nthurkettle

I remember when Eric Bogosian is flaunting his super-MacGuffin brand satellite control box and teasing Seagal about how he can't stop the satellite death beam, and then Seagal shoots the box and the bullet goes through Bogosian too and he dies saying something like "Oh, I never thought of that!" I will bet all the money in my wallet that Seagal came up with that moment and was like "Ha! I'll show this nerd! Also - I don't know how technology works!"

At 0:54 when Christopher Reeve ridiculously shouts: "STOP! DON'T DO IT!.......THE PEOPLE!" fully Shatner-style, I have to imagine he asked the director after: "was that too silly? It felt silly", and the director looked at his watch and was like "NOPE, couldn't be better, MOVING ON!"

The director, James Foley, is back at the top of Hollywood with Fifty Shades Darker, and he's being advertised to direct the third movie as well. What a weird career. This movie came out just a few years after he made the insanely good Glengarry Glen Ross, and in the very same year as this one he also directed the hilariously bad The Chamber, which was during that Hollywood period of "John Grisham barfs on a napkin and Hollywood greenlights it."

I feel like this screenwriter had a long history of failing to have an empathetic understanding of women's moods.

Who can forget the reign of action movie dominance by tap dancer Gregory Hines!

This is the one where they are captured in the theme park by robot Abe Lincoln? Man, I know I watched this when it hit cable but I have blocked most of it out. Tone Loc made poop jokes, that I know. So weird.

True story - I was working as a script-reading intern for a producer and he gave me this script to evaluate; it was just called "Untitled Nancy Pimental Script" because Nancy was a writer on South Park (who has since gone on to work for several seasons on Shameless and is a genuinely funny lady.) I read the script and told the executive "I think this wouldn't make a good movie". He replied "This script just sold for a million dollars, it's going to be the next American Pie only for women". And I replied "I still don't think it will work, because it all hangs on this woman deciding to go on this insane, humiliating road trip just because she had two pages of decent flirt-banter at a bar." But I got very insecure because I was just out of college and these were all experienced Hollywood producers so who was I to say they were wrong?

I remember an exchange in the movie where a monster actually shouts "You're going down!" and Ghost Rider actually replies "I don't think so!" I always imagined the screenwriter pushing back from the keyboard and saying to himself "You'll never top dialogue like that, you handsome genius, you! Pure gold!"

Worth doing just for the way JCVD pronounces the words "Black silk underwear". Also, they clearly filmed a borderline-pornographic sex scene without necessarily knowing a) where it fit in the plot, or which twin was going to be the one having sex. So it gets wedged in as a fantasy sequence where growly, hair-slicked back JCVD drunkenly imagines smiley spandex-wearing JCVD jackhammering his girlfriend.

In order to make sense of this movie, there are many threads that have to be accounted for. First, as has been mentioned, Snake is conspicuously terrible at his job. Not to mention, since everyone knows him, his mission isn't very secret. In the first movie, he was a covert attempt to get around the hostage-takers' demands that there be no rescue attempt. Here, it's obvious why Snake has been sent, so why not just send the whole army? Second, and less-explored in the podcast - Cuervo Jones does not seem to understand how to be a bad guy. He has created a convoluted murdersport whose purpose is to tease victims with false hope before they are shot. So when Snake beats his arbitrary game, Cuervo acts as if he doesn't know what to do. YOU MADE UP THE GAME, CUERVO. You're not going to be fined if you just shoot Snake anyway. Also, his plan is to capture the magic button that can destroy the world, and then use it as blackmail so that he can overthrow the government with his rebel army, which is a way slower and costlier way of conquering the world when you already have a button you can conquer it with. That's not how blackmail works, he's basically saying "Let us destroy you, or else I'll destroy you". YOU'RE A BAD GUY, you shouldn't be reluctant to use power to achieve your goals. Third, as had been mentioned, it was implausibly careless of the President to make his Kill Everything device not only be unsecured enough to be stolen by his daughter, but so generic looking that it could be switched with an audio tour. So what could explain all this? I believe that this has all been orchestrated by the President himself. Being a religious radical obsessed with the apocalypse, one earthquake isn't enough to satisfy him. And just exiling sinners isn't enough. He clearly has a Rapture fetish and is trying to jumpstart the process by running Snake Plissken through an elaborate simulation of his previous adventure in New York, knowing exactly how Snake will behave at the end. As evidence in support of this theory - the video game "Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty", in which the franchise's hero is named "Solid Snake" and uses the name Plissken as an alias, the entire adventure is revealed to be a simulation of a previous adventure orchestrated by an evil American President. I rest my case.

