Author: swampflix

The Mystery Behind the Highway to Hell (1991) Soundtrack

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As I previously mentioned in the Highway to Hell Swampchat, the film’s soundtrack is bananas, and I’ve never heard anything quite like it. The best way to describe the sound is r&b vocals with 80’s pop/rock music, but the vocals are more like soulful grunts instead of actual words. The group responsible for all of this insanity is Hidden Faces, and this group is just as mysterious as their music. Researching Hidden Faces wasn’t so easy because there’s virtually nothing out there about this group, but I was able to find some interesting information.

Frank Fitzpatrick founded Hidden Faces in 1989, and the group strictly did soundtracks and scores for movies. Highway to Hell, Nuns on the Run, Breaking the Rules, Friday, Under the Hula Moon, The Player’s Club, and Soul Man are all films that feature Hidden Faces tunes. Nuns on the Run seems fantastic, so I have Hidden Faces to thank for bringing it to my attention. In the film, Eric Idle is a criminal disguised as a nun, and that’s all it took for it to make it onto my watchlist. Come to think of it, the only film that I’ve seen from this eclectic film collection is Friday, and if I recall correctly, the music was totally different from the music in Highway to Hell. I guess that’s common for artists in the film score/soundtrack business. Unfortunately, Hidden Faces called it quits in the late 90s, so it’s doubtful that they’ll be doing any movie soundtracks again.

It turns out that Hidden Faces has a connection to New Orleans, though. Not only is Fitzpatrick a songwriter, producer, and certified yoga instructor, he is also a major social entrepreneur that raised funds and awareness for Hurricane Katrina victims. In particular, he produced a song called “Be On Our Way” with Van Hunt, Supervision, Buku Wise, and Hidden Faces for the film Hurricane Season, a film that follows the story of John Ehret High School’s basketball championship journey post-Katrina. All of the proceeds made by the song were donated to the Make It Right Foundation.

I’m actually pretty surprised to find that Hidden Faces is more than just a growling man and a drum machine. They actually have a very interesting history that’s much lengthier than I expected. This is all the more reason to pay close attention to film credits, even the ones in horrible movies.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, Ate De Jong’s 1991 action comedy Highway to Hell, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at De Jong’s other (more successful) 1991 cult classic Drop Dead Fred, and last week’s query of exactly why Jerry Stiller’s entire family appeared in the film (their only full-family appearance outside The Independent).

-Britnee Lombas

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

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fourstar

There’s an admittedly cheap, but remarkably effective result from committing a night at the opera to film. No matter how cynical or out of place its inclusion, the opera elevates cinema, especially genre films that can use a leg up. It elevates the romcom in Moonstruck, the deliberately dumb comedy in the Bob Sagat-directed Norm MacDonald vehicle Dirty Work, the slasher horror in Dario Argento’s (appropriately titled) Opera, and now in the fifth installment of the Mission: Impossible series, Rogue Nation, it elevates the super spy action movie. In one of Rogue Nation‘s most elegant sequences our hero & the thorn in the government’s side Ethan Hunt infiltrates an operatic production to put a stop to four separate assassination attempts on a single Austrian dignitary. John Woo (embarrassingly) attempted to invoke a sort of rack rock opera in the climax of Mission: Impossible 2 fifteen years ago, but it wasn’t until Rogue Nation that the series’ operatic ambitions amounted to anything meaningful. The assassination prevention is a ridiculous, impossible mission, but it’s neither the first or the last of the film’s many over the top set pieces. The fact that the film’s literal operatic heights are almost forgettable amongst its other action-laden tangents is merely a testament to how eager it is to please as a popcorn spectacle.

As you may have noticed (presuming anyone out there might be paying attention), I have been superficially tracking my journey through the Mission: Impossible series by the length of Tom Cruise’s hair in the films. In the delightful first & third entries, Cruise was rocking a short, handsome hairdo that conveniently coincided with the films’ somewhat concise approach to action delivery & 60s super spy nostalgia. In the second film his hair got remarkably douchier in length, which was mirrored in the film’s awful late 90s/early 00s aesthetic, a mistake repeated in the fourth installment, Ghost Protocol, which I’m willing to forgive since Cruise begins the film in a Serbian prison. It’s more than excusable. It’s not like he’s the President of the Limp Bizkit Fan Club in the fourth film (I’m assuming he was in the second), so the terrible hairdo can slide. In Rogue Nation, Cruise’s hair length also goes rogue, striking an in-between balance that serves as a nod to both hair styles. Rogue Nation is a satisfying culmination of all the Mission: Impossible films, forming a single entity greater than the sum of its parts & Cruise’s hair length is a nod to that cohesion. You may scoff, but I swear it’s true.

There are, of course, less simplistic & much more dignified ways of tracking the Mission: Impossible franchise’s progress as a whole. For instance, the The Gang’s All Here mentality that never truly solidified until Ghost Protocol was put to to great use in Rogue Nation, at the very least comically speaking. Since the beginning I’ve heralded Ving Rhames’ presence as a saving grace, even through the John Woo dark times, and it’s here that he finally joins the Abbott & Costello duo of Jeremy Renner & Simon Pegg to form some sort of unholy trinity of comic relief. The small taste of Alec Baldwin doing his best Jack Donaghy is merely icing on the already too-sweet cake. Rogue Nation also acknowledges its franchise’s history in the way it combines all of its past female characters (the agent, the double agent, the super sexy/deadly assassin, the love interest & Ethan Hunt’s only hope) into a single convenient package that’s smart enough to take off her heels before battle, unlike one of this summer’s most egregious female leads (who we’ve already effectively ripped to shreds).

What’s most fun about Rogue Nation, though, is that it combines the main selling points of the third & fourth installments (that Ethan Hunt is a divine being among men & that he has a loyal team behind him that helps create the myth of that divinity) into a satisfying, cohesive whole. The Mission: Impossible ball didn’t truly get rolling until the third entry & it somehow didn’t reach its true apex until the fifth. Hunt’s crew of loyal super spies (and Ving Rhames) eat up much of the film’s runtime, but they use that platform to elevate their fearless leader as “The Living Manifestation of Destiny.” By limiting his screen time in favor of letting his talented supporting cast run the show (which as a producer he could’ve easily turned into a vanity project), Cruise made great strides in Rogue Nation to build his character up as something more than just the “dude with a dangerous job” he was in the third film. He’s an impossible character in an improbable world who has to battle an equally impossible “syndicate” of evil spies helmed by a cross between a murderous Steve Jobs & Eddy Redmayne’s wicked, eternally hoarse drag queen from space in Jupiter Ascending. It’s thrilling, but highly goofy stuff.

Cruise has a history of working with an eclectic list of directors in this series (Brian De Palma, John Woo, JJ Abrams, Brad Bird) & here he enlists Christopher McQuarrie, a relative unkown, but longtime collaborator who he’s worked with on in films like Edge of Tomorrow, Jack Reacher, and Valkyrie. McQuarrie holds his own here, not only crafting one of the most enjoyable entries in the franchise to date, but also continuing to solidify a somewhat messy series of films as a recognizably unique intellectual property. Rogue Nation is a relentlessly fun action pic that Cruise & McQuarrie should be proud of bringing to the screen, both as a campy espionage spectacle and as a continuation of a decades-old franchise that has finally reached the operatic heights it promised way back when rap rock was still a viable commodity.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Snow (2009)

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There’s a critical flaw at the heart of the Norwegian horror comedy Dead Snow that keeps it from being the absolute classic Shaun of the Dead-style schlock send-up it comes so close to achieving. For some strange reason the film stubbornly likes to pretend that its audience doesn’t know what is coming. Despite the exact nature of its threat being spoiled in every last piece the film’s advertising, Dead Snow keeps its monsters in the dark for as long as possible. Anyone likely to watch the movie in the first place would presumably be interested solely because of the gimmick of its monsters, so withholding them from the screen doesn’t build tension. It feels more like treading water.

Since I’ve already hinted to the “surprise” in the illustration above & it’s much more explicitly laid out in the film’s promotional material, I’ll just go ahead & spill the beans. Dead Snow is about Nazi zombies. It’s a Nazi zombie horror comedy. Since most of the audience is already prepared for that premise from the get go, it becomes increasingly frustrating that we don’t see a zombie Nazi in full regalia until 2/3 into the film. As if the promo material weren’t enough to prime you for the “surprise” there’s an ominous monologue from a local yokel that spins a yarn about a bygone Nazi occupation & some stolen gold that sets up a Leprechaun type scenario where the doomed victims are bound to unwittingly “steal” some Nazi treasure that the undead fascists will undoubtedly come knocking for. When the first fully visible Nazi zombie appears on the screen I was expecting to shout “Awesome!” but instead it was more of a “Finally!”

