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Leprechaun: Origins (2014)

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onehalfstar

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It was difficult not to go into Leprechaun: Origins without very specific expectations. Given its pedigree as a WWE Studios horror film starring little person pro wrestler Hornswoggle as the titular leprechaun, a role once played by a wisecracking Warwick Davis, it’d be fair to assume you know everything about the film before you even watch it. If you follow the WWE on a somewhat regular basis you might know Hornswoggle as a sort of a walking punchline. The performer is less recognizable for the quality of his wrestling performances (like, say, El Torito) and more for being involved in some of the promotion’s all-time worst storylines, such as ones where he was revealed to be Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son & the Anonymous Raw General Manager. Thanks to this kind of groan-inducing little person humor that Hornswoggle’s usually used for, it’s even already easy to picture him in the leprechaun costume (or to just Google image search it) and just sit back waiting for the Warwick Davis-style quips to be plugged into the script.

I’ll give credit to WWE Studios for this: they most definitely subverted my expectations here, a rare feat for the movie studio. Instead of dressing Hornswoggle up like Warwick Davis & providing him a bunch of Freddy Krueger/Chucky style one-liners about he gold, Leprechaun: Origins gave him a full-bodied prosthetic makeover. The pro wrestler/human punchline was reconstructed to look & sound like a shaved burn victim gorilla that did little more than bite, hiss, scratch, and growl. It seems that I may have spoken too soon when I said that remakes like Poltergeist weren’t doing enough to update their ancestor’s formulas in a means to justify their own existence.

Leprechaun: Origins is a far cry from its actually-fun predecessors like Leprechaun 2: Back 2 tha Hood & Leprechaun 4: In Space, so it does at least sidestep criticisms of being a shameless retread. The problem is that instead of retreading ground already covered by the Leprechaun franchise in particular, Origins instead removed everything that was unique about it & simplified the formula to the point where it felt like a retread of every monster movie ever. In a lot of ways this crime is far worse than the sins of Poltergeist’s by-the-numbers mediocrity.

Outside its Irish setting & a throwaway one-liner about Lucky Charms, there’s absolutely nothing of note in this film to distinguish it from any other cabin in the woods horror film I can name. Even the hideous get-up they use to conceal Honswoggle is oddly downplayed, so that most of the monster’s screen time is through a first-person POV cam à la Pitch Black. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I would almost rather they had just dressed Hornswoggle up in the cliché leprechaun costume and have him tell a bunch of lame ass jokes for 90 min. At least there would be the small chance of the film being fun (or at the very least memorable).

-Brandon Ledet

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)

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ghost

three star

When saw Insidious: Chapter 3 at the theater, it just happened to be playing at the exact right time. I had two hours to kill & Insidious 3 was conveniently positioned to kill it for me. Having not seen the first two films in the franchise I had absolutely no idea what to expect outside its pedigree as a horror sequel. Since then, I’ve caught up with the entire trilogy & I’m surprised to admit that the third “chapter” has held up both as an appropriate entry point & my favorite film of the series so far.

A prequel to the events that take place in the first two “chapters”, Insidious: Chapter 3 is a straightforward, no frills ghost story. A haunted teenage girl starts to get dragged into the afterlife (known here as “The Further”) by a super creepy specter with a terrible attitude. Character actress Lin Shaye (who was absolutely terrifying as the overbearing mother in Detroit Rock City) is expertly employed here as a medium who tries to drag her back to the physical world before it’s too late. Straightforward genre fare has been the Insidious series’ forte since the beginning, but this is the most successful entry so far both in terms of how fun it is and how successfully creepy-scary it can be.

Although Insidious: Chapter 3 doesn’t bring all too much new to the table that wasn’t in the first two films, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s the most successful of the three. Its ghost looked cooler, the tension was built better, it was much goofier on the camp scale (without the icky crossdressing phobia of the second entry), it spent more quality time in “The Further” realm, etc. The basic components of the first two films have merely been switched around & dusted off a little here, but it still managed to be my favorite entry to date, a rare feat for a horror sequel these days.

