novels (in this film's case, a 1976 short story written by John Varley) but ended up being the last of only three because of lack of funding. The film was not a critical success and since then was re-aired a few times on the Sci-Fi Channel, including in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 during its eighth season, which also featured fake pledge drive host segments.

To think, your tax dollars helped fund this movie.

You don't have to be computer-simulated to work here, but it helps.

In what is yet another in a ever-lengthening list of dystopian movies I have come to review on this blog, this faux-Matrix world is entirely computer-controlled and ruled over by a number of super-duper-maxi-mega-multi-million-dollar corporations which have assumed all power of governance and lawmaking and general bossing-people-around-type affairs. The late Raul Julia, known for such films as The Addams Family, Addams Family Values and I am certain many others, stars as Aram Fingal, a programmer for one of these big companies (named "Novicorp" for the sake of convenience) who's one of those annoying people at the office. You know the type - never does his job, sits at his desk staring at Facebook posts, spends all his time at the water cooler chatting up secretaries, we've all seen them. Only instead of Facebook, Fingal just sits as his desk downloading old movies like Casablanca (or in this film's futuristic lexicon, "scrolling up cinemas") on company time.

Well, one day, his superiors finally catch him in the act and order him to visit his "psychist", an old lady who has to be prompted to ask him about his mother by the big all-seeing computer with an electronic disembodied voice that exposits absolutely everything that happens in this film. His "psychist" orders him to 48 hours of compulsory "prophylactic rehab", which consists of inserting him in a virtual forest with his mind placed in the body of an animal, or "doppling" him as they call it. It's sort of a forced vacation, though if you ask me, it's more like they give him some juice (or "reconst", whatever that means), knock him out, cut his head open, stick some electrodes in his brain and have him narrate over some stock film ripped from a nature documentary.

Fingal, as it happens, is also very poor, so rather than be doppled into a horse or something nice yet very expensive, he ends up inside the body of a baboon named Daisy.

It was either that or go in as an anteater. Vile, stupid, hateful creatures.

Either he's being doppled or he's part of a focus group for an Adult Swim pilot.

All goes well in his little dopple universe/nature documentary footage. He skitters around the place, gets drunk on nature documentary footage maruba fruit with his little animal friends, and just chills. However, when he's threatened by a nature documentary footage elephant, he requests to be pulled out of there, but there's a bit of a problem with that - you see, at the same time some grade school kids are going on a field trip of the doppling facility, touching people's brains and unbuttoning their tops, when one perverted little urchin in particular for some reason switches Fingal's tag with somebody else's, and now his body has gone missing.

When word of this gets out to the rival companies, Novicorp's stock plunges, and the appropriately fat, appropriately evil Chairman (Donald C. Moore) is considering having Fingal terminated to recoup their losses, but Fingal's dopple supervisor, a tech named Apollonia (TV movie vet Linda Griffiths) convinces him to change his mind and have her keep Fingal's soul in their HX368 computer mainframe until they can find his body, or before his dopple time runs out and his existence is erased, whichever comes first. Of course, Fingal IS quite easily bored, and she would have to keep an eye on him so he doesn't start screwing with the computer's source code.

You can already guess how that will turn out.

"I'm getting something...Novicorp...can...suck...my...HEY!!"

Fingal wakes up in a computer simulation of his own bedroom and tries to phone for help, but is only informed to go to work as normal. Apollonia must enter the simulation and explain to him that he can create his own reality simulation in the HX368, but he must create a reality as normal as possible to make it easier to track him.

And how does she enter the simulation? AS FINGAL'S LONG DEAD MOTHER. Yeah, THAT'S normal.

Well, at least this scene gives us the film's most unintentionally funny line - Raul Julia asks "Mom...am I nuts?" and it comes out "Mom...my nuts?"

By the way, Fingal is played by a Puerto Rican actor, but his mother is Caucasian? How does that work?

"Well, I had a little fling in San Juan, one thing led to another, and then..."

Anyway, for some reason the Chairman decides to undermine Apollonia's efforts by hacking the simulation to chase her Fingal's-mother character to run into the path of a simulated truck.

From there, it isn't long before Fingal's turned the inside of Novicorp's mainframe into a cheap Casablanca set, complete with a virtual reproduction of himself playing Humphrey Bogart and an unnamed neurotic virtual guy as Peter Lorre. Apollonia and the Chairman pop in and out frequently, the former to try and keep him in line and slowly become the love interest, the latter as the "Fat Man" who comes in to make vague threats and generally make life difficult for them.

Of all the scenes in all the movies in all the world, they reference this one.

Eventually, after extensive periods of boredom which included sleeping with one of his lady coworkers and even finding THAT boring, Fingal gets tired of waiting for them to pull his mind out of the machine and decides to find his own way out of the HX368 by punching in numbers at random, despite the fact that tampering with the programming could have devastating effects in the outside world it controls. After numerous attempts, he stumbles onto the access code quite by accident - IY479.

So the name of the computer is HX368 and the password to access it is...IY479. The letters and numbers that follow each letter and number in the name of the computer. That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his email account. I'm surprised it wasn't 863XH or 12345 or the Chairman's wife's name spelled backwards.

Anyway, some cheesy video effects and random falling snow later, we've found he's hijacked the weather control system and is now wreaking meteorological havoc all over the world. Or so the graphics tell me.

WHOOOOOO, FUTURISTIC! WHOOOO...