Despite the little bit of pained effort it takes to get there, Dead Snow eventually delivers on its promise of Nazi zombie mayhem & the film devolves into some great splatter-soaked chaos. With references to films like Peter Jackson’s Braindead (aka Dead Alive) & every group-of-youngsters-murdered-in-a-cabin horror cheapie ever, Dead Snow is smart to go over the top once it finally delivers on its premise. Eyes are gouged, head are crushed, a vast army of undead Nazi scumbags are gunned down & ripped to shreds. It’s a truly fun release after a very slow build that unnecessarily tests the audience’s patience before it lets loose. I’m hoping that since the hammer has already fallen that the same mistake wasn’t repeated in the sequel, last year’s Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead. If it just would get to the good, bloody stuff a little quicker, a Dead Snow movie could easily go from “pretty good” to something much more special.

-Brandon Ledet

Southpaw (2015)

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twohalfstar
The advertisements for Southpaw have been driving me mad every time I go to the movies lately. No matter how I timed my entrance at the theater it seemed I was always just doomed to hear Eminem echo “I am PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL” in an embarrassing fashion & I’d find myself cringing again. Much of the film’s trailer had me interested in Jake Gyllenhaal’s follow-up to his nightmarish turn in Nightcrawler, but Eminem was regrettably featured so prominently in Southpaw‘s trailer that I was expecting to take at least a half-star off my rating every time one his songs played on the soundtrack. Although Eminem’s voice is only heard twice during the film (once during a clueless in tone training montage & once during the end credits) his prominence in the trailer does point to a lack of self-awareness that prevents Southpaw from being anything too fresh or special.

It would be one thing if Eminem were something Gyellehaal’s punch drunk protagonist Billy Hope blasted in headphones to get pumped up before his boxing bouts. A down on his luck, white brute foster home survivor with a drinking problem certainly sounds like the kind of dude who might be a huge fan of the Detroit rapper, who knows a thing or two about being a down on his luck white brute with a troubled upbringing. Instead, though, Eminem’s contribution to the film amounts to little more than a business deal soundtrack tie-in, complete with an official music video. It feels like an ancient practice, dead for at least a decade, that’s much better suited for already-cynical corporate cash grabs like Juicy J’s contribution to the Ninja Turtles soundtrack or Waka Flocka Flame’s (laughably awful) collaboration with Good Charlotte meant to promote the latest Adam Sandler stinker Pixels. Instead of helping detail the character of its protagonist, Eminem’s involvement instead details the character of the film itself.

Southpaw is a mediocre film. It’s passable as a redemption story melodrama, but rarely memorable as a unique work. Even die-hard fans of boxing films in general are likely to find it difficult to distinguish its individual charms from much more distinctive examples of the genre. The story it tells is pretty easy to call from beginning to end within the first fifteen minutes or so, complete with a couple tearjerker character deaths solely meant to give Billy Hope’s inevitable final triumph some sense of meaning or purpose. Without a unique narrative or any visual touches to distinguish Southpaw (outside maybe a couple interesting 1st person POV shots in the ring), all that’s left then is the quality of the acting, which varies from Impressive, But Not Nightcrawler Impressive (Gyllenhall) to Decent (Forest Whitaker) to I’m Wearing A Hat! (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson). It’s not a terrible viewing experience (besides maybe the sequence where it tries to use an Eminem song for misguided cool points), but Gyllenhaal’s performance is the sole element in play that approaches anything near PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL PHENOMENAL and that’s far from enough to save the whole ordeal from mediocrity. I hope the actor continues this recent trend of playing scary that started with films like Nightcrawler & Enemy, but I’d like to also like to see that talent put to much more interesting use with far fewer Enimem songs stinking up the joint.

-Brandon Ledet

Marabunta Cinema: Eight Feature Films & Eight Television Episodes about Killer Ants (2nd Ed.)

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When I first reviewed the 1974 oddity Phase IV, I noted that the film was very different from what I would have expected from a sci-fi movie about killer ants. When I pictured the film in my mind I imagined the gigantic monster insect movies from the 1950s, when everything from leeches to adorable bunny rabbits were blown out of proportion by atomic radiation and turned into Godzilla-type suburban threats. Phase IV turned out to be a much stranger film than I pictured, but my hunch wasn’t far off. The 1954 creature feature Them! is widely credited as the very first of the 1950s nuclear monster movies as well as the first “big bug” movie ever. Them!, like Phase IV, also happens to be about murderous ants. It turns out that the tiny pests have served as an endless source of cinematic fascination over the past 60 years, racking up eight feature films and several television episodes since Them!’s initial release. There are definite patterns & tropes common to the way killer ants, often called “marabunta,” are portrayed in cinema, but the quality of the tactics & results vary greatly from film to film. Them! & Phase IV certainly represent the apex of the killer ants genre, but they don’t capture the full extent of its capabilities.

Them! (1954) EPSON MFP imagefourhalfstar

If Them! is the very first nuclear monster & big bug movie of the 1950s, it was an impressively prescient one. So many of the films that followed borrow so much from its essential elements that it basically serves as a Rosetta Stone for the marabunta genre. For instance, the film opens with a child in danger. A young girl, newly orphaned, roams the desert alone, in a state of shock after witnessing her family being murdered by “Them! Them! Them!” (a titular line she shrieks in horror when prodded for details). Children in danger is a surprisingly common theme for a lot of the marabunta films to come, along with the desert setting, and their roots are established in Them!’s opening minutes. Other tropes, like attempting to destroy the hive by attacking the Queen’s chamber, the use of nature footage as a scientific lecture on ant behavior, the ants’ high-pitch squeaks, and the blaming of pollution (in this case nuclear fallout) as the cause of the ants’ size & behavior would be frequently echoed in the 60 years that followed. What was most prescient of all, however, was just the basic concept: killer ants. No killer bug movies (as we know them) preceded it, but plenty followed and Them! is truly the pioneer of them all.

When I first imagined what Phase IV might be like, I was actually imagining Them! I pictured late night, black & white schlock (in the same vein as The Brainiac or Frankestein Meets the Space Monster) about giant killer bugs with an atomic age metaphor attempting to justify its true purpose: giant ant models, hairy like gorillas & eager to kill. When a scientist opines in the final scene, “When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict,” it feels more like an afterthought than anything else. The gigantic ant models were obviously a point of focus for the filmmakers and it paid off well. They look fantastic, never to truly be topped by the killer ant films that followed. It’s also a testament to Them!’s quality that the tension building atmosphere in its first act is still strikingly effective despite modern audiences knowing what the “they” in Them! are long before they grace the screen. Them! may be the standard execution of what a killer ants movie would look like, but it’s extremely well crafted for its pedigree and deserves to be respected as a pioneer in the natural horror genre at large, much less marabunta cinema.

Ant size: “They” are gigantic.
Fire delivery method: In almost all of the marabunta movies, the ants are attacked with fire through various methods. This practice, like many other tropes mentioned, can be traced back even to the original marabunta movie, Them! In Them!, fire is initially delivered to the giant ants through bullets & rocket launchers, but it’s the use of flame throwers that ultimately save the day, as will become a popular choice as the genre marches on.

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If Them! is the Rosetta Stone of marabunta cinema, The Naked Jungle is its furthest outlier, the most difficult film to read in the context of the genre. Released the same year as Them!, The Naked Jungle refuses to play along with its killer ants compatriots even in the most basic terms of genre. Instead of working within a horror context, The Naked Jungle is an old-fashioned big studio romance epic where the killer ants are a natural disaster not very distinct from a flood or a landslide. The movie is mostly a vehicle for (a mostly shirtless) Charlton Heston & (a similarly undressed) Elanor Parker, who star as a South American cocoa plantation owner and his mail order bride (shipped to him via New Orleans!) whose personalities are too big & too stubborn to mix cohesively. Their initial hatred of one another is palpable in quips like “I’m trying not to irritate you.” “I noticed that. I find it irritating,” and in a key exchange when Heston is upset that his new bride is a widow instead of the virgin he requested and she retorts “If you knew more about music, you’d know that a piano is better when it’s played.” This dynamic, of course, gradually shifts from hostile to sensual and the sweaty (it is South America, after all) tension between the two drives a lot of the movie’s runtime.