-Brandon Ledet

Spy (2015)

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fourstar

The absurdist genre-spoof comedy that hit its apex with cult classics like ZAZ’s Airplane & Top Secret has sadly become a dying art in recent years. Titles like Not Another Disaster Movie & Scary Movie 19 have tarnished the genre’s cultural cachet and more or less reduced its target audience to twelve year old boys who are emotionally stunted even for twelve year old boys. There have been a couple great exceptions in the past decade that give me hope for the genre’s future, though. The Judd Apatow comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, while posed as a spoof of the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, was a brilliant take-down of the entire biopic genre. Walk Hard somehow included every single biopic cliché & American genre of music into one silly, but intellectually extensive spoof. The Will Forte vehicle MacGruber did more or less the same thing with the violent action flick genre that saw its heyday in the 1980s. The difference is that instead of limiting itself to brilliant send-ups of films like Commando & Cobra, MacGruber went a step further and created one of the most vile, pathetic protagonists in all of cinema. Both Walk Hard & MacGruber breathed fresh air into the genre-spoof, but they’re just two titles in a sea of bad examples.

After a single viewing of Spy at the theater, I’m already confident enough to include it along with Walk Hard & MacGruber on the list of the best spoof movies of the past decade. Sure, the James Bond international spy genre has been spoofed before in movies like Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Casino Royale (1967), and Our Man Flint, but Spy distinguishes itself from its predecessors by feeling distinctly modern. There’s a self-aware, crass irreverence to the film that feels distinctly 2015. Although it’s riffing on an entirely different genre, Spy is very much in the vein of MacGruber more than it is in the very 90s Austin Powers. Besides the general crassness of its script & general improv-enhanced vibe of its sense of humor, Spy also continues MacGruber’s undermining of alpha male action movie types that turns the typical hero (this time as a frivolous side character hilariously played by Jason Statham as opposed to MacGruber’s central protagonist) into vile worms of the lowest order. As Statham’s misogynist prick brags to the main character that he is immune to 179 varieties of poison & can water-ski blindfolded, it’s easy to see how an exact MacGruber successor would’ve been born if he was the central character, but Spy is smart to leave him sidelined while the more morally-palatable, but just as crass Melissa McCarthy serves as a much more relatable audience surrogate.

McCarthy hit her creative peak for me last year with the goofy road trip comedy Tammy, which felt like a wonderful culmination of everything she’s been building towards since Paul Feig’s breakout comedy Bridesmaids. Feig, who also worked with McCarthy on the similarly crass buddy cop comedy The Heat, finds an entirely new kind of role for her to play in Spy. In Tammy, McCarthy was a complete mess, more raccoon than human in her thoughtless pursuit of laze-about surface pleasures. While I found that character incredibly charming, she was a far cry from the in-over-her-head every-woman McCarthy plays so well in Spy. There are flashes of Tammy’s feral nature in Spy, but they’re dialed back enough to allow McCarthy to shine though as a relatable human being. With Spy, Feig has not only created a modern classic in genre spoofery, but also helped to open a door for an incredibly talented comedic actress who’s more or less hit a typecasting wall she hasn’t been able to sidestep since her wonderful turn on Gilmore Girls nearly a decade ago. Let’s hope he can keep the productive streak going when he works with her on their fourth film in a row together, the all-female cast Ghostbusters reboot.

-Brandon Ledet

My Mistress (2015)

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three star
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One of the most unexpected genre revivals I’ve noticed recently is the return of the 90s style erotic thriller. From major releases like 50 Shades of Grey to trashier fare like The Boy Next Door, there seems to be a veritable resurgence of erotic thriller media. This might be a little disheartening to defenders of good taste & decency, but for cinematic trash dwellers like myself, it’s a godsend. Bring on the expensive-looking echoes of crap that used to play at 2am on Showtime & Cinemax, I say. Bring it on, ya garbage peddlers.

It’s with that attitude that I welcome, without a safe word even, the arrival of My Mistress to Netflix’s Recently Added stockpile. An Australian film that grapples with questions about grief, maternal love, and the therapeutic powers of BDSM play, My Mistress doesn’t quite match the campy heights of fare like The Boy Next Door, but it also doesn’t try to. Although its story about a dominatrix who becomes involved with her teenage neighbor sounds adventurous, the film mostly plays it safe. It’s at heart a pleasant, but low key melodrama about two people who’ve been badly hurt & find solace in each other’s company. This kind of melancholy ambition doesn’t do much for the film’s erotic thriller appeal, admittedly. If it were to be a true addition to the genre one of the two love birds would have to flip out and start threatening to murder the other, but that’s just not the kind of story told here.