Apollonia reappears to Fingal for some reason dressed as Venus in a clam shell from the Renaissance painting (or, if you want, think Uma Thurman from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and tells him to stop again. Fingal complies...for about five minutes, until another visit from the Fat Man changes his mind again. He also deduces that the Chairman is using Apollonia to track him down and badger him. He tries to regain access, but luckily the CEO has added another security lock to the system to keep Fingal out, but he gets back in anyway by just "reversing the access code."

So now it's...974YI? ...How did this guy get to be CEO of this company again?

Anyway, THIS has the effect of spitting Monopoly cards out at everybody in the building, as Novicorp's finances are redistributed to the proletariat masses.

Meanwhile, Fingal's body is finally recovered. Turned out he was in the sex change operation queue. Go fig.

EPIC STARING CONTEST ACTION!

What happens after that is very, VERY confusing, so I'll just skim through it. The Chairman finally decides that Fingal must die and re-enters the computer via Apollonia for a final confrontation, promptly shutting her out entirely somehow, the ensuing meeting leaves virtual Fingal and the little guy shot, a cheesy spinny virtual effect appears out of nowhere in front of Fingal which he grabs somehow and screams "I'M INTERFACE" at the top of his lungs, and then he stands in front of the Fat Man who starts convulsing for some reason, and they both just stare at each other for a full minute before Fingal shoots some very large pixels out of his eyes and vaporize the Fat Man.

...ah calls 'em as ah sees 'em.

Some MORE cheesy video effects later, Fingal returns to his body, and he and Apollonia make out a little before he erases their identities, assigns the Chairman a month's compulsory rehab (as an anteater, appropriately enough--serves him right, the bastard) and programs every screen in the building to scroll up Casablanca before the two of them leave the room, free from their corporate yokes.

"Look, I've Photoshopped the Chairman's face onto an anteater! ...I think I've improved the anteater!"

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank wants to be a good movie, I can feel it. Deep down inside it wants to be a decent sci-fi movie. Sadly, it comes up short in this because of three reasons:

One: the visuals in this film are not the least bit pleasant, at least when it's not nature documentary footage. The filmmakers' decision to shoot this movie on cheap-looking videotape instead of film is glaring, and the chroma key and blue screen special effects only heighten the level of its ugliness. I was half-expecting Mr. T to come out and teach me something about self-esteem. The climax practically thrives on them to the point where you have no idea what's going on. Not to mention it looks horrifically dated three decades after the fact, and the music and sound effects do nothing to help.

Two: it tries to pass itself off as futuristic by giving everything silly futuristic names. It rips a page out of George Orwell's 1984 by trying to invent new words for things. Money is called "credits." Movies are renamed "cinemas." Even potato chips are renamed "Flavo-Fibes!" It's cute and all, but in a few cases it gets really confusing and unnecessary. I mean, what the hell is "reconst" supposed to be anyway? Water? Beer? Medicine? Whatever was in Fingal's cup at the doppling table could have been wallpaper paste for all I know.

And three: corporation that is so glaringly evil and yet so grossly incompetent that the concept of network security eludes them. This is a guy who could hack into their server and watch illegally download movies on company time, and they put an access code to their most delicate software that is so simple a grade school kid could crack it? And then when he tries to get back in, they put in ANOTHER access code that he literally cracks in seconds?

In short, this movie is one part cheap Orwellian sci-fi, one part plot enigma, one part computer graphics vomit and one part low-budget Casablanca ripoff. I can't think of any other reason not to recommend this movie that the Anteater Anti-Defamation League can't provide.

"JETSONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!"

Flash Gordon (1980)

Pathetic Earthlings...who will save you now?

Flash Gordon is a product of the science-fiction/fantasy/adventure craze that hit the comic pages in the 1930s. Created by cartoonist Alex Raymond and first published by King Features on January 7, 1934, Flash Gordon was one of many comic adventure stories inspired by and created to compete against Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but since then has taken on a life of its own, having been reprinted many times under many publishers, adapted into a number of TV series courtesy of the DuMont Network, the Filmation cartoon studio and the Siffy Channel, and has recently been featured in the works of Seth MacFarlane, a guy who's somehow made a lot of money by trying to pass off pop culture references as jokes.

Though, to be honest, MacFarlane was not referencing the comic itself, but rather the 1980 movie based off of it.

The one produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the Italian film producer who gave us Barbarella, the 1976 King Kong remake, and both Conan the Barbarian movies, riding the wave of sci-fi/fantasy movies inspired by the original Star Wars.

The one screen-written by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who also wrote the first Batman movie. No, the FIRST Batman movie.

The one with the kick-ass theme song performed by:

Of course it's not like there's another Flash movie out there. Apart from the serials.

Once upon a time, there was a nice, kind, benevolent emperor named Ming (played by Max von Sydow of The Seventh Seal and The Exorcist) who ruled a very far-away planet called Mongo. One day he happened upon a planet named Earth, and decided he likes it so much he wanted to play with it, with earthquakes, hurricanes, and somehow triggering nasty volcanic eruptions to terrorize the population.

Oh, did I say "nice, kind and benevolent?" I meant "horribly, horribly evil."

Looks like a cross between Bruce Willis, Fu Manchu and Queen Amidala.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the barren wasteland of somewhere in the United States, a plane is boarded by Melody Anderson playing traveling journalist Dale Arden and the star of this movie, nude Playgirl centerfold Sam J. Jones as Flash Gordon--in the original comic a polo player from Yale University, in this film star quarterback of the New York Jets.