Then, in the last third of the film, the ants arrive. Millions of ants. Not the gigantic, atomic ants of Them!, but rather a hoard of regular army ants, marabunta. They’re described in the film as “40 square miles of agonizing death” that operates as an organized, trained army. The initial horror of the ants picking a skeleton clean is a bit goofy & melodramatic, but once you get to the real shots of real insects crawling all over actors’ very real skin, it actually gets pretty disturbing. Some of the painted backdrops & dialogue in The Naked Jungle are unfortunate. Its depictions of native savages that depend on Heston’s white man knowledge to survive are especially disappointing. However, it’s a mostly enjoyable movie that, thanks to Heston & Parker’s love/hate dynamic, feels like a Tennessee Williams play drowning in marabunta, which distinguishes it from every other film in the genre.

Ant size: Regular.
Fire delivery method: There’s some torch tossing & explosives use, but the fire that matters the most in The Naked Jungle is the fire burning in the two leads’ loins.

Outer Limits: “The Zanti Misfits” (1963)

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As if murderous insects made gigantic by nuclear fallout weren’t strange enough, this is where the marabunta genre takes a bizarre left turn. In its inaugural season of television, The Outer Limits tried to prove itself to be more than just a hard-sci-fi answer to the much looser The Twilight Zone. Its hour long episodes often had enough big ideas & practical effects to support a decent feature-length B-picture if they had just been stretched a little further. The episode “The Zanti Misfits” certainly had potential to support a longer runtime based on the scope of its ideas alone. At the very least, it came up with a creative reason as to why its killer ants would be so murderous & destructive in the first place. No other marabunta picture I’ve seen put nearly as much thought as to the ants’ motivation for killing.

Well, “ant” is a little bit of a misnomer in this case. As the story goes, a superior extraterrestrial race named The Zanti demands that Earth host a penal colony for its most undesirable criminal population, in other words, its misfits. The Zanti are very much ant-like in their appearance, but with the enlarged size of an average rodent & the horrifying detail of their humanoid faces. Most of the Zanti population are supposedly a peaceful group, but what arrives on Earth is their criminal throwaways, so, of course, chaos ensues as they attempt a prison break & the U.S. military guns them down. Discontent to merely thank Eathlings for doing them a favor, Zanti officials instead gloat that they’re far superior to our bloodthirsty nature as “practiced executioners” and any gratitude that could be detected is severely muddled. With its stop-motion animated humanoid ants, hand-made UFO models, and oldschool sci-fi moralizing, “The Zanti Misfits” is a neat little addition to the marabunta genre, as well as one of its strangest concoctions.

Ant size: About the size of a rat.
Fire delivery method: Liberally tossed hand grenades.

Phase IV (1974)EPSON MFP imagefourstar

I’ve already dropped almost 700 words on Phase IV, so I’ll try to keep it brief here. It’s almost as much of an marabunta outlier as The Naked Jungle due to its reluctance to adhere to a traditional monster movie format. However, instead of framing itself as a romance epic, Phase IV is posited as psychedelic sci-fi. Droning, loopy synths accompany the movie’s expertly manipulated nature footage to create a strange world where ants evolve at astounding rates, learning to systematically destroy their predators (including humans, of course), dismantle electronics and weaponize reflected light. In most films listed here, the nature footage is less-than-seamlessly integrated into the plot by means of scientific lectures or Ed Wood-esque asides, but in Phase IV it’s integral to the film’s narrative. The extensive, close-up ant footage provides a disturbing authenticity to the film’s story of an insect takeover. In a lot of ways the ants in Phase IV are much more convincing actors than their human co-stars.

There’s some campy appeal to the pseudo-science of Phase IV’s bleep bloop machines and (its somewhat prescient) hazmat suit aesthetic, but the film is for the most part genuinely successful in being a sci-fi creep-out. The killer, droning synths are a large part of this success, as they add an otherworldly atmosphere to the already alien-looking close-ups of the marabunta. Also unnerving is the film’s somewhat open ending, which was cut short by the film studio for its pessimism & psychedelia. The threat of the ants in Phase IV feels truly insurmountable and, well, it very well may be.

Ant size: Regular.
Fire delivery method: No fire at all, which very well might explain the pessimism of the conclusion. In fact, the ants deliver fire of their own when they all-too-wisely convert a pick-up truck into a homemade bomb.

Empire of the Ants (1977) EPSON MFP imagetwohalfstar

If Them! & Phase IV are the prime examples of the heights marabunta cinema, Empire of the Ants is an entertaining sample of its depths. With production, direction, and visual effects all provided by shlock peddler Burt I. Gordon, Empire of the Ants shares a lot with the (much more fun) killer rabbits movie Night of the Lepus, both good & bad. For example, the exact dimensions of the ants fluctuate from scene to scene, depending on the technique used to make them appear large (which includes over-sized props and rear projection trick photography). That variation in the ants’ exact size & shape does wonders for the film’s camp value, but the dialogue that surrounds it (including a performance from why-are-you-here? Joan Collins) deflates a lot of its charms. It also doesn’t help that there are no killer ants in the first third of the film, so the dialogue is all you have to chew on. Much like with Night of the Lepus, Empire of the Ants has a disturbing habit of playing into old-fashioned genre clichés, but in this case it tips the film firmly in the direction of pure boredom. It’s incredible that Empire of the Ants was released three years after the much more experimental Phase IV, as it feels like an ancient dinosaur by comparison.

As far as hitting the marabunta genre touchstones goes, Empire of the Ants is fairly sufficient. It gets the nature footage requirement out of the way as soon as the opening prologue, with an off-screen narrator warning the audience, “This is the ant. Treat it with respect, for it may very well be the next dominant lifeform on our planet.” Much like with other marabunta movies, the ants were mutated into their monstrous form through radioactive waste, there’s a reliance on a hazmat suit aesthetic to lend the film sci-fi authenticity, and there are a multiple shots taken from the ants’ perspective, or “ant cam” if you will. In this film, the ant cam is represented as concentric circles, as opposed to the honeycomb look employed in Phase IV, but the effect is more or less the same. There are even some innovations to the marabunta genre in the plot’s focus on the queen ant’s obedience-inducing hormones that command humans to do her evil bidding. I also appreciated Empire’s pedigree as a shameless Jaws knock-off, with not so subtle nods to the Spielberg film’s infamous score in its soundtrack. Despite how entertaining all that sounds, however, Empire of the Ants mostly feels like a slog, struggling to recover from the opening segment where the dialogue endlessly drones on about valuable real estate and all kinds of other who-cares nonsense. As a collection of alternately impressive & inept practical effects, it’s an entertaining mess; as a feature-length film it’s a chore.

Ant size: Gigantic, but seemingly fluctuating from scene to scene due to the varied methods of Gordon’s visual effects.
Fire delivery method: Explosives used to blow up the sugar mill where the ant queen prefers to dine. Pretty smart.

Ants! (1977) EPSON MFP imagethree star

Ants! (also known as It Happened at Lakewood Manor & Panic At Lakewood Manor) marks the beginning of the killer ants’ genre being tethered to the small screen, a format they’ve been unable to escape for nearly 40 years running. A made-for-TV movie starring Suzanne Somors, Ants! is an admittedly awful film, but one with enough melodrama and laughably bad acting to make it work as a campy pleasure. It plays like a Lifetime Original Movie about a family struggling to hold onto their hotel resort in the modern business word (with swarms of killer ants playing mostly as an afterthought). In addition to the new made-for-TV-movie format, Ants! also introduces the marabunta genre to a new plot structure, framing its story as more of a disaster movie (like Towering Inferno or Airport 1975) than a creature feature (like Them!). The ants that plague Lakewood Manor are treated collectively as a natural disaster (something only hinted at before in The Naked Jungle), not an aggressive hoard of tiny monsters. As explained by a mid-film science lecture (again, with accompanying nature footage) this widespread disaster was created by the ants’ exposure to increasingly strong pesticides. According to the film’s resident killer ants expert, “We’re the ones that forced them to live in a toxic world,” which prompted the ants to absorb our pesticides and weaponize them as their own poisons. His audience’s horrified reaction to this news? “I don’t like it.” The film’s ridiculous dialogue saves it from the doldrums of Empire of the Ants, even though Empire had much better practical effects for its marabunta. If only they had combined those two elements, we’d have a veritable cult classic on our hands.