That’s not to say that there aren’t trashy elements at play. My Mistress may be hinged on the devastating grief suffered by two lonely souls, but it knows exactly how tawdry the erotic elements of its BDSM subject are. While the movie never gets overly kinky outside a couple whippings, there’s enough leather bullet bras & doggy costumes to give the whole thing a campy undertone. Watching a teen boy try to seduce a grown woman by smoking cigarettes and playing tough with lines like “I’m bad. Really bad. Evil sometimes,” is the kind of playfulness the movie tries to get away with while still dealing full-on with the more tragic plot developments. There’s also some uncomfortable, Oedipal vibes in the contrast between the two central mother-son relationships that the film is smart not to push too hard, but it still adds an extra layer of tawdriness to the affair.

My Mistress is not likely to be a movie that’s going to change anyone’s life. At best, it might help you fill up an afternoon. Its worst fault might be that it somewhat plays into the typical BDSM Folks Just Need to Meet Someone Sweet to Lower Their Defenses triteness you usually encounter in these kinds of films, but that only adds to its trashy charms in some ways. It’s a pleasant movie that finds a way to have it both ways, playing with titillating 90s Skinemax erotica and exploring the sad nuance of romance & grief. I liked the balance it struck, even if it didn’t push its worst impulses into deliciously over-the-top JLo territory.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lazarus Effect (2015)

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twostar

Sometime in late 2012 I had the unique opportunity to catch the beautifully-filmed fine cuisine documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, (a movie most people have experienced through the power of Netflix) on the big screen. Running late from grabbing a sushi dinner myself, I had to sit in the front row, craning my head to take in the majestic sushi specimens that towered over me. It was an overwhelming experience, one I’m unlikely to ever forget. Never in my wildest imagination would I have assumed that the director, who was present at that screening for a Q&A, would follow up that beautiful film with a drearily cheap sci-fi horror that feels more like a particularly eccentric episode of a CSI type show or a SyFy Original Movie than anything that belongs in a proper theater, but that’s exactly what happened.

The Lazarus Effect is cheap. And ugly. And hopelessly shallow. Its worst quality of all, though, is the level of talent it roped into its murky depths. Not only is Jiro Dreams of Sushi director David Gelb suffering a sophomore slump here, respectable actors Mark Duplass, Donald Glover, Olivia Wilde, and Evan Peters (who had a great turn as Quicksilver last year in X-Men: Days of Future Past) are all dragged down by his misstep. The movie’s dire quality is apparent as early as the opening credits, which play over grotesque medical footage and a staged lab experiment in which a dead dog is revived. It’s a cheap way to fish for a reaction from the audience, flatly showing something horrific & ugly instead of building suspense to it the way a decent horror movie typically would. That approach is a major indication of what’s to come.

Since the movie’s atmosphere never allows tension to build properly, the best chance you have of enjoying The Lazarus Effect is as a camp fest. The basic premise is that a doctor named Frank (-enstein! Get it? Get it?) is experimenting on bringing deceased canines back to life in hopes his techniques will give surgeons more time to operate in life & death medical emergencies. But what if he’s bringing his subjects back from Doggie Hell instead of Doggie Heaven? Indeed, the first revived dog starts to act a little freaky, but that doesn’t stop Dr. Frank from going off the rails & reviving a love one who passes away unexpectedly. When his first human subject rises from the dead, she’s literally a ghost under a sheet, which is a sort of goofy moment. By the time she’s reading minds, abusing her telekinesis, and (the most evil thing of all!) levitating, she’s gone full goof.

The problem with reading the film this way is that it’s rarely silly enough to be laughable. There’s some amusing moments involving the evil dog (who never gets to levitate or read minds himself, unfortunately) & I’m fairly certain this is the only film I’ve ever seen where a vape pen is used as a murder weapon, but for the most part it’s just hopelessly bland. The Lazarus Effect is much more concerned with exploring kiddy pool depth ideas about a scientific mind confronted with spiritual questions he can’t explain logically than it is with entertaining its audience or not looking like a pile of wet garbage. Whether you take the film seriously or try to enjoy it as a goof, there’s just not much there. I keep asking myself how this was made by the same guy who brought the world Jiro Dreams of Sushi and I just can’t come up with anything but the question itself. How? Just how? That’s about the only haunting or even vaguely interesting element at play here.

