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!
The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)
Long after the Incredible Hulk television series had ended, NBC revived the Hulk with a string of comparably silly made-for-TV movies, the first of which was, naturally, The Incredible Hulk Returns. Still a lonely soul, Bruce Banner (Bill Bixby) is on the verge of finishing a project that he believes will cure him of his unfortunate Hulk-outs. But just when he’s about to fire up the machine and change his life for the better, he’s interrupted by some curly haired nerd from his past, who tells him of a polar expedition he recently undertook, where he found an ancient hammer that allows him to summon Thor (Eric Kramer). Got that?
Why would this dork think to track down the presumed-dead Banner to tell him all this? Never you mind, because he shows Banner a demo, and sure enough, here comes Thor (looking less like Thor than Vincent D’Onofrio’s car mechanic in Adventures in Babysitting), who proceeds the wreck the shit outta Banner’s anti-Hulk contraption. Oh, the irony!
Thor doesn’t even really act like the Thor of the comics. He acts like Fabio after a week’s training of Hooked on Phonics. Posing and winking like a pro wrestler, he walks around shirtless, downs gallons and gallons of beer, and greets visitors to Banner’s apartment by asking, “Why must you pound on my door with such insolence?” This is where you know director Nicholas Corea wanted to hit the button on the mixing console marked “LAFF TRACK.”
It just sorta ends after the climactic scene of the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno) and Thor working together to pull down a helicopter. Then Banner hits the road again, only to resurface in the following year’s misleadingly titled The Trial of the Incredible Hulk. —Rod Lott
Lifeforce (1985)
Ah, the 1980s. It was a simpler time: a time of magic, miracles, demons and gods. A time when a cult horror director could commandeer a $25 million budget to construct an amalgamation of thoughtful British science-fiction and American horror. A time when Steve Railsback was considered a viable leading man. I speak of the infamous flop Lifeforce.
Loosely based on Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires — fairly on-the-nose for a title — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre director Tobe Hooper and Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon cobbled together one of the cinema’s most bizarre achievements. Ostensibly a tale of intergalactic vampires discovered in Halley’s Comet (embodied by Mathilda May, wandering nude through her scenes and helping a few teenagers achieve maturity much faster), Lifeforce switches tones at will, transforming from space opera to vampire flick to chase film, then going absolutely bugfuck to become a zombie apocalypse. At one point, May replicates herself through blood streaming from the faces of nearby victims, and somehow, it just makes sense.
Cannon Films clearly didn’t know what it had signed on for. Lifeforce flopped, with reviews generally negative or worse (although Gene Siskel liked it). But aided through hindsight and extended editions, Lifeforce is a geek classic. Certainly no one involved phoned it in; Hooper’s direction (never better) captures the style and dry wit of the classic Hammer Quatermass films (well worth checking out), the score by Henry Mancini (!) is appropriately quirky and bombastic, and John Dykstra’s (Star Wars) special effects are superb — the desiccated zombie design is wonderful, and the alien spacecraft is a thing of beauty. No CGI here, just craft and skill.
And the cast! Railsback is fittingly hammy as the token American hero, and the rest of the talent is a who’s who of classic British faces, including Patrick Stewart, who may well be a Highlander considering he hasn’t aged a day in almost three decades. Lifeforce ain’t particularly scary, although it has a share of “Boo!” moments. But when you add up its elements — vampires, zombies, mad scientists, astronauts, sex, spaceships, psychics, aliens, Lovecraftian undertones — you have one utterly sui generis film. —Corey Redekop
Bangkok Dangerous (2008)
Bangkok, Oriental city, and the city don’t know what the city is getting: Nicolas Cage with a lifetime supply of the inkiest shades of Just for Men.
In the ridiculous action failure Bangkok Dangerous, the Pang Brothers (The Eye, The Messengers) remake their own supposedly popular 1999 Thai hit of the same name, but to no great effect. So unimaginative, so uninvolving is this routine no-effort that it took me several months of starts and stops just to get through it, and even then, I gave up with about 20 minutes left to go.
Cage is Joe, one of those expert hit men of the movies: He doesn’t miss, but he’s getting too old for this shit. Instead of killing strangers on a freelance basis, he wants to meet someone and settle down. While on assignment in Bangkok, Joe meets Fon (Charlie Yeung, New Police Story), a nice deaf girl who works at the local pharmacy. He teaches her skills she needs to know, like hand-to-hand combat and watermelon shooting; in turn, she teaches him skills he needs to know, like how to feed bananas to an elephant and how to upstage an Academy Award winner without saying a word.
The only reason to watch a film like Bangkok Dangerous in the first place is obvious: potential for cool action sequences. The Pang (Pain?) Brothers deliver a decent boat chase and murder by motorcycle, but no scene is pulled off with a discernible degree of pizazz. It may be the least engaging action vehicle for an A-list actor this decade. If only the sibs had borrowed elements of one of Cage’s other turds of the time, The Wicker Man, they might have something.
I’d suggest the bee helmet. —Rod Lott
The Strangers (2008)
It takes a good half-hour of Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman moping around and listening to Joanna Newsom on vinyl, but once it gets going, The Strangers offers a pretty suspenseful section of 45 minutes I wouldn’t want to watch in the dark while home alone late at night. The final 15, however — let’s just say debuting writer/director Bryan Bertino never should have let his story see the literal light of day.
Tyler and Speedman play a couple who, following a wedding reception at which she turned him down on his proposal, retreat all weepy to his dad’s vacation home for the night. Soon after drowning their individual sorrows in rusty bathwater and Blue Bell ice cream, there’s a knock at the door at an ungodly hour, with a young blonde asking for someone who isn’t there.
The inconvenience is merely step one of a trio’s ace home-invasion plan. This assault on precinct pretty-boy is made unnerving because the three perpetrators each sport a different mask; according to the credits, their names are Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Man in the Mask. That latter moniker doesn’t do him justice, as he wears a burlap sack with eyeholes and a painted smile. (Pin-up Girl’s facial disguise is particularly creepy; just ask my kids since I was sent one with the review copy. Yes, I am a horrible parent, but I cannot resist a laugh at their piss-their-pants expense.)
If illogical — they seemingly vanish via teleportation — their reign of terror is effective, like Michael Myers’ pursuit of Jamie Lee Curtis in the closet drawn out to feature length. The Strangers is neither brilliant nor groundbreaking, but works for more than half the time, which makes it worthy viewing. Reportedly based on true events, Bertino’s version is a tad better than the 2006 French film Them, which is so similar, I can’t see how The Strangers gets away without being credited as a remake. —Rod Lott