Ming sends in a plague of "hot hail" (couldn't it just say meteorites?) which pummels the plane and somehow makes its pilots disappear, leaving Flash and Dale to try and keep the plane in the air, but despite their best efforts, it crashes into the greenhouse belonging to one Dr. Hans Zarkov (played by Topol, whom I remember as one of James Bond's allies in For Your Eyes Only), an ex-NASA scientist who believes that these disasters are the cause of an alien invasion, an extraterrestrial force that is slowly pushing the moon towards the Earth.

Zarkov doesn't seem to mind that Flash and Dale have crashed an airplane into his house. In fact, he even invites them to fly his new rocketship with him to investigate these alien goings-on. At gunpoint, mind you, but, hey, at least they get to ride a rocket.

Okay, so which one of you is Flash?

The rocket takes them all to Mongo, where they are promptly captured by stormtroopers and brought before Ming. The fuehrer decrees Flash to be executed, Dale to become his new concubine, and Zarkov to have his mind wiped for entry into his secret police, and then...a football game breaks out between Flash and Ming's soldiers. Yeah, a football game. Flash plays quarterback, Dale plays cheerleader, and Zarkov reveals that he was a first-round draft pick for the Kansas City Chiefs by accidentally braining Flash with a forward pass.

At Flash's execution, however, he is rescued at the last minute and smuggled from his coffin out of the palace by Ming's daughter Aura (Ornelia Murti) who, I've gotta be frank here, is a TOTAL SLUT. I'm not just saying that, she is literally a tease. She already has a relationship with Prince Barin of Arboria (played by another Bond actor, Timothy Dalton) yet she seduces the royal surgeon to smuggle Flash out of Ming's palace during his execution, and while teaching Flash to fly the airship that's taking him to freedom and teaching him how to telepathically contact Dale and tell him he's alive, keeps trying to put her tongue down his throat.

Hey, hands on 10 and 2, buddy.

Anyway, Aura drops him off at Arboria, which looks a lot like the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi, and returns to the palace to be interrogated and tortured. And Prince Barin proves himself to be most hospitable to Flash by locking him in a cage and dumping him in a swamp, daring him to stick his hand in a hollow tree stump that is home to a poisonous stinging thing, and then saving his live from a carnivorous plant...so as not to be denied the pleasure of killing him himself.

Eventually everyone gets abducted (including Dale, who escapes Ming's palace with a very-much-not-mindwiped Zarkov, and Zarkov as well) and taken to the airborne kingdom of Sky City, home of its ruler Prince Vultan (played by BRIAN BLESSED, who has since become the most notorious actor in this film) and his army of Hawkmen (no relation to the DC superhero). And Vultan's first official act is to have Flash and Barin fight to the death on a rotating spiked platform.

But not before Dale is briefly reunited with Flash and hurriedly pops the question to him, after knowing him for just the span of a few hours, most of which she spent unconscious flying in a space capsule.

I don't think he expects you to talk.

The battle comes to an end when in a show of good sportsmanship Flash saves Barin from falling to his death, much to Vultan's disappointment, but word has gotten out that Flash has survived and it isn't long before Min's mingions...Ming's mingings...minmingminamin...the baddies turn up and recapture everybody. Except for Vultan and the hawkmen who fled at the arrival of Ming, and Flash, who rejects Ming's offer of a kingdom of his own after seeing how he turns everybody's neighbors against each other as insurance against a possible owverthrow of government and is left for dead at Sky City as it is to be demolished.

Having conveniently found a vehicle he can ride to escape just as Sky City is destroyed, Flash must now rescue Dale from marrying the universe's biggest prick, somehow save Barin and Zarkov from execution, and though I personally don't think she deserves it, stop Aura from being exiled to the coldest, iciest, most uncomfortable part of Mongo. Tall order for a first-string quarterback.

"Errm...which one of you is the bride again?"

Luckily a newly reformed Aura escapes her own exile and frees Barin and Zarkov just as Ming's army notices that Flash is not quite dead again and sends some army guys to make him not not quite dead again. Flash thinks to the newly-displaced Vultan, and together he and the Hawkmen launch an invasion of Ming's palace and stop the wedding. This includes a flying laser battle fight scene on Ming's battleship Ajax, complete with THE BEST MUSIC YOU COULD POSSIBLY SET TO A FLYING LASER BATTLE FIGHT SCENE.

Have a listen:

Queen could make a FAMILY REUNION sound epic.

Anyhoo, long story short, Barin manages to lower the palace's lightning field, allowing Flash to suicide-plunge the Ajax into the exact spot where Dale is becoming Ming's new sexual playthi--marrying the bastard, and without even bothering to wait until the "speak now or forever hold thy peace" part of the ceremony, finally crashes, skewering Ming on the long pointy end of the vessel, where he eventually...makes himself evaporate.

Oh, yeah, and the Earth is saved somehow, I guess.

Barin and Aura become the new Emperor and Empress of Mongo, Vultan is named their new general, and a big thank-you party is thrown in Flash's honor as he, Dale and Zarkov contemplate getting back to Earth.

Meanwhile, an unknown hand picks up Ming's ring in the final shot, setting up a possible sequel that never happens.

Earthling drivers.

It's very easy to dismiss Flash Gordon as comic book camp but, let's face it, it is. Any movie where half the characters dress in silly costumes and act like they're supposed to be taken seriously IS camp in its purest form. It was written by the guy who wrote the 1966 Batman movie, and knowing the sort of material he came up with for THAT feature, of course it would be a tad theatrical. Plus, anybody who could get BRIAN BLESSED to dress up in feathery shorts and wings with no shirt on...do I HAVE to spell it out for you people!!