-Brandon Ledet

Everly (2015)

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fourstar

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Last year’s Keanu-Reeves-avenges-his-puppy’s-death action flick John Wick earned a lot of attention for being a return to form for the shoot ‘em up genre. Its above-average fight choreography, underground crime ring aesthetic, and relentless violence made it a crowd favorite, the thinking man’s mindless action flick. It turns out I’m not much of a thinking man. I liked John Wick well enough, but found it hard to match a lot of its audience’s enthusiasm. It was a decent throwback action flick, for sure, but felt more like a throwback to the late 90s than any other era, far from my favorite era of popular art.

Everly, on the other hand, has none of John Wick’s technical sophistication or cultural cachet. It shares its basic beautiful-person-kills-a-heap-of-faceless-strangers premise, but none of its finesse. I still enjoyed Everly more. I can’t help my trashy self. In Everly, a scantily clad prostitute played by Salma Hayek attempts to reunite with her family and escape a life of indentured servitude through an onslaught of gun violence. Cornered in a condo, Hayek’s Everly has to shoot her way through an army of Japanese gangsters, bumbling bodyguards, and fellow prostitutes to achieve freedom. If this sounds stupid & gratuitous, it’s because it most definitely is. Everly isn’t a film where any themes or ideas are explored in new or interesting ways and the violence is a mere exclamation point. It’s a film where violence is the entire point. It’s a film where a gun-wielding Salma Hayek in a negligee defiantly tells cartoonisly violent gangsters, “Lick my balls.” It’s a stupid film, but it’s also an awesome one.

I don’t mean to pull up any comparisons between Everly & John Wick to say one is objectively better than the other. It’s actually highly likely that fans of one would enjoy the other. I’m more drawing the comparison to point out something about my own tastes. Both Everly & John Wick put familiar, beautiful faces in a trashy cult movie scenario, asking their respective stars to shoot their way out of it; but while John Wick aims for greatness, Everly knows exactly what kind of trash it is at heart and searches for greatness in the gutter. That kind of deliberate simplemindedness isn’t going to go too far with certain audiences, but it does go a long way with me. Again, I can’t help my trashy self.

Side note: It surprised me that the film was set during Christmas. If you’re looking for some campy, violent counter-programming this holiday season, I highly recommend giving this one a spin.

-Brandon Ledet

San Andreas (2015)

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three star

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There’s really only one reason to see San Andreas and it ain’t to watch The Rock act outside of his comfort zone. If you really wanted to watch Dwayne Johnson push himself as an actor, I highly recommend checking out Southland Tales or Pain & Gain. If you want to watch buildings fall over and crush countless nameless people while The Rock just happens to be there, San Andreas is the movie for you. The Rock is in full Hercules mode here, just sort-of coasting on his natural charisma as a mediocre film crumbles around him. San Andreas may not be the best possible Johnson vehicle, but it does have something Hercules was missing: incredible visual spectacle. As soon as San Andreas leaves the theaters it’s going to be a forgotten by-the-90s-numbers natural disaster pic, but as long as it’s huge & loud on the silver screen it’s got an impressive 3D spectacle to it that I found myself genuinely wowed by when I wasn’t chuckling at the clichéd dialogue that broke it up (like the earthquakes that break the movie’s California coast into pieces).

Since it’s unlikely that you’ll enjoy San Andreas for its storytelling prowess or emotional resonance, I guess I’ll detail what it has going for it in camp value. First of all, its aping of 90s disaster pics like Daylight & Volcano is so accurate that the whole endeavor feels ludicrously old-fashioned. In a lot of ways, it’s only a half-step up from the corny script of last year’s horrendous Left Behind, which is really saying something. Unlike Left Behind, however, San Andreas is consistently dangerous-feeling from the get-go, almost to the point of sadism. Buildings are ripped in half, people wander around bleeding in a daze, floods & fires complicate the rescue missions, etc. San Andreas knows it has little more to offer than sheer spectacle, so it pushes how much constant carnage it can get away with without devolving into a complete cartoon, something it just barely gets away with. As for traces of camp in The Rock’s performance, he does have a pretty great one-liner when he expertly parachutes onto a baseball field with his estranged wife (“It’s been a while since I’ve gotten you to second base”) and it’s pretty amusing how quickly & without inner conflict he abandons his post as a helicopter-rescue pilot to focus on retrieving his own wife & daughter as millions of other earthquake victims suffer. Other than that & a few amusing scenes in which a cowardly business dude pushes people into immediate peril to save his own ass, the movie doesn’t offer much else camp-wise outside the impressive 3D spectacle of a city collapsing.

