Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
Night Train to Terror (1985)
I defy you to name one other film that offers as much breakdancing, animated monsters, spandex, gushing blood, naked breasts and Bull from Night Court as the diabolically incompetent and massively entertaining Night Train to Terror. Destination? Hilarity!
It’s a horror anthology film, built out of one unfinished flick and two existing films severely edited to the point that they play like extended trailers. The wraparound segment has God and Mr. Satan — played, according to the credits, by Himself and Lu Sifer, respectively — sitting on a moving train, debating for the souls of each story’s characters, while a musical group with way too many guys wearing headbands and aerobic outfits sings the same damn song over and over and over in the next car.
The first case they pore over – the incomplete Scream Your Head Off – stars Barbarella’s John Philip Law as a salesman who ends up in a mental ward and is coerced by the hot middle-aged nurse to go out and drug young women so that they can be strapped to tables naked and have their internal organs harvested to the highest bidder. Oh, and Richard Moll is in it.
Next comes the heavily abbreviated version of 1983’s Death Wish Club, in which Gretta, a skank with bad teeth, makes porno movies until she meets frat boy Glen. Gretta takes her new beau to a strange suicide club, at which one member is dispatched each time via some bizarre method, whether that be a giant winged beetle with a sting of death, electric-chair Russian roulette or lying in sleeping bags until your head is crushed by a wrecking ball.
Last is a chunk of 1980’s Cataclysm, in which a Nazi war criminal with a cloven hoof continues to live — and murder — in the present day without having aged. Cameron Mitchell investigates, and finds stop-motion monsters and open-heart surgery footage. Oh, and Richard Moll is in it.
Between each vignette, That Damned Band “sings” that “song,” engages in semi-Laugh-In bits and breakdances in slow motion. At the very end, a model train car crashes, presumably killing all aboard, which is a good thing. In its own fucked-up way of utter incompetence, Night Train to Terror is genius. —Rod Lott
Fists of Bruce Lee (1978)
The bad guys in Fists of Bruce Lee don’t seem all that threatening, what with their pink telephone and idling time playing bumper pool. But the woods outside their hideout are a different story, booby-trapped with sandbags, pitchforks, rope and logs!
We’re introduced to our hero — Bruceploitation star Bruce Li — via a credits sequence in which he, wearing a blindfold, spars with another guy wearing a girdle, while Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces” blares. The film is produced by Woo Ka Chi, which also accurately describes how the music score sounds.
Li meets an effeminate guy with a name like Poochie Chan, who wears a white suit and continuously dabs at his face with a handkerchief. Li also falls for a woman who has a doll in her room that shoots metal darts out its head. How all these characters come into play with the story is a moot point, because there is no story. They simply amble amount and speak in generic terms and, every few minutes, a fight breaks out.
One colorful brawl takes place at night at an amusement park; another on a playground, predating a similar scene in Jackie Chan’s Police Story 2, except Jackie’s scene didn’t steal John Barry’s 007 musical cues, nor did it have a preceding foot chase scored to Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die.” One guy gets shot with an arrow by a dude who looks like either the construction worker or the motorcycle rider from the Village People. Some random minion gets a pitchfork deep in his ass. Story schmory, slightly snory. —Rod Lott
eXistenZ (1999)
In the near future, Jennifer Jason Leigh is Allegra Gellar, the world’s best game designer. The controls for her game look like pulsating handheld vaginas, and they attach directly to your spine with an umbilical cord. As the film opens, Leigh and a dozen others are test-driving her new virtual-reality game for the first time when she’s nearly assassinated by a man with a gun made of flesh that shoots teeth.
In case you couldn’t guess by now, eXistenZ was written and directed by David Cronenberg.
With various people wanting her dead, Allegra goes on the run with her company’s PR trainee, played by Jude Law. He’s never played her games before, so they get the necessary “bioport” installed in his back at a local gas station by attendant Willem Dafoe. Now Jude and Jen can play the game together to make sure it works.
The game plants Jude on the assembly line, cutting open mutated frogs for parts to make mini gamepods. This, incidentally, is where the movie starts to go south. Jen worries about her own gamepod, because it’s sick and diseased, and you wonder how the actors were able to keep a straight face.
Both Law and Leigh are fine, even if I suspect the latter is convinced she’s playing Elisabeth Shue. What’s Cronenberg trying to say in the Möbius-strip eXistenZ? Hell if I know! But for a while, I liked how he said it — gory amphibian parts, clitoral joysticks and all. —Rod Lott
Be Cool (2005)
Somewhere in the mess of Be Cool is a story. There has to be; after all, it’s based on an Elmore Leonard novel. John Travolta reprises his role as one-time shylock Chili Palmer from 1995’s Get Shorty, also based on Leonard. While that earlier work focused on Chili’s foray into the film industry, Be Cool finds our so-cool-he’s-Popsicle protagonist drifting through the ooze of L.A.’s sleazy music biz.
In either an unfortunate accident or a meta-ironic attempt to parrot that shallow world, Be Cool serves up a passel of tired caricatures, stale gags and self-congratulatory cameos (Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, Anna Nicole Smith, et al.). There’s a burly bodyguard who is gay and — get this — wants to be in movies! Yowzah! Oh, and a white guy who thinks he’s a black guy! Hoo-boy! There’s a Russian Mafiosi who sports a … bad toupee! Tee-hee-hee! Oh, and then there’s the gangsta rapper who’s just itching to shoot someone! Knee-slappin’ hoopa-hoopa funny!
Some of these high jinks are executed by talented folks, which somewhat alleviates the sting. Andre 3000 (of hip-hop duo Outkast), Vince Vaughn, Cedric the Entertainer and especially Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson all shine in their respective roles, until the one-dimensional shtick they are saddled with starts to wear thin. It doesn’t take long.
Others in the ensemble are less lucky. Christina Milian has the thankless role of the young musical talent whom impresario Chili takes under his wing and steers toward a record contract. (Will she make it? Take a guess.) She’s relegated to several performances of synthetic R&B dross while Travolta and co-star Uma Thurman are told to sway their heads from side to side.
F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job remake) is a competent, if unremarkable director, and he does manage to keep the flick humming along and even intermittently entertaining. But hell, intermittently entertaining isn’t quite cool enough. Be Cool be crap. —Phil Bacharach