Don't give me that look. It's not necessarily a bad thing to be overly theatrical. Adam West's Batman is regarded not just as a TV classic, but as a major influence to certain elements of the Batman comic we know today. And Electra Woman and Dyna Girl gets a pass because, well, it's Sid and Marty Krofft and I wouldn't expect anything more or less from them. Not sure what was the deal with Supergirl, though...

I enjoyed Flash Gordon. It was very entertaining. The visual effects were nice to look at, the action was pretty good, there was obvious attention to detail paid to its source material, and, of course, the soundtrack was kick-ass. And if no one else, at least Brian "GORDON'S ALIVE?!" Blessed appeared to be enjoying himself, even if his outfit wasn't doing him any favors.

That is the face of a man whose place in pop culture has just been cemented.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends--future events such as these will affect you in the future.

There are bad movies, and then there are bad movies.

Some movies are made with the sole intent to cause physical and mental pain to its audience. Some movies are made by directors and film crews with very dim outlooks on life and very low opinions of humanity. Some movies are torturous to sit through in ways that violate the Geneva Conventions. Some movies exist only to insult your intelligence, diminish your sanity, and suck your very will to live.

Then there is that special kind of bad movie, the "so bad it's good" type of turkey. It's the unnatural phenomenon where a film is just so inept, so terrible, so incompetent on every imaginable level that it somehow transcends all logic and criticism and actually becomes quite entertaining. They're been called guilty pleasures, unintentional comedies, and have sometimes been considered art films. People not only love them, but make them cult classics and recommend them to friends.

You know which ones I'm talking about. Snakes on a Plane. The Room. Reefer Madness. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Every movie Troma Films has ever made.

And this week, we're looking at the granddaddy of them all...

Who better to school us all in how not to make a movie than the grand cheese master himself, Edward D. Wood, Jr., writer, producer, director, known transvestite, lover of angora sweaters, and the self-proclaimed master of "suspension of disbelief"? A man who loved movies and loved making movies, even though he wasn't very good at it. An icon of overzealous half-assery who combined the acting talents (or lack thereof) of horror legends Vampira, Tor Johnson, even the great Bela Lugosi (sort of), put together shoddy reusable sets complete with identical shower curtains, banged out a script in no less than five minutes tops, dressed half the cast in shiny bathrobes, and then blindly chucked the footage in the editor's face with the words "go nuts", and STILL came up with a film that is less than the sum of its parts.

Crackpot psychic The Amazing Criswell opens the film by talking (or reading off cue cards) about the future, where you and I will spend the rest of our lives, and where future events such as these will affect us. He then goes on to talk about "what happened on that fateful day" and then confuses us further about punishing the guilty and rewarding the innocent before finally settling on "GRAVE ROBBERS FROM OUTER SPACE!"

Up in the skies, two men pretending to be airline pilots while sitting in a mostly empty room on boxes are freaked out by a shot of a hubcap hanging from a string.

Meanwhile, following a funeral service for the wife of an elderly gentleman, two gravediggers are burying the coffin when they are suddenly attacked by the very woman they were just burying.

Grief-stricken and despondent, the widower sadly leaves the house they had shared for so many years and walks a lonely, lonely path...into oncoming traffic.

And at HIS funeral, little do his mourners know that as they walk out of the world's smallest mausoleum wondering why his wife isn't entombed in there with him, HER CORPSE IS WATCHING THEM.

And it just gets better from here.

"The incidents, the places, the future...where the hell am I going with this?"

That evening, one of the pilots, a man named Jeff Trent, tells his wife Paula about the flying saucer he saw, saying it looked like a giant cigar (a giant hubcap-shaped cigar, I'm sure) and after he radioed it in, the topmost army personnel were upon him as soon as they landed and made him and the co-pilot swear to secrecy. He can't even admit he saw the thing (even though he just did). Suddenly a bright flash and a huge gust of wind knocks them both backward as a spacecraft has just landed in a cemetery conveniently next to the house, and just as conveniently where those two gravediggers were killed.

As the wind knocks the police around flimsy grave markers, one Inspector Clay (Johnson), who had gone off on his own with a flashlight, encounters Lugosi (or was it the director's wife's chiropractor? I can't be sure) and Vampira and is promptly murdered. ("And somebody's responsible!")

Soon after, Hollywood and Washington, DC are visited by similar sightings of hubcaps wobbling about on strings ("Visits? That would indicate visitors!") and the army's only solution is to shoot off pop caps at them. (How hard is it to hit them? They're just dangling up there.) As the army men ponder just what it is they're shooting at and what it is they're covering up, the aliens return to their space station and set about implementing "Plan 9", which is the regeneration of the newly deceased through stimulation of the pineal and pituitary glands in hopes of gaining the people of Earth's attention.

Plan 8 involved the saucers flying low over major cities with the aliens leaning out the windows waving and yelling "Hey! Look over here!"

Well, as Trent leaves to play pretend airplane pilot again, Paula is left all alone to touch his pillows in her sleep (make of that what you will) when Lugosi/Chiropractor Vampire Guy comes into her bedroom for some reason and chases her out of the house and into the cemetery, where he, Vampira and now the newly resurrected Inspector Clay wander around aimlessly while the girl runs around screaming. Shots alternate between soundstage and outdoor film, actors run across the same part of the cemetery several times over and the time of day changes completely at random until Paula is finally carried off the movie by a passing motorist. The dead reconvene at a waiting space vessel which takes off just as the cops arrive.

Wait, the detective and the dead wife come back as zombies, but the old man comes back as a vampire? How does that work?