With a larger budget, San Andreas could have looked even further back than its 90s-disaster-movie roots and assembled one of those sprawling casts from the days of Big Studio disaster films like Towering Inferno & Earthquake. I’m not saying that they should’ve recast The Rock’s helicopter pilot or Paul Giamatti’s befuddled scientist. It’s more that they felt like a small part of an absent larger whole. If San Andreas were a near-three hour epic overstuffed with every Hollywood star imaginable, but with the same level of impressive special effects it could’ve been something really special. As is, it’s going to lose its significance as soon as it hits VOD & home video, so I suggest seeing it in the theater while you can if you have any interest in it at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Hack O’ Lantern (1988)

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fourhalfstar

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“But Mom, I like the taste of blood. Grandpa says it’s good for me.”

The bond between grandfather and grandson is a very special one, especially when the grandfather is the leader of a satanic cult and breeds his grandson to be the son of Satan. Director Jag Mundhra’s Hack O’ Lantern (aka Halloween Night) explores this specific type of grandfather/grandson relationship in one of the greatest “bad” horror films ever created. I knew that this was going to be a bad movie just from the title, but literally everything in the film was terrible. For starters, the main character, Tommy, is an 18 year old played by a balding 32 year old Gregory Cummins (Cliffhanger, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Now, even though Tommy is supposed to be the film’s main character, he’s present for probably less than half of the movie, and he barely has any lines at all. His grandfather is truly the most prominent person in the film, and his character isn’t even given a name. He’s simply referred to as Grandpa. Doesn’t this sound like a gem already?

Out of all the satanic themed horror movies I’ve seen (which is many), this one had the quickest satanic reveal ever. Within the first few minutes of Hack O’ Lantern, it’s known that Grandpa is a full-blown Satanist. After the opening credits, an innocent looking old man (Grandpa) driving a farm truck filled with pumpkins stops to visit his young grandson (Tommy). He gives Tommy a pentagram necklace along with a pumpkin of his choice and a little plastic skeleton. In one of the worst Southern accents I’ve ever heard, he tells Tommy that he’s “very special.” It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on, and honestly, I was a little disappointed. I personally would’ve liked Grandpa’s character to be more mysterious.

Ten years after receiving the necklace, Tommy turns into a rebellious teen, and he is more than ready to make his satanic confirmation. One of my biggest laugh-out-loud moments was when Tommy and Grandpa shared this super-secret satanic handshake. They both make (incorrect) devil horns with their hands and press them together while straight up mean mugging each other. Shortly after this occurs, a really bad heavy metal music video, starring Tommy, pops out of nowhere. The video is for D.C. La Croix’s “Devil’s Son” and I swear, the song is just as annoyingly catchy as “It’s A Lovely Life” from May’s Movie of the Month, Crimes Of Passion. This was definitely my favorite part of the movie.

About 30 or so minutes into the film, a slasher element is introduced. An unknown killer wearing a horned devil mask and cloak goes on a Halloween killing spree using a pitchfork, shovel, and knife as murder weapons. Of course, no slasher flick would be complete without a couple of nude girls, and I swear, everyone woman in this film had the opportunity to shed their clothes at some point. What I really appreciated was how the film’s slasher element blended in with its satanic roots so well. One did not overshadow the other, and many other films have not been able to balance different themes as well as Mundhra did with this one.

Hack O’ Lantern is a classic 80s slasher flick with a hint of satanic horror metal, basically the perfect formula for a “terrible” movie. It has not been released on DVD, but in November 2014, Massacre Video stated that they have acquired the rights to Hack O’ Lantern and plan on releasing it on Blu-ray later on this year.