As cheesy as the dialogue is in Ants!, the sheer swarms of insects that accumulate actually make for an unnerving climax. The characters’ plan to survive the natural marabunta disaster is to remain motionless, allowing the bugs to crawl all over their skin. It’s legitimately terrifying (and more than a little gross) and I hope the actors were well compensated, even if those were sugar ants. There was also a return to endangered (and, for the first time, harmed) children in Ants!, something that’s rare in any horror film and hadn’t graced the marabunta screen since the likes of Them! On the cultural relic front, there’s an unexpected appearance from Brian Dennehy and it’s surprisingly entertaining to watch ants crawl all over Susanne Somers. Ants! is far from the most memorable film in its genre, but it does have its own corny charms as a made-for-TV trifle that features bugs crawling over a Three’s Company castmember’s half-dressed body. Blech.

Ant size: Regular
Fire delivery method: A flaming, hand-dug pool of gasoline meant to keep the ants at bay.

MacGyver: “Trumbo’s World” (1985) EPSON MFP imagetwostar

What can I say? I’ve never seen a MacGyver episode before “Trumbo’s World” so I have no idea how its quality compares to others. MacGyver’s preposterous, makeshift gadgets were amusing, there was some hilarious pseudo-science in lines like one describing a substance as nitroglycerin’s “chemical kissing cousin”, I genuinely loved the nifty soft synth soundtrack, and there were a couple great one liners like when MacGyver drowns a gang of “bad guys” and quips, “Chances are, those guys are all washed up.” For the most part, though, I still consider myself more of a MacGruber guy at heart. There just wasn’t much here worth going out of your way for, especially since the episode plays like a cover version of The Naked Jungle.

At first I thought the similarities to The Naked Jungle were incidental, due to the shared setting of a South American wilderness and, of course, the swarms of killer ants, but as the coincidental resemblance started to build I began to notice exact images borrowed wholesale from the Heston-Parker romance epic. The plantation-owner-refuses-to-leave-without-a-fight plot, the fleeing animals, the increasingly uncomfortable (still, 30 years later) depictions of native savages were all way to close to The Naked Jungle to be pure coincidence, but then exact footage lifted from the film, including both ant attacks and action shots of Heston-from-behind, sealed their connection. I’m not sure if all MacGyver episodes are cover versions of old movies hardly anyone remembers, but I’ve definitely seen the likes of “Trumbo’s World” before—and not that long ago.

Ant size: Regular, same as The Naked Jungle.
Fire delivery method: Flame thrower. Solid choice.

Skysurfer Strike Force: “Killer Ants” (1995) EPSON MFP imagethree star

In sharp contrast with the I’ve-seen-this-all-before familiarity of “Trumbo’s World”, the animated television show Skysurfer Strike Force plays like nothing I’ve ever encountered in my life. Its 1990s Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic is certainly familiar to me, especially as a decorated survivor of such dire properties of that era as Street Sharks and Captain Simian & The Space Monkeys, but there’s still something special about Skysurfer Strike Force’s lunacy in comparison. It’s one of those total shit-shows whose basic concept is difficult to capture in critical description so I’ll just urge you to see it for yourself in the YouTube clip of its intro and this Wikipedia-provided plot description: “The show featured five heroes, named the Skysurfers, which protected the world from the vile Cybron and his bio-borgs. The Skysurfers used technologically advanced watches that transformed them from their casual clothing to their battle attire and weapons, similar to the Choujin Sentai Jetman. During the transformations, their cars transform into rocket-powered surfboards that they can ride in the air.” It’s wickedly entertaining in its unnecessarily complicated mythology & complete detachment from reality.

As promised in its succinct title, the episode “Killer Ants” finds Skysurfer Strike Force joining the marabunta genre. Early in the episode gigantic ants (as in the size of dogs, not elephants) attack an unsuspecting truck driver on a mysterious late night highway, foreshadowing the evil Cybron’s world-domination-scheme-of-the-week. You’ve got to hand it to Cybron; for a cyborg supervillain he’s got some fresh ideas. Must be the stolen computer-brain. His plot to rule us all with killer ants was conceived as the perfect crime, as everyone would assume the ants were a natural disaster that he himself could not be blamed for. Pretty smart, as well as a wholly unique approach in the marabunta genre. The episode adds other unique details like the ants communicating through vibrations (instead of the usual pheromone route in other titles) and that instead of being killed when eventually conquered, they’re made to perform as circus animals. Skysurfer Strike Force may on the surface seem to be a half-assed children’s show bankrupt of any nourishing value, but it’s actually packing an excess of ideas & face-value virtues that add a surprising amount of new developments to both the marabunta & half-baked 90s children’s cartoon genres.

Ant size: Gigantic, but not too gigantic. Mid-sized giant ants.
Fire delivery method: Rocket launchers & tanks.

Goosebumps: “Awesome Ants” (1998) EPSON MFP imagetwohalfstar

Goosebumps gets by on charm more than it does on fresh ideas, bucking the unexpected quality jump in Skysurfer Strike Force. A live action television show based on the popular children’s book series, Goosebumps fits snuggly among the ranks of several sub-X Files monster of the week children’s properties of the 90s—shows like Eerie, Indiana & Are You Afraid of the Dark? In the episode titled “Awesome Ants” the monster of the week is, you guessed it, gigantic killer ants.

Ordered through the mail from a nefarious back-of-a-magazine company, a child’s ant farm science project gets out of control when he overfeeds his population (despite a pamphlet’s specific warnings not to, of course). The resulting killer ants are surprisingly well visualized, using a multi-faceted, Empire of the Ants kind of approach that combines over-sized props and green screen gimmicks to create the menace. This is all mildly amusing here or there, but what really sets this episode apart from any other installment in the marabunta genre is its wicked, Twilight Zone conclusion where (spoiler) the kid wakes to find himself as part of a human farm run by even larger ants, the tables having been turned. I gotta admit, that’s pretty “awesome”.

Ant size: Gigantic, and then even more gigantic.
Fire delivery method: None, which again might explain why the ants won.

Legion of Fire: Killer Ants! (1998) EPSON MFP imageonehalfstar

Starting with the Suzanne Somers melodrama Ants!, marabunta cinema has seemingly been banished to television purgatory for its sins of repetition. Not helping the case for the genre at all is the made-for-TV snoozer Legion of Fire: Killer Ants! (also known simply as Marabunta). Legion of Fire was not made for just any TV, mind you; it was made for late-90s Fox, which has to be the most tasteless era of television in this writer’s (admittedly limited) memory. Getting some of that trademark Fox Attitude (as well as the nature footage trope) out of the way early, the film opens with the gall to claim that “This is not science fiction. This is science fact. The story you are about to see could happen tomorrow.” It could. It most likely never will, but I guess it could. It already takes some considerable hubris to posit a made-for-TV monster movie starring “Skinner” from X-Files & “that dude” from Caroline in the City as “science fact”, but the claim becomes even more preposterous as soon as the first kill, which features a newlywed couple on a hike being physically dragged into the depths of an over-sized ant pile. Nice. Even in its opening minutes Legions of Fire can’t decide if it wants to be a believable scare film about South American ants (likened to the era’s similarly-feared “Africanized bees”) or an absurd sci-fi monster movie. Frankly it fails to be entertaining as either.

Legion of Fire’s dialogue is mostly of the dull, Empire of the Ants variety, with a couple isolated gems like “I never met a bug I didn’t like,” and “And my mom used to say that being an etymologist would be boring . . .” There’s also some limited camp value in a few action scenes like when an (endangered!) child is dragged into a hive or a pilot thrashes about as if the film’s CGI ants are actually eating his face, leading to one of the most slowly-progressing helicopter crashes I’ve ever seen in a movie. Speaking of the CGI, Legion of Fire’s most depressing development is that the golden era of practical effects is firmly in the rearview, giving way to shoddy CGI ants carrying even faker-looking human body parts on their not-real-at-all backs. It’s no surprise, then, that the most fun the film has with its premise is in the practical effects when the killer ants drag people into the gasoline filled holes meant to set the colony ablaze, followed promptly by explosions. If I could pick out one thing Legion of Fire needed more of, it’s people being dragged into holes and then exploding, not Windows screensaver-quality insects “crawling” all over some nobody’s horrified face. Legion of Fire is a disheartening low point for the marabunta genre, easily the most unimaginative feature film in the bunch—even if it is “science fact”.