Yeah, if I had to wear that, I'd want to choke myself, too.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, Colonel Thomas Edwards, Chief of Saucer Operations (as if there were such a position in in the Army, at least to my knowledge) is briefed by a chain-smoking general about the radio signals the aliens have been sending them all this time, and then plays him one which they have translated via their new "language computer." The speaker identifies himself as Eros, a soldier from some unnamed planet within the galaxy who describes his race as advanced eons beyond humans, calls they "stupid" for thinking they were alone in the universe, states that they have come to save their planet from their "ancient, juvenile minds" who keep devising new ways to blow themselves up, and states that the Earth's big guns scare them and that humankind will be destroyed if they refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Not one for diplomacy, are we?

When did Ann Coulter get a dye job? And when did Glenn Beck shave his head?

Edwards is sent to California to speak with the Trents when the aliens come back, send their vampire to attack them and then promptly vaporize him with their Decomposing Ray.

You know, I'm beginning to think these cries for attention are signs of a deeper psychological problem.

A trip back into the cemetery to see where this ray came from sees Monster Clay kidnap Trent's wife and Eros invite them inside their spaceship so they can show them that they're holding Trent's wife captive. He then goes on to reiterate that they are on a mission of peace by admonishing them for their primitive wars, calling them "idiots" with "stupid minds" who will just keep killing each other, and states that mankind must be obliterated before they stumble upon a new type of explosive--a "Solaranite" bomb which would harness molecules of sunlight or whatever as an explosive that would set off a chain reaction and destroy the universe.

Oh, nice use of tact, Eros. The aliens from Independence Day have better people skills.

"You're all big jerks who are stupid and your big ugly faces are as dumb as a butt!"

Anyway, police reinforcements arrive to incapacitate Clay with a stick to the back of his head and save Trent's wife, a fight breaks out on the spacecraft between Trent and Eros that destroys Eros' ham radio equipment and sets off a fire, Trent and the army guys escape just as the flaming ship takes off and explodes in midair, and the remaining zombie creatures instantly decompose where they stand.

Then Criswell comes back daring us to prove that what we just saw didn't happen (we can) and warns us that people whom we don't even know have passed us by in the street may be from outer space, and mentions something about laughing at vitamins and television and outer space before ending with "God help us in the future," not telling us what any of this even has to do with the future.

"YOUR mind's stupider!"
"Nuh-uh, YOUR mind's stupider!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times ten!"
"YOUR mind's stupider times a hundred!"
"YOURS time a thousand!"
"YOURS times INFINITY!!"

Plan 9 from Outer Space is a quandary among bad movies. Is it a bad movie? Undoubtedly. Did it look like they only had a special effects budget of twenty dollars (adjusted for inflation)? Absolutely. Does the plot make as much sense as a 27-dollar bill? Of course. Could a hyperactive six-year-old have written better dialogue? Again, the answer is yes.

Is it the worst movie ever made, however? Surprisingly no.

There ARE bad movies out there. Movies that make you cringe, movies that make you hurt, movies that make you want to find the nearest bridge and jump off it. I've done a few on this blog already--Supergirl, Volcano, The Giant Spider Invasion, and maybe some others I can't name off the top of my head. To list Plan 9 from Outer Space among those titles just seems...wrong.

Don't get me wrong; it is NOT a good movie. It tries hard to tell a suspenseful science fiction story and fails spectacularly in every category. But I'm certain there isn't a director alive who goes into any movie project with the sole intent of making an absolute stinkburger. Sometimes watching these cinematic failures are like staring at a train wreck. You can't look away. And over the years people continue to not look away at epic fails like these. And they keep telling other movie buffs to not look away. And eventually they gain legions of fans, attract new generations of film lovers and develop a cult following, and nobody ever looks away.

I guess my point is...the worst movie ever made is NOT the worst movie ever made.

"A MOVIE THAT IS SO GOOD I WAS HAPPY TO DIE FOR IT!" --Bela Lugosi

The Black Hole (1979)

Dash it all, Nana, don't look at me like that. It's nothing personal, it's just that...well, you're not really a nurse at all, you're...well, a dog. And the children aren't puppies, they're people. And sooner or later, Nana, people have to grow up.
--George Darling, Peter Pan

The Black Hole was a milestone for the Walt Disney studio--it was their very first PG rated production. Fifty years after the founding of the only major movie company that was devoted exclusively to squeaky-clean family-friendly entertainment, they had finally made a film where people were using CURSE WORDS. From this film grew an interest in more mature feature production which led to Disney's experimental age and later to the formation of Touchstone Pictures and their acquisition of Miramax Films. Movies like Tron, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and maybe even Pulp Fiction might not have been made if not for this film.

To put this into perspective, Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was Disney's very first PG-13 rated film, released in 2003. Safe to say we won't be getting anything with an R rating under the Walt Disney Pictures banner anytime soon, but they've been gradually coming of age.

Released in 1979 during the sci-fi movie boom following the release of the first Star Wars film and directed by Gary Nelson, who gave us a young Jodie Foster starring in the original Freaky Friday just one year before, The Black Hole was an early example of the use of computerized camera technology in motion picture. When ILM couldn't loan Disney the equipment they needed to shoot the film, they developed their own computer-controlled camera system. This won them praise from critics who were a wee bit disappointed by the story. It even got them a couple of Academy Award nominations for special effects and cinematography.

Ladies and gentlemen, the star of our film. ...At least it's not acrobatic brine shrimp.

Dan Holland (Robert Forster) is captain of the USS Palomino, a space exploration vessel currently returning from duty with its crew: the eager First Officer Lieutenant Charlie Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), rugged journalist Harry Booth (played by the dearly-departed Ernest Borgnine), civilian personnel Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins a.k.a. Norman "A Boy's Best Friend is His Mother" Bates) and Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux), the science officer who has ESP capabilities for some unexplained reason.