-Britnee Lombas

Seventh Son (2015)

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witch

three star

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Okay, here’s the thing: Seventh Son is a bad movie. It’s just awful. It’s already been called “staggeringly bad” “a creative miscarriage”, “a quickly forgotten pile of junk”, and maybe “the worst movie of the year”. I’m not arguing with any of those assessments. They’re true enough. I’ll even back up the complaints that the bland, medieval fantasy epic is even politically regressive. Indeed, its main plot involves two white men beating up & setting fire to the movie’s only female & POC-cast characters, who are all invariably evil. So, yeah. Seventh Son is a bad movie in almost all ways you can mean that phrase.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. It’s a mind-numbingly dumb & old-fashioned attempt at establishing a franchise (à la I, Frankenstein & Dracula Untold), but I honestly found the blatantly simple-minded picture kinda low-key entertaining. Watching a drunken, wizardly Jeff Bridges battle a half Dragon/half Disney villain Julianne Moore was lizard-brain cool enough to forgive almost any cliché plot points or b.s. franchise ambitions for me. This is the kind of fantasy realm nonsense that is overstuffed with dragons, blood moons, witches, ghosts, evil queens, ogres, and haunted forests. Better yet, it’s overstuffed with laughable scenery-chewing from two actually-great actors redefining what slumming it truly means. Jeff Bridges mumbling wizardly nonsense and a metal-clawed Julianne Moore cooing commands like, “Help yourself to the blood cakes, little one” were enough to make me glad that I gave the movie a shot despite it’s (well-deserved) awful reputation.

I’m not saying that you should support Seventh Son with your hard-earned dollars or even give it a chance when it’s streaming for free. I’d just be lying if I said I hated it. It’s a laughable failure of a film that won me over by laughter more than it lost me with its failure, especially in the final minutes when it promises (threatens?) a sequel that most certainly ain’t coming. Thankfully.

-Brandon Ledet

Russell Madness (2015)

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russell mania

fourstar

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Once upon a time Air Bud (known by his friends as “Buddy”) was merely a simple golden retriever with an inordinate talent for playing basketball. Not to be pigeonholed, Buddy gradually proved himself to be more of a canine Bo Jackson than just a run-of-the-mill basketball-playing dog, and found formidable careers in football, soccer, baseball, and volleyball. Even more impressive, Buddy found a way to extend his career beyond the playing field, a struggle that a lot of athletes fail to overcome, and has established a second life as a big-time movie executive. At first, Buddy made his film production choices based solely on nepotism, and released six vanity projects starring his own puppies, in what has been labeled as the Air Buddies series. Now, after seven years of straight-to-DVD movies that featured his offspring venturing into unlikely territory like space travel & supernatural crime fighting, Air Bud has finally gotten back to his roots: sports movies. Branching off from his work with Disney and rebranding his film productions as Air Bud Entertainment, Buddy has finally released his first film that does not feature his own progeny: a pro wrestling comedy called Russell Madness. As evidenced by the film’s prominence on the Air Bud entertainment website & this picture of Buddy working hard as a big time movie executive, he could not be prouder of the results.

As the title indicates, Russell Madness strays from Air Bud Entertainment’s usual preference for golden retriever protagonists by casting a Jack Russell terrier in the titular role of a rescued pound dog who finds fame & fortune in an unexpected pro wrestling career. As the title does not indicate, but as you can see in the film’s trailer, the character’s wrestling name is actually “Russell Mania”, not “Russell Madness”. The phrase “Russell Mania” is repeated constantly throughout the film, echoed even in Russell’s killer entrance music (a vital asset to any pro wrestler), but the phrase “Russell Madness” isn’t uttered even once. Why the name change, you ask? As a shrewd business dog, Air Bud was obviously side-stepping any potential legal conflicts with references to the WWE’s WrestleMania brand, dog-based puns or not. That doesn’t mean that WWE got the last laugh here. Oh, no. Air Bud Entertainment not only kept all of the verbal “Russell Mania” references in its debut feature, but also found more subversive ways to criticize the “sports entertainment” giant that robbed them of their movie’s intended title.

Although Russell Madness does not refer to the WWE directly, again thanks to Buddy’s shrewd business sense, its main conflict is built around a WWE surrogate. In the movie’s folklore, all local & regional wrestling promotions were eaten up by an amoral juggernaut that built its empire by violating long-respected business treaties of non-competition. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly how the WWE rose to prominence in the early 80s. Russell Madness even named its fake wrestling promotion the Wrestlers United Federation, or WUF. This not only serves as a reference to WWE’s past as the WWF, but also finds room for another stellar dog pun (“woof”, for those following along), of which there are plenty.  Now that’s efficiency! Just in case that wasn’t enough to drive the point home, a Vince McMahon stand-in, Mick Vaugn (played by Cliff from Cheers), is the evil capitalist head of WUF & makes constant references to his business as more “entertainment” than wrestling. He even goes so far as to ruin the illusion of the “sport”’ by suggesting that (gasp!) the results are fixed and the performers are (double gasp!) only in it for the money.