Ant size: Regular, but seemingly fluctuating from scene to scene due to the cheap CGI.
Fire delivery method: Flame throwers & exploding, gasoline-filled holes.

The Bone Snatcher (2003) EPSON MFP imagetwohalfstar

The Bone Snatcher was a promising improvement from the dire viewing experience of Legion of Fire (which is one I hope to never repeat), but it’s an ultimately disappointing film when considered in its own right. It was the first & only marabunta movie not made for television in the near-three decades since Empire of the Ants, but since it was released straight-to-DVD it’s somewhat of a hollow victory. The Bone Snatcher is an Alien-esque creature feature that opts more for tension building than it does for a body count, which is a frequent mistake for low-budget horror. Look, everyone loves Alien, but there’s a reason why it’s one of the most memorable horror/sci-fi films of all time. It’s an extremely well made and handsomely budgeted film that a lot of independent horror movies just aren’t going to be able to replicate. The Bone Snatcher’s failed attempt at Alien-levels of tension instead of a high body count gore fest is particularly disappointing because the film’s creature looked so cool and was obviously cheap to film (thanks to CGI). There just wasn’t enough of it onscreen to make the film recommendable.

The creature in question here is a gigantic sasquatch-looking specter that, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be a collection of highly-organized killer ants that collect to form a single gestalt being, a “bone snatcher” if you will. The title of “bone snatcher” is afforded to this ants-monster through its affinity for using the remains of its victims as a structural support for its gigantic, undulating body. Sometimes the bone snatcher even wears the face of its victims (literally), which is disturbing enough even when that face isn’t spitting out a stream of ants. The unnerving & clever physical attributes of the bone snatcher itself made want to love the film that surrounded it, but there’s just not much there to love. Borrowing some of the hazmat suit & militaristic desertscape aesthetic from marabunta pioneers like Phase IV, the film has a little bit of spooky atmosphere to work with, just not enough to carry the film on its own.

There are also some new touches added to well-established marabunta tropes, like picked-clean bones (common as far back as The Naked Jungle) now being stained red from blood and the ant cam POV (offered in Empire of the Ants & Phase IV), now looking like a sepia-tone brethren of the Vin Diesel sleeper Pitch Black. There’s also some disturbing gore that arrives with the appearance of the bone snatcher, including skin being carried off by endless floods of ants and muscle melted off the bone by their toxins. The problem is that it’s too little too late and much of the film’s action is pushed off until the final half hour of the runtime. The tension-building atmosphere is competent, but not nearly entertaining enough to carry a film whose best quality is its creature design. If the film had let its freak flag fly and given the titular bone snatcher more time in the sun it could’ve been something really special. Instead it was mostly a well-intentioned bore with a few admirably disturbing ideas.

Ant size: Regular, but coming together to form a gigantic gestalt creature.
Fire delivery system: None. The bone snatcher’s victims opted for stabbing instead, probably due to limited resources.

Atomic Betty: “Atomic Betty Vs the Giant Killer Ants” (2004) EPSON MFP imageonestar

If Legion of Fire is the moment when CGI unfortunately makes for lazy live-action filmmaking in the marabunta genre, Atomic Betty is where it similarly sinks animation. Taken at face value, I appreciate that there’s a children’s show (and we’re talking super-young children) within which a female moppet of a superhero periodically saves the world from 50s style B-movie plots, taking her assignments from a talking fish. If there were an actual 1950s movie called Atomic Betty Vs the Giant Killer Ants you’d be safe to bet I’d be eating that schlock up greedily. As a lazily-animated, mid-2000s cartoon the prospect is less tantalizing. There’s really nothing of interest added to the marabunta genre here. Betty is told by her fish boss that there are some killer ants on the loose (made gigantic by “multi-plasma nectar”), she flies over, and then puts a stop to the threat post haste. I hope it was riveting for its pint-sized target audience, but for our purposes here it doesn’t have much to add to the marabunta genre, outside of maybe the “multi-plasma nectar”. I’ve never heard that one before.

Ant size: Gigantic, duh. It’s right there in the title.
Fire delivery method: None. Nothing of interest here at all.

The Hive (2008) EPSON MFP imagethreehalfstar

There was a truly disheartening quality to the arrival of the CGI slog Legion of Fire. It felt in a lot of ways like the party was over, like it was the end of an era where campy practical effects can save an otherwise hopeless affair like Empire of the Ants from devolving into sheer boredom. The Bone Snatcher teased the possibility that the marabunta party was indeed still raging on, putting the CGI to good use by creating a physically impossible gestalt monster out of millions of computer-generated insects. There just wasn’t enough of the monster on screen to fully make it an essential piece of marabunta cinema. Made just five years later, The Hive seemingly learned from that mistake, pushing the ridiculousness allowed by CGI to its full limits, throwing out as many ridiculous ideas as it can, given the time & budget. Where The Bone Snatcher held back on the on-screen ants and mistakenly attempted atmospheric tension, The Hive knows its limits and offers as many cheap thrills as it possibly can while it lasts.

The most surprising thing about The Hive’s likeability is that it was not only made-for-TV, but it was made specifically for the Syfy Channel, which has a long record of offering bland, empty CGI schlock that features long stretches of boring dialogue and a few short scenes of sci-fi action. The Hive, by contrast, bends over backwards to entertain. It might not be the most unique film listed here, but it borrows so much from so many sources that it’s a very fun experience, one that feels well informed of its marabunta ancestry. For example, just like in other marabunta films, The Hive features children in danger, but it goes a step further by featuring the youngest endangered child yet: a baby. In the opening scene a baby is successfully eaten by a swarm of killer ants. It’s quite the introduction. The movie also plays off of the hazmat suit trope and includes the genre’s required nature footage (this time with mixed with news reports about rampaging swarms of killer ants). Best of all, it returns to the collective, gestalt creature of The Bone Snatcher, but this time the ants form all sorts of shapes: tentacles, constellations, functioning computers, and most entertaining of all, a gigantic ant made of tiny ants.

The Hive survives on the charms of its excess. It just has so many dumb ideas: liquid nitrogen cannons, ants controlling people’s minds, an evil corporation called Thorax Industries, and the idea that the marabunta are controlled by an insect spirit from outer space (seriously). Most important of all, though, it has an excess of ants, easily the most ants out of any film listed here, so many ants that they just fall from the sky in solid blankets of ant rain. Legion of Fire felt like the death of marabunta cinema, while The Hive felt like its unexpected (and so far unanswered) rebirth. It was the rare occurrence in cheap horror where CGI allows the film to push itself do so much more, instead of getting by on doing less.

Ant size: Regular, except for that gigantic one made of regular ones.
Fire delivery method: Flame throwers & a suicide bombing

Phineas & Ferb: “Gi-Ants” (2012) EPSON MFP imagetwohalfstar

Just as formally inconsequential as Atomic Betty, Phineas & Ferb at least one-ups the computer animated competition in the freshness of its ideas. In the episode “Gi-ants” the titular stepbrothers gather their neighborhood cronies (I really know so little about this show) together to come check out their latest quixotic scheme (again, so little): a gigantic ant farm that the kids can tour as a sort of museum. The purposefully-created “gi-ants” in this ant farm never become murderous despite their incredible size. Instead, their presence is menacing only because they mutate at an alarming rate, evolving from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one to their own Industrial Revolution to the information age to total transcendent enlightenment (which I doubt is what’s next for us), all in the space of a single afternoon. The episode just barely qualifies as part of the marabunta genre if you squint at it the right way, but it’s a mostly harmless, cute diversion with a couple unique ideas within marabunta cinema. I especially appreciated how far they pushed the idea of rapidly evolving ants, first introduced in Phase IV, to a ludicrous point where the insects transcended space-time. That was nifty.

Ant size: Gigantic. Giant. Giant ants. Gi-ants. Oh, I get it.
Fire delivery method: Not necessary; the ants have evolved past the stage of petty human wars, instead opting to travel to the next dimension or outer space or something along those lines.