And proving that even back then Disney couldn't resist putting cute talking mascot characters in their movies, there's V.I.N.CENT. (short for "Vital Information Necessary CENTralized", whatever that means), a smarmy, sarcastic little robot with a penchant for reciting axioms with a slight air of superiority in the uncredited voice of Roddy McDowall.

Now there's a face that just SCREAMS "free toy in every kids' meal."

On their way home, they pass the REAL star of our film--a massive black hole in the middle of space with a derelict spaceship hovering nearby, positively identified as the USS Cygnus which was reported missing some time ago. (Kate is especially intrigued--her father served on the ship at the time of its disappearance.) Curious as to why the ship hasn't already been sucked INTO this black hole, the Palomino investigate, and after nearly getting sucked in themselves they finally find someplace to dock when the lights suddenly come on.

Turns out someone's home--none other than the notorious eccentric and Cygnus commander Dr. Hans Reinhardt, played by German actor Maximilian Schell, who explains to them that he ordered the crew to abandon ship after being crippled in a meteor shower--only he and Kate's father stayed behind, the latter of whom has since died. He reveals his plans to become the first human being to enter a black hole, much to the jaw-dropping of his visitors. His entire crew have been replaced with robots, including a red hulking automaton named Maximilian who serves as--

Wait a minute. The robot's name is Maximilian and one of the actors is named Maximilian? This may cause confusion...

"Your mother is an iPhone 5 with iOS 6!"

"Kiss my output port, you little Amiga."

Not much happens from here to the climax--the Palomino crew give themselves a tour of the ship and debate the boundary between genius and insanity that Reinhardt--played by Maximilian the actor, not Maximilian the robot--is currently straddling until he invites them all to dinner. Meanwhile, V.I.N.CENT. wanders off to find some sentry bots playing a game where they...shoot lasers at dots or something and meets another new friend - Old B.O.B. (short for BiO-sanitation Battalion--not a very good acronym either), an earlier, more beat-up version of Vincent with the similarly uncredited voice of Slim Pickens.

Let's take a break here and give some character critique. V.I.N.CENT looks cool and everything, but he's also kind of...full of himself. He's very snooty and sarcastic, he's always making quotes of famous philosophers like he's all "oh, I'm so great because I'm a robot and I'm more intelligent than these bipedal meat sacks". He doesn't even enjoy the company of other robots, since he's SUCH a superior model to them.

"Dude, you guys are total racists...and that's coming from a guy who leads a robot gestapo."

Old B.O.B. reveals that the crew never really left the Cygnus--a mutiny broke out amongst the crew when Reinhardt--Maximilian the actor, not the robot--refused to obey orders to return to Earth, and their captain had them all lobotomized and "reprogrammed" to serve as the robot crew they see all around them. Worse still, Kate's father was killed for leading the mutiny in the first place.

Dr. Durant, who up until now was fascinated by Reinhardt's exploits and was willing to accompany him on his mission, suddenly wants to leave when Kate is told of this telepathically, and then is given the distinct honor of having the first on-camera death scene in a Disney film when Maximilian--the robot, not the actor--runs him through with his metal...arm...blade...spinning thing, while Dr. Reinhardt--Maximilian the actor, not the robot--has Kate sent off to join his crew of the living dead.

"I told you not to call me 'Hansie' while we're working!"

The rest of the crew is notified of this through Kate's telepathic link with V.I.N.CENT., and Charles and Holland head back to rescue Kate. From then we get a big rescue scene/laser battle sequence with some very nice special effects.

Booth is killed when he tries to make a run for it in the Palomino and is promptly shot down by Reinhardt and crashes into one of the Cygnus' anti-gravity generators.

And because they're just not in enough peril already...

BRING ON THE METEORS!!!!!!

As a hailstorm of giant glowing Corn Pops begins pelting the ship, Reinhardt gets ready for its final voyage and orders Maximilian to go kill the bad guys, making the robot, not the actor, deaf to the actor's, not the robot's, cries for help when the control room begins to fall apart and he is trapped under the debris. Maximilian--the robot, not the actor--reappears and voids Old B.O.B's warranty before V.I.N.CENT. disables him with his own...blade...spinning thing and sends him hurtling into space.

Our heroes manage to escape in a small probe ship before the Cygnus is completely destroyed, but they're not out of the woods yet! In fact, there IS no way out of the woods, because the ship's controls have been programmed to plunge straight into the black hole.

I smell another picture montage.

I can't help but think there's an underlying theme in all this.

So, I guess the black hole wins in the end. Bummer.

Fortunately, in Disney's long-standing tradition of letting most if not all of the good guys survive, the ship pops out the other side in a completely different part of the universe, if not a completely different universe altogether. The survivors smile at each other as they rocket off to a planet eclipsing a star in the distance posing as sort of a sunset out heroes ride off into.

Not unlike Tron, The Black Hole is more lauded for its groundbreaking special effects than its plot, and it's easy to see why. If I'm honest, the characters aren't all that interesting, except V.I.N.CENT. whose smugness came off as a tad annoying, the plot's not exactly rocket science, and it's the fourth of the last five movies I've done with an ending that's totally up in the air, but I'll tell you the truth, it is quite pretty to look at from its early CG opening credits to the final shot. One scene has the Palomino crew running across a gangplank leading across the path of a giant meteorite rolling towards them Indiana Jones-style. I think one of the reasons I dig these early sci-fi movies is because I'm always fascinated by how they pull off these visual effects before every movie started using CG and green screens.