I always felt like the filmmakers just selected the lead, Ed Speelers, using a picture of 1977 Mark Hamill and a vaguely-accurate "What Celebrity Do I Look Like?" Facebook app.

The amount of time devoted to the resolution of a corporate takeover subplot in a movie in which Death Itself is wandering Earth in a hijacked skinsuit always confused the hell out of me. Then again, considering that 80% of the film's runtime consists of dramatic pauses, everything takes way, way longer than it should.

SPOILERS and all, but the climax is the main characters agreeing to use their Sphere powers to forget that they have Sphere powers. I got mugged after seeing this movie and that ending still makes me feel more assaulted.

This movie is so outstandingly crazy. The plot depends on a porn actress being famous for a choreographed striptease routine. And the "porn set" is just a giant party/music video where Frankie Goes to Hollywood is performing, and the main character finds the porn actress he's been obsessing over/stalking, and just walks up and starts doing her without even introducing himself. Brian DePalma was really working at, like, maximum filmmaking talent level and maximum pervy weirdness level at same time.

When I saw all the scenes of DeNiro and Pacino strutting around, pumping iron and beating up punks and swaggering about how great they are, I remember thinking "This script was probably written for guys like 30 years younger than you, because you're both like 70 and this is absurd."

I remember there's an early scene of the girls having a sexy locker room clothes change after their shift at the mall pizza place and asking myself - what mall pizza place has a sexy locker room? Also - their big plan to fight the killer metal robots is to throw Molotov cocktails. And well...um...metal doesn't burn... My favorite line of dialogue: “Let’s go send these fuckers a Rambogram!”

Bumping for Keanu Reeves's impassioned plea for room service:

And yet he still made Bloodrayne.

Not sure how many crossover HDTGM/WWE fans there are, but has anyone else noticed this? It seems like it could easily just be coincidence until you get to that fat belt buckle. Did Seth Rollins base his wrestling gear not just on Snake Plissken, but specifically Snake Plissken from Escape from L.A.!? That's kind of next level.

I really get the feeling he added extra arm shaking just in case the cheap wind machine failed in the middle of the take. Such a pro.

I just re-watched this for the first time since it was in theaters. It would be defensible as a kind of Crank-style gonzo self-satire for the colorful design, the crazy action ideas and the way it openly acknowledges that it's just teeing up story beats from the original to do again, only more ridiculous - the death of Valeria Golina's character is played as a straight up punchline....except so much of it just feels so damned LAZY. Kurt Russell seems like he's moving at half speed most of the time, and Cuervo Jones is like the most half-assed supervillain I've ever seen - from what I can tell, the furthest the writers went in crafting his character is "Ummmm, let's go Latino, okay? SAVE AND PRINT." He's so lame that Snake doesn't even bother to kill him. Buscemi kills him. STEVE BUSCEMI KILLS THE BAD GUY. The best part, though, was seeing Cuervo seduce the President's daughter using What the 90's Thought Snapchat Would Be Like.

Studios trying to self-coin "badass" initialisms for their own terrible movies was definitely a thing there for awhile.

I usually don't endorse a movie for HDTGM that hasn't been released yet, but given how no one can seem to find a precedent for a studio announcing it as a giant money loser months before it's even released, that almost justifies an exception. And this closes the deal: "conceived in 2013 by Adam Goodman, then the president of Paramount’s film group, off an idea he had bandied about with his then-4-year-old son." http://www.wsj.com/a...-yet-1474577856 The story for this was partially-conceived by a LITERAL PRE-SCHOOL CHILD. A true HDTGM first.

I forgot what a scary rage Johnny 5 is in during the big "I Need a Hero" chase scene in Short Circuit 2. I get that Oscar lied to him and endangered his friends - but once they're safe and Oscar is just fleeing with the heist money, Johnny 5 still sounds like he wants to murder-death-kill the guy. He is a relentless specter that wants only VENGEANCE and PUNISHMENT OF THE WICKED, even if it means his own demise. Pretty dark emotional territory for a kids movie.

I'll always have affection for this one, because a: it was my entree into the world of low budget filmmaker Charles Band (who produced), and b: everything I subsequently watched from Charles Band was SO MUCH WORSE - including the far less entertaining "Robot Wars" and the "oops our option on Dr. Strange lapsed during pre-production" cheapie "Dr. Mordred: Master of the Unknown". Robot Jox hits the cheese bullseye and it's from that last generation when people in the exploitation/knockoff/etc. world still might use stop-motion animation, which is so much more charming than terrible CGI.