American Dad!: “The Shrink” (2015)

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I may have been a little too eager to poke fun at the Phineas & Ferb wordplay with “Gi-ant”. It was at the very least more clever than the pun in the title of the American Dad! episode “The Shrink”.  In the episode, the protagonist Sam Smith is assigned to see “a shrink” in order to deal with his anxiety, but he finds a much more satisfying therapy in “a shrink ray” that allows him to trap his family in a homemade miniature that he believes he can exert better control over. Shrink, shrink ray, haha. Ha. After his extraterrestrial housemate spills some red wine (in an exhaustingly aimless B-plot) some ants are attracted to the miniature, where they terrorize Smith & his family in the episode’s third act. There’s really no reason to track this episode down unless you find Seth MacFarlane’s brand of humor particularly funny (God help you), but it was the most recent example of marabunta cinema I could find & it was mostly harmless outside of being desperately unfunny.

Ant size: Normal, but with even tinier victims to terrorize.
Fire delivery method: This time they opted for water, something that hadn’t been done since “Trumbo’s World” (a.k.a. The Naked Jungle Jr.)

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It would be fair to assume that over eight feature films and six television episodes the marabunta genre would be exhausted for new ideas, but there are some glimmers of hope for unexplored territory in projects like The Hive and The Bone Snatcher. If anyone’s looking for a fresh angle for their own killer ants movie, I’m going to offer you an idea on the house: humans transforming into ants once bitten, like the pseudo-zombie transformations in films like Black Sheep (2006) & Zombeavers. There were at least three films on this list (Phase IV, The Bone Snatcher, and The Hive) where I suspected that a poisoned human was going to make the full transition into humanoid ant, but they never reached their full marabunta potential.

In the wonderful 1993 Joe Dante picture Matinee, John Goodman plays a William Castle type who is peddling a B-movie called Mant! As a movie within a movie, Mant! unfortunately didn’t quite make for a proper entry on this list, but it does deserve a mention at the very least for exploring the ant transformation teased in The Hive & The Bone Snatcher. Utilizing gimmicks like Atomovision & Rumble Rama as well as taglines like “Half man, half ant, all terror” & the same fluctuating ant size as Empire of the Ants, the clips of Mant! featured in Matinee feel like a blueprint for the ant transformation film that the marabunta lovers of the world need & deserve. For those who would claim that there’s no fresh territory left for marabunta cinema, I offer that concept as the next frontier, with Joe Dante already having penciled in most of the details.

I also would like to note that I did not include Antie from 1989’s Honey I Shrunk the Kids on this list because Antie was a true hero whose name shouldn’t be soiled by the likes of killer marabunta. For a full length eulogy recognizing Antie’s bravery & accomplishments, I suggest reading the “Remembering Antie” piece from MTV.com. Similarly, in this year’s MCU action comedy Ant-Man there are swarms of heroic ants that help save the world from certain doom, but none deserve nearly as much praise as Ant-Man’s flying sidekick Antony, who gave everything he had so that we could live in peace, bless his insect heart.

The only other film I can think of with marabunta content that wasn’t included here was Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. There is a very brief sequence about 90min into the movie where some killer ants disintegrate a few Soviet baddies in the heat of an extended car & foot chase. Amongst all the other mindless spectacles of the film (which includes some space alien silliness & the infamously laughable scene where Indy survives a nuclear blast by chilling in a refrigerator), the marabunta aren’t much more than a brief diversion. Honestly, the whole film is sort of a bland wash of difficult-to-remember action, so even if the whole movie were crawling with killer ants, I probably still would’ve forgotten to give it a proper listing above.

If there are any other killer ants you think I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll be sure to hunt them down.

-Brandon Ledet

Sabotage (2014)

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three star

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Loving Arnold Schwarzenegger can sometimes mean loving repetition. There are distinct phases to the action legend’s career where he shifts gears & tries new types of films, but he’s pretty much consistently the same old Arnold in each role. Whether it’s The Running Man, Commando, or Kindergarten Cop, all wildly different films, he’s pretty much consistently the spotless tough guy with a great sense of comic timing & an unexplained Austrian accent. It’s been interesting to see, though, where he wants to go with his career in its latest phase. The post-gubernatorial, elderly Arnold is a strange bird, one that’s difficult to pigeonhole just yet. In projects like Terminator Genisys & The Last Stand, it definitely feel like he’s slipping back into his old ways, but then there’s more out-there choices like this year’s zom-drama Maggie, which showed him playing tender & quietly pensive. I didn’t enjoy Maggie very much on the whole, but I did respect Arnold’s vulnerability in getting out there & trying something new at this late stage of his career, even if he was disappointingly quiet & inexpressive in that role.

It wasn’t until I saw last year’s Sabotage that I got a glimpse of where I’d love Arnold’s career to go. Playing a crooked, disgraced DEA agent who heads an out-of-control crew that has devolved more or less into a gang, Arnold subverts his eternally unblemished good guy routine for the first time I can remember since The Terminator. And he does it so well. There’s something so satisfying to see him pull a (to borrow a pro wrestling term) heel-turn at this point of his career & play a cigar-chomping scumbag driven out of his mind by the violence of Mexican drug cartels. It’s already a little jarring to watch him head a team instead of falling into his usual lone wolf Commando routine, but it’s even more jarring to watch him head a team of such hopeless reprobates.

The catch with Sabotage is that Arnold is far from the film’s only scumbag. The entire film is just oozing with scum. I felt dirty just watching it. With character names like “Breacher” & “Grinder” and a visual palette that makes time to include blood, shit, and viscera, Sabotage is an ugly, ugly film. Much like with Swordfish & See No Evil, it’s the kind of movie where nearly every line of dialogue is loaded with an insult. Characters constantly call each other “assholes” & “crackwhores” and command each other to “Shut the fuck up” or “Wake up, you drunk fuck” or to quit “fingering The Devil’s pussy.” It’s far from a pleasant film & I wasn’t surprised to learn afterwards that the dude who wrote & directed it was also responsible for penning both Training Day & that upcoming Suicide Squad movie. David Ayer apparently has an eye & an ear for the grotesque and from what I’ve seen from his work this kind of nastiness is something he brings to the screen often.

The only truly remarkable thing about Sabotage‘s nastiness is that it managed to drag Schwarzenegger through the mud with it. This is far from the actor’s first ultraviolent rodeo, but his bloody action films usually have a sort of detached, cartoonish nature to them that’s intentionally missing here. Although Arnold’s shown chomping cigars & pumping iron in Sabotage, he’s almost unrecognisable as the film’s King Scumbag. I honestly appreciated that about the film. Its I Know What You Did Last Summer revenge plot was tolerable, but not exactly thrilling, and it was severely lacking for a single pleasant image or line of dialogue or any ray of sunshine, really to break through its deeply nasty, garbage water pessimism, but Arnold’s performance kinda made up for those shortcomings. There’s a really interesting idea at the heart of the way he plays villain here & I’d love to see that thread explored in other, more easy-to-stomach projects in the future.

-Brandon Ledet

Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (1989)

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three star

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Something is ever so appealing about films that have extra-long, descriptive titles. When I sat down to view Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, I assumed someone named Stephanie was going to be burned alive in an incinerator. I’ve seen a few films that involve murder evidence being burned in an incinerator, but never an entire body. Needless to say, I was bouncing off the walls when I got my hands on this movie, especially since it is a Troma film. Unfortunately, my expectations were a bit too high. It wasn’t a horrible film, it was just so confusing and not in the good way.

I began to lost interest halfway through the film, but the beginning of Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator was amazing. It starts off with two strangers, Paul and Stephanie, who are prisoners in a mansion. The owner of this mansion, Roberta, is obviously a man crossdressed as an elderly socialite, and she wants to watch Paul and Stephanie have sex. Of course, the two “lovebirds” are opposed to the idea of having forced sexual intercourse for Roberta’s viewing pleasure, so they attempt to escape her evil clutches only to find themselves back in her hell house. Then, all of a sudden, the film takes an unexpected turn for the worst. Roberta takes off her wig to reveal herself as Robert, an actor paid by Stephanie and Paul (whose real names are Casey and Jared) to participate in their over-the-top role-playing. As the film goes on, it’s obvious that Casey is not too keen on the role-playing and desperately wants to leave Jared because he is absolutely insane and obsessed with doing one role-play after another.  The rest of the film is filled with twist after twist, and ends with a very surprising conclusion.