Some credit should also go to John Barry's music score, which for the most part is pretty catchy, including the overture.

The Black Hole is a good movie to kill ninety minutes with. There's plenty to look at, and it's not too complex for the less discriminating sci-fi geek. As long as you don't get your Maximilians confused.

It's a world of laughter, a world of tears...

Demolition Man (1993)

I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Meyer Wiener"!
--Edgar Friendly

The year is 1993, and Sly Stallone's career had fallen on hard times. His reputation as an actor had been tainted with such cinematic disasters as Rocky V, Oscar, and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!, and the Iron Curtain had fallen two years ago which meant there were no more Commies for John Rambo to perforate. He needed a movie to drag his star out from where others had fallen, a movie which would spark his comeback as an action star, a movie which would place him in the limelight once more.

That movie was Cliffhanger, which was a critical and commercial success and picked up four (technical) Oscar nominations.

Then, five months later, this came out:

We begin at Los Angeles in the future year 1996, which is a criminal-infested wasteland which is constantly on fire. Quite a bleak three-year outlook for the city, huh?

LAPD officer John Spartan (Stallone), a.k.a. the "Demolition Man", is called in to deal with a hostage situation in one of the apparently many crime-infested parts of the city, where criminal madman Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes, in a case of one man with a cool name playing another man with a cool name) is holding a busload of passengers hostage. Spartan storms a derelict building where Phoenix is hiding out, and they both get into a fight during which some explosives are set off and the building is brought tumbling down. Spartan eventually wins, and Phoenix is arrested and carted off to be frozen in a cryogenic prison.

...Well, that was a short movie. Very simple story, too. Looks like this will be a short review for a change. Hope you enjoyed reading it.







Oh wait. Spartan is arrested as well on charges of involuntary manslaughter when all the hostages are found dead in the rubble, and he gets frozen too.

You'd think they'd have put out that volcano by now.

Fast forward a few decades to the year 2032, where Los Angeles has merged with San Diego and San Bernadino to become the megalopolis of "San Angeles". Yes, you guessed it--it's another dystopian future movie. We seem to get a lot of those nowadays. The only difference here is unlike the other two I've covered, there isn't some ultra-violent national sport to keep the proletariat from revolting.

Here we meet our third major character, Lenina Huxley (a pre-Speed Sandra Bullock), a lieutenant in the San Angeles Police Department, which isn't seeing much action these days since the society they live in is a peaceful, puritan one organized by the city's pacifist leader Dr. Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne). Huxley is one of those "retro nuts" you see a lot of now and then, people who are infatuated with the pop culture from a previous era; in her case, the late 20th century. Her office and apartment are decked out with all sorts of paraphernalia from this period in time, and she's seen so many action movies from way back when that her day job seems kind of boring. If only something interesting were to happen...

There's one in every workplace.

Well, careful what you wish for, because today's the day of Simon Phoenix's parole hearing. This goes south quickly when shortly after he's thawed out he manages to free himself of his restraints, dispatch the guards with some martial arts moves, and poke out the warden's eye to trigger the retinal scan security system to excuse himself from the building.

He does not know how he managed this.

He's just broken out of jail and already he's racked up six homicides and stolen a car--

Oh, wait a minute. This is too rich. They don't use the word "homicide" to describe a code 187 in 2032 San Angeles. You know what they call it now?

You really wanna know?

Okay, here it is:

I will give you a moment to process this and laugh appropriately.

Yes. It seems that there hasn't been a homicide in San Angeles for so long that they forgot what it was called and just made something up. Most of the dialogue in this film is along these same lines. What do they call a burglary, a "RobberyTheftSteal"?

Well, anyway, the SAPD's *ahem* finest are unable to restrain Phoenix--when they first approach him at a phone booth-like computer terminal, the arresting officer has to read from a small prompter becuase he doesn't know what to do--that they eventually come to realize the only way to catch an old-fashioned criminal is with an old-fashioned cop. So they dig up Spartan's ice cube in the cryoprison, thaw him out and reinstate him as a fully-deputized law enforcer. Huxley is assigned to be his partner since she speaks late 20th Century...or tries to numerous times, anyway.

Phoenix's trail leads to the San Angeles history museum, where he has found the Armory exhibit...or rather, many particularly deadly weapons stored in a glass display case which any maniac, not just Phoenix, could smash through if he used his head...or in Phoenix's case, someone else's. Spartan eventually catches up to him, and they have a tearful reunion throughout the rest of the museum, Phoenix greeting Spartan using a highly-advanced magnetic accelerator gun and Spartan using his fists.

Spartan escapes the museum only to run into Dr. Cocteau himself, but strangely he cannot find it in himself to blow his head off. The good doctor suggests that he has "someone to kill", a man who through some sort of hypnotic suggestion Phoenix knows to be named "Edgar Friendly", and Phoenix casually wanders off, not knowing why he can't shoot him.

"Oh, please, just call me 'Your Holiness'."

After this, they spend a bit of time fleshing out this non-threatening, peaceful world we've entered. Spartan has an understandably hard time adjusting to San Angeles in a future where:

• Everyone has a bio-engineered sensor chip implanted into their skin so they can be monitored wherever they go.
• Thanks to the 61st Amendment which apparently repealed the part in the Constitution that said the President had to be a natural born citizen, Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected to the White House at some point. 
• A war between fast food franchises has left Taco Bell the last remaining restaurant chain.
• The most popular radio station in town plays nothing but old commercial jingles.
• The modern convenience of toilet paper has been replaced by "three seashells." They don't really explain how that works, so you'll just have to use your imagination.
• Everything that has been deemed not good for you is bad, and is henceforth illegal - smoking, alcohol, contact sports, meat, chocolate, gasoline, toys that aren't educational, salt, even SWEARING is against the law. Matter of fact, there's a running gag throughout the film where anyone who cusses is ticketed for "violating the verbal morality statute."
• Much to the delight of Republicans, religious wackos and the state government of Kansas, abortion is illegal as well. But then, so is impregnating your wife without a license.
• Speaking of sex, it is now done without any physical contact or fluid transference with the use of neurological "thought helmets." If you want to make a baby, you have to go to a lab.

"Can't we just cuddle? ...oh, right, we can't."

We also learn that there is an underground resistance movement in the sewers of San Angeles who are reportedly organizing and plotting to overturn Cocteau's nanny state, led by this Edgar Friendly whom Cocteau wants Phoenix to kill. Spartan notices this when during a dinner date at a fancy, err...Taco Bell he chases away some subterranean ruffians who it turns out were just foraging a delivery truck for food. Spartan, Huxley, and a third cop played by Benjamin Bratt investigate further by checking out the sewers, where they discover an underground civilization of shabby-looking people who have rejected Cocteau's law and have made a crude version of old Los Angeles where they live their lives in poverty and minding their own business. This "Edgar Friendly" turns out to be Denis Leary in a trench coat, just a regular guy who likes to annoy Cocteau from a distance and just has a few friends along for no reason. Though he does sound flattered that Cocteau sent someone to kill him.

Then Phoenix arrives to shoot up the place and we get another fight scene complete with a car chase, Phoenix in a modern police car with futuristic control screens he somehow knows how to read, and Spartan in Edgar's 1970 Oldsmobile. During this tussle, Phoenix takes the time to casually mention that the bus passengers he was holding hostage at the start of the film were already dead when Spartan arrived, so he went to freezer jail for nothing. Oh, you little rascal.

By now Spartan and Huxley have put all the pieces together: Cocteau wants to kill Edgar and crush the resistance he is supposedly leading, but since ape can't be seen killing ape in the world he created and with a police department too dumb for words, his only option was to brainwash the imprisoned Phoenix into doing it for him, feeding him the knowledge,  access codes and physical capabilities he would need to do the job, and then busting him out of jail when the time was ripe. Phoenix even asks Cocteau to thaw out some of his old friends to help him out.

Here we have to wonder if Cocteau was really thinking straight. Here he is, letting one of the 20th century's most kill-crazy felons loose on the streets after years of implanting the skills of a Navy SEAL and an expert computer hacker and his only job is to kill ONE GUY? What about the harm he could do to this peaceful society, one that is actually stupid enough to keep all of their weapons FULLY LOADED behind a glass case in a museum? Did he not consider the amount of collateral damage this man might cause, as measured in destruction of property and loss of life? And what will he do when his job is finished? How is he going to rein him in? If the police can't stop him, who can? And talking of killing machines, who's to say that he won't pull a Terminator scenario out of his hat and become self-aware, rise up against his master, kill him, and then unite his fellow machines against the humans and take over the world?

Well, unfortunately for Cocteau, that last thing I mentioned is exactly what happens. Phoenix turns the tables, has one of his cronies shoot Cocteau (since he's programmed not to do it himself) and is now planning to thaw out every thug in the cryoprison to raise infinite amounts of hell on San Angeles, just like in the good old days.

And all Spartan learned in cryoprison was how to knit.

With support from Edgar Friendly and his...friends, and no help whatsoever from the increasingly boorish SAPD police chief (Bob Gunton), Spartan and Huxley infiltrate the cryoprison where Phoenix is awaiting for the final showdown. Huxley manages to take out one of Phoenix's cronies before Spartan renders her unconscious with his taser...truncheon...thing to face the big boss alone. Another fight breaks out between the two of them and Phoenix has the upper hand throughout most of it, but thanks to a smashed cryogenic fluid container, Phoenix's body is finally frozen solid and finally shattered like liquid nitrogen. Spartan escapes just as the cryoprison is destroyed by several massive explsions.

Finally, with the police chief mourning the loss of their city's leader and Edgar Friendly eager to have the party he's fought for his right to have, Spartan suggests that the two of them work together to form a law-abiding but more permissive society, and then leaves with Huxley, asking her how the "three seashells" thing works.

Demolition Man is a silly movie, a VERY silly movie. It doesn't completely subscribe to the idea that everyone in the future will wear jumpsuits and eat food pills for three square meals a day, but its depiction of a dystopian, overly sanitized society isn't taken as seriously as in other films. I'm not sure whether it was trying to criticize ultra-liberal political correctness or uber-conservative sheltering--perhaps it was more focused on the balance between order and chaos, but the extra bits like Taco Bell, President Schwarzenegger and the "three seashells" clearly have nothing to do with the plot and were merely written in for a laugh.

Also, there was also a proposed subplot about Spartan seeing his daughter after being frozen for thirty years which never gets off the ground.

Credit where it's due, however--Wesley Snipes is enjoyable as Simon Phoenix. Just look at him gallivanting around 2032 San Angeles, running rings around its incompetent police force, MurderDeathKilling people all over the place. He's like a kid at Christmas who doesn't know which present to open first. Bonus points should also go to Denis Leary, who plays Edgar Friendly as...Denis Leary in a trench coat.

Take from this movie what you will, but it's MOST DEFINITELY a silly movie.

"Now, John, about that 'fluid transference' thing..."