I enjoy a twist or two in a film, but this was just too much.  Every time I took my eyes off the screen for more than a second, there was a major change in the plot. The constant shift from one story to another became annoying, and I had to rewind the film a few times to figure out what was going on. Also, there is an incinerator scene, but it’s not as cool as I thought it was going to be, so that was another disappointment. Aside from all the negative comments, Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator honestly wasn’t all that bad. It was entertaining and full of all kinds of stupid fun. I just really wish it would have been about a perverted old woman and her sex prisoners.

-Britnee Lombas

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe (1991)

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three star

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As a fan of both Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot ’em ups and films of questionable quality starring pro wrestlers, I had very little choice but to partake in the doomed-from-the-start prospect of watching Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe when its cheap DVD sleeve caught my eye at the second-hand store. As a Z-Grade Terminator knockoff starring Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Abraxas had almost zero potential to be a decent sci-fi cheapie, but almost all of the potential in the world to be a fabulous trainwreck. Its plot synopsis of about “intergalactic police officers” & “a hybrid being that has the power to destroy the universe” boasted a special sort of promise for a campy mess. What was most surprising about Abraxas, however, was not exactly how irredeemably bad it was (it was pretty bad) but what it happened to get right & wrong about the Terminator franchise.

The original Terminator film from 1984 has a lean efficiency to it that makes it feel like an especially well-funded Roger Corman production, right down to the Dick Miller cameo in the gun shop. Part of what James Cameron does so well in that film is keep his audience in the dark. He allows questions about the exact nature of Schwarzenegger’s time-traveling robot assassin to hang in the air until they need to be answered. The gradually unfolding plot creates an feeling of dread & mystique that makes the original film a fun watch to this day (four sequels later), at the very least in admiration of how a familiar, but complicated story gets laid out in an unfamiliar, but understandable way in its initial telling. Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe has no patience for this sort of gradual roll-out & instead blurts every idiotic idea it his on its mind directly to the audience in its opening exposition.

In just a few short minutes of Jesse Ventura’s helpfully explanatory grumbling we learn that his protagonist (the titular Abraxas, of course) is an 11,000 year old intergalactic supercop, known as a “Finder”, who has to renew his vows to “defend all life” every 100 years. His latest mission is to “find” (read: “terminate”) an ex-partner, Secundus, who has gone renegade. Secundus’ evil plan involves impregnating an “Earth woman” in order to give birth to some sort of cyborg anti-Christ with the power to destroy the universe. Before Abraxas can leave for this mission, however, he must undergo a painful “reinforcement” of his skeletal & muscular structure through “short-wave irradiation” & “ozone layering”, a highly risky process that requires him to (I’m not kidding) play word association games with an A.I. surgeon (that helpfully give us some background info on his home planet of Sargacia) so he doesn’t lose his mind from the pain. If this sounds like a lot of info to lay on the audience in a single soliloquy, that’s because it is. The whole ordeal is nearly as exhausting as the restructural “ozone layering” or whatever the Hell he was babbling about.

As wrongheaded as Abraxas is about rolling out a Terminator-type plot in an understandable way, it’s also oddly prescient about where the series would go in its second installment, T-2: Judgment Day. Released just weeks before T-2, Abraxas has way too many similarities to the cult classic to not have been a direct mockbuster version of it. It’s as if the entirety of the film were written based on the promotional materials of what Judgement Day was going to be about. For some strange reason, the ad campaign for T-2 made no bones about the fact that Schwarzenegger was going to be returning as a “good guy” in the second film, despite that twist’s potential to make for a fun shock for an unsuspecting audience. Abraxas mirrors T-2‘s basic structure of two superhuman warriors fighting over the fate of a young child, except that it muddles the details of which warrior (good or bad) would be structurally superior & what the good guy’s relationship with the would-be victim’s mother would look like (I don’t remember Schwarzenegger’s cyborg falling in love with Sarah Conner, but Abraxas totally falls for her thousands-of-years-too-young-for-him equivalent in this dreck; typical male-female Hollywood age differences, right?).

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe certainly does very little to hide the fact that it exists solely to wean off some of those sweet, sweet Terminator bucks. The film shamelessly uses the word “terminate” at least three times, there’s a scene where the evil “Finder” Secundus vaporizes a dude just to steal his clothes, and both Secundus & Abraxas are more or less directly impersonating Arnold’s very recognizable accent throughout the film (with Secundus’ attempts being a much more accurate interpretation than Ventura’s). Given the obscene cheapness of the film’s sets (warehouses, camp sites, offices, wilderness, etc.), the fact that the futuristic laser guns that don’t shoot visible lasers (they just set off sparks & explosions), and the batshit insane repetition of certain (costly, I’m guessing) identical explosions shots in the film’s montages & final conflict, it’s entirely believable that Abraxas was created in a rush as a composite of ideas from the original Terminator film & ideas lifted from the promotional material for the second. Their weeks-apart release dates pretty much seal that thought completely.

As for the film’s camp value outside of a Terminator-imitator, there are several things worth a chuckle. The repetition of the identical explosions is maddening, but also amusing. There’s also a completely needless side plot about space alien bureaucrats bitching about being assigned to “a planet no one’s ever heard of,” an over-the-top scene where not-Sarah Conner becomes pregnant & gives birth in the span of a minute at the wave of a hand, and an out-of-nowhere cameo from Jim Belushi as a befuddled principle that left me scratching my head. Most of the film’s non-Terminator camp value comes from “The Body” himself, though. Ventura could be a menace in the ring & on the mic ringside in his heyday, but in the early 90s he looked more like a bald stepdad confused with what to do with his gigantic body. As he tries to reconcile the super-serious “finding” mission at hand with his newfound tender feelings for an Earth woman, it’s pretty funny to watch Ventura try to make Abraxas out to be anything but a coldhearted robot, which the film often forgets he’s not. It’s not a knee-slappingly funny performance, but it’s definitely a fascinating one & definitely worth a look for a bored Terminator or oldschool WWF superfan looking to kill 90 minutes on an especially boring afternoon.

-Brandon Ledet

The Independent (2000)

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In our attempts to crack open the mysteries behind our current Movie of the Month, Ate De Jong’s basic cable oddity Highway to Hell, Britnee mentioned that it was the only film she could recall that featured all four members of the Stiller clan. Thanks to a helpful recommendation from a reader (thanks Tom!) we now have another entry to add to that list. Jerry Stiller, his wife Ann Meara, and their children Ben & Amy also all appear in the 2000 indie comedy (appropriately-titled) The Independent. To discuss The Independent solely in terms of its relationship to Highway to Hell, however, would be doing the film a huge disservice. It’s so much better than that. I went into the film expecting a few decent one-off gags from the always-dependable Jerry, but I left completely in love.

In The Independent, Jerry Stiller plays Morty Fineman, a Roger Corman archetype who’s made a career out of schilling an endless stream of schlock for decades on end. Unlike Corman, who is generally calm on the surface but expressive in his filmmaking, Stiller is on the same violently explosive vibe he brought to his role as Frank Constanza on Seinfeld. He also (for the most part) lacks Corman’s thirst for making art films, like The Masque of the Red Death, and sticks mostly to genre fare that’s main selling point is “tits, ass, and bombs”. Although Corman himself appears in the film (along with former cronies Peter Bogdanovich & Ron Howard) to offer the film a touch of credibility, Stiller’s protagonist is less of an homage to that single filmmaker, but more of a ZAZ-type spoof of the entirety of schlock directors from Russ Meyer to The Golan-Globus folks to anyone who’s ever made a blacksploitation film (and even Fred Williamson appears in the film to afford credibility on that end). Morty Fineman is the entire B-movie industry wrapped up into one convenient, hilarious package.

A lot of the soul of The Independent is in the brief clips & promotional material for Morty’s work. There’s a Meyer-esque sexploitation pic about an eco-friendly biker girl gang, a wonderful mushroom cloud pun mockup for a film called LSD-Day, a Fred Williamson-falls-in-love-with-a-soul-sister-robot blacksploitation flick called Foxy Chocolate Robot, etc. I counted at least fifteen of these schlock spoofs represented in brief clips & there are endless dozens of more ideas listed in a “complete filmography” that rolls in tandem with the end credits. Each idea plays just as well as you’d expect from a film that boasts a cast with its roots both the cult sketch comedy legends The Ben Stiller Show & Mr. Show (Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick, Janeane Garafalo, Brian Posehn, etc.). I don’t think there was a two minute stretch of the film when I wasn’t at least chuckling & a large part of that success was due to how well disperser these schlock spoofs are. They’re evenly spaced from beginning to end with only the flimsiest of narrative glue about Fineman’s struggle in his old age to climb out of financial ruin either by filming a morally-reprehensible musical about a serial killer or accepting a film festival gig in a shithole town he dubs “Blowjob, Nevada.”

At the time of its release, reviews on The Indepenent were mixed at best, but I honestly believe it was ahead of its time. If pitched in the current climate, it would make for a knock-out HBO comedy series. Its mockumentary format, improve-based looseness, tendency towards one-off gags & celebrity cameos, and loveable reprobate of a protagonist would all play perfectly into the modern HBO comedy. It’s likely that the other Stiller clan affair, Highway to Hell, will remain in obscurity for the foreseeable future, but I like to imagine that The Independent still has a chance to achieve a cult classic status. It’s a wonderful little love-letter to the shlock movie industry that recognizes its faults (like the literally fatal risks of some of the less-than-safe sets) as much as its glorious heights. I’m not going to pretend to know the entirety of Jerry Stiller’s career, but I will say this is the best feature-length vehicle I’ve ever seen for his brand of comedy. Out of respect for the comedian & respect for schlock as a medium, I plan on making this film a frequent recommendation to help keep its name alive. So, if you also have respect for either or just love a well-executed comedy sketch (or a dozen), I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. It’s damn funny.

-Brandon Ledet

From The PG Era to a Solid R: John Cena’s Promising Career in Raunchy Comedies

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There weren’t that many surprises for me in the new Amy Schumer-penned romcom Trainwreck. As was typical with almost all Judd Apatow comedies, the film was generally pleasant and supported a wealth of great gags & a wonderful cast, but also was in desperate need of some third-act editing. Recent over-exposure to Schumer’s more unrestrained writing on her sketch comedy TV show had me looking for something a little more (excuse the pun) off the rails from Trainwreck than the usual Apatow fare, though, so my expectations for something more unconventional were more than a little off base. I liked it; I just wasn’t caught unprepared for most of its content.

However, I was taken aback by the comedic performance of pro wrestler/in-the-flesh superhero John Cena. My surprise with Cena began before even the opening credits, when a trailer for an upcoming Amy Poehler/Tina Fey comedy called Sisters featured the typically clean-cut wrestler decorated in neck tats & a beanie, informing a hot-to-trot Fey that his safe word is “keep going”. That was just the start. In Trainwreck itself, Cena is even more subversive in dismantling his squeaky clean persona by appearing as he normally would in public, but with much raunchier content backing him up. It was difficult to determine from the film’s trailer how just how much of Cena we’d be seeing outside of that quotable “Mark Wahlberg” one-liner, but it turns out that we get to see way more of him than most people would’ve asked for. His character, Steven, engages (with varying degrees of success) in dirty talk, fully-nude on-screen lovemaking, undercutting questions about his own sexuality, and an intense pantomime of an ejaculation that will . . . not . . . end. As a fan of raunchy sex comedies, I found these gags just the right tone of playfully amusing. As a pro wrestling fan, I found them downright shocking.

For anyone who (understandably) has not been paying attention to the WWE since the creative heights of its so-called Attitude Era of the late 90s/early 00s, John Cena has more or less dominated the company’s narrative for the past decade. Shifting away from some of the more gruesomely violent & overtly sexual content of yesteryear, WWE sorta-unofficially promoted Cena as the face of the company. With his classic military looks & his character’s (almost) forgotten beginnings as a white rapper, Cena has been scripted within the ring to be more or less a superhero for young children to look up to. His stubborn refusal to “turn heel”, constant sloganizing about never giving up & always being respectful, and his never-ending championship victories appeal directly to younger fans, which drives a lot of older, nerdier smarks to disgust, deeming his reign as The PG Era. This behavior has spilled outside the ring as well. In his WWE Studios movies, Cena has always played the unblemished hero, like in his action movie vehicle The Marine, or a superhero version of himself, like in the Scooby-Doo/WWE crossover where he defeats a robotic ghost bear & an Indiana Jones style bolder with his bare hands. Then, there’s the fact that he in “real life” has more Make-a-Wish Foundation charity work than any other celebrity on record. In short, he is a ludicrously wholesome persona inside the ring & out.

The thing about Cena is that he really is likeable. There’s just way too much content out there about him being likeable. If you religiously follow WWE’s two flagship shows, Raw & SmackDown, (God help you) then there’s six hours of content on a weekly basis about how likeable John Cena is. And that’s not even counting the monthly Pay-Per-Views or the reality shows. That’s gotta wear even the most enthusiastic viewers down after a few years. Fortunately, though, things seem to be (gradually) changing. Cena’s niche at the company has been looking more like a respectable midcard position for the past few months (although, as I’m typing this now it looks like they’re pushing another championship match for him at this year’s SummerSlam) and he’s been putting in some of the best in-ring work of his career & helping get over lesser-known talents through his recent John Cena’s U.S. Open Challenge angle. What’s even more remarkable, though, is how he’s subverting his spotless image through comedies like Sisters & Trainwreck.

I first noticed this shift during the last few episodes of the now-legendary NBC comedy Parks & Recreation, where Cena appeared as himself on the episode “The Johnny Karate Super Awesome Musical Explosion Show” (one of my favorite episodes of the series). Cena did little to taint his superhero image in that appearance, but there was a spark of hope there in his willingness to make a fool of himself, when he so often manages to land on top. It also helped that Parks boasted a deep roster of talented comedians that could land Cena bit parts in worthwhile bigscreen comedies through networking. It’s tough to say whether it was Poehler’s Parks connection that helped Cena land his part in Sisters or the odd fact that Amy Schumer once dated pro wrestler Dolph Ziggler that helped him land his persona-shedding role in Trainwreck, but it couldn’t have hurt in either situation. No matter what the cause, Cena now seems to have his foot in the door for a life on the bigscreen (as opposed to WWE Studios’ straight-to-VOD dreck) and his career could be at a pivotal point because of it.

It’s a very rare feat for the WWE to successfully launch a career in Hollywood. Hulk Hogan is certainly the earliest example, but even he had a tough time making a lasting go of it after his ridiculous start in titles like No Holds Barred & Rocky III. Outside of a couple 90s goof-offs like Suburban Commando & Mr. Nanny, he hasn’t made much of a memorable mark outside the ring. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, on the other hand, has been a much clearer success story with his roles in franchises like The Fast & The Furious and G.I. Joe. Even The Rock’s been struggling to branch out & express himself as an artist, though. Despite a few wildly off-the-wall turns in films like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain, he’s been landing a lot of roles he would have been typecast in over a decade ago. Schlock like Hercules & San Andreas aren’t nearly enough of a step-up from his days as The Scorpion King, considering the talents he’s put on film in his his stranger roles.

Both The Rock & Hulk Hogan have long struggled to expand the scope of their acting careers once they got their foot in the door and now it’s John Cena’s turn to fight that battle. Starting his career in major films by degrading himself in raunchy comedies is honestly a brilliant first step in that direction. Cena’s showing us that his spotless superhero persona does not necessarily define him as a talent. Let’s face it; a lot of the kids who would’ve latched onto the original version of his current “Hustle, Loyalty, Respect” routine in its initial run would be in at least their late teens now, so it makes total sense that his content would grow up with them. I could be wrong & Cena could be slipping back into his old ways (starting as soon as SummerSlam next month), but there’s at the very least a glimmer of hope for change in his roles in Sisters & Trainwreck.

I’ve recently grown to like Cena despite my initial misgivings. His repetitive nature really isn’t all that unique within the world of pro wrestling, after all, and he can be really entertaining when he puts in his best work. Besides, it’s really difficult to deny the power of those Make-a-Wish numbers. I’d just also like to see him continue to branch out into these filthy, degenerate characters in goofy comedies until it’s no longer jarring to the audience. It might be his best chance at establishing himself outside of his roles as a “sports entertainer” and an eternal “good guy”. As Hogan & The Rock have proved time & time again, the WWE ring will always be there with open arms for whenever he needs it. There’s no reason, then, not to go out there & make himself vulnerable in a gross-out comedy or two. Judging by his work in Trainwreck alone, he’s already off to a great start.

-Brandon Ledet