This little slice of pro wrestling history (with a talking, wrasslin’ dog added for flavor) may seem like familiar territory for even the least committed of marks, but to a child it sounds like ancient history. When the father figure of Russell’s adoptive family recaps the WUF takeover of his own father’s business as a bedtime story, he starts, “Back in his heyday, in a time called ‘The 80s’ . . . “ and instead of imagining the world thirty years ago, his kid (played by one of Mad Men‘s many Bobby Drapers) imagines a sort of dust-covered vaudevillian aesthetic that places the events about a century back. Indeed, even the Ferraro Family Wrestling (an Italian slant on the Guerreros?) arena looks like an ancient vaudevillian theater (that’s in incredible shape for a supposedly blighted building) or as the dad puts it, “midcentury guido”. There’s no denying that this one classy joint, especially once Russell’s family cleans it up & revives the old Ferraro family business. Once again, the comparison between the charming, warmhearted wrestling indies and the cold, mammoth WUF is made clear in how much more character the old-timey digs have than the blue-lit corporate arenas.

At this point it’d be fair for you to have a few lingering questions like, sure the arena is swell, but what about the wrasslin’? And how does a dog even wrestle in the first place? And we know about Russell’s entrance music, but what’s his signature move? First of all, Russell can wrestle. Oh boy can he wrestle. He’s a good boy, yes sir. Who’s a good boy? Russell is. That’s right. As a Jack Russell terrier, Russell obviously isn’t going to be dishing out any suplexes or pile-drivers, but he gets by on some surprisingly adept (CGI-assisted) choke holds and rope work. He may not have the height, strength, charisma, body mass, opposable thumbs, or lung capacity normally associated with pro wrestling’s top acts, but Russell uses his light frame’s aerial abilities to their full advantage and he’s got three very important things than many a wrestling legend have made careers out of in the past: novelty, heart, and raw talent. Of course novelty, heart, and raw talent alone won’t make a champion, but Russell finds a great manager in a (talking!) monkey (voiced by Will Sasso!) who has been haunting the Ferraro Family Wrestling arena since it shut down in the 80s, just waiting for a young talent to shape into a wrestling god. With his monkey manager’s help Russell proves himself champion in a sea of lesser opponents that include a mummy, a cave man, a pirate, a clown, an escaped convict, and a California surfer who says things like “Dude, that’s gnarly.” He even has a unique finisher: he pisses on the competition. It’s not a very physically taxing move, but it is wickedly brutal in its own demoralizing way.

If watching a (talking!) Jack Russell terrier fight his way to the top of the pro wrestling world with the help of his (talking!) monkey manager and a family who loves him sounds like a hokey mess to you, please keep in mind that Air Bud Entertainment is primarily made for children. Russell Madness is just one of the many hokey messes of children’s media, but it’s one with fairly deep love & understanding for both the art of pro wrestling & the art of the pun. Comedy workhorse Fred Willard resurrects his clueless sports announcer role from Best in Show here to deliver some of the best puns of the film, including a personal favorite of mine that involves chimney sweeps. That doesn’t mean he gets to have all the fun, though. Russell even gets a good one in himself when he tells the film’s central heel “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” Of course, there’s some occasionally tedious humor to the movie that will cause many-a-eye roll (Will Sasso’s literal monkeyshines certainly push it), but that’s to be expected in a straight-to-VOD kid’s movie that was greenlit & produced by a retired-athlete golden retriever. What’s more surprising is how much of Russell Madness strangely works. There’s a particular shot of the child protagonist (Bobby Draper IV) enjoying his birthday cake with a life-size cutout of his absent father that has a particularly strong pathos to it. Also, as silly as the idea of a wrestling dog might be to some people, it works surprisingly well at garnering heat for his opponents. What heel behavior could possibly trump beating up a dog for money?

If you can get past the cheap CGI weirdness, the awful little moving mouths on the talking animals (à la The Voices), and the idea that people would somehow be more impressed by a wrestling dog than a talking monkey with managerial skills, you might find yourself enjoying this little wrestling cinema oddity. Personally, I marked out to the point where I was totally on board with even its most ham-fisted messages like “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” and “The strongest tag team is family.” Film producer “Air Bud” Buddy may not have touched every heart with his tale of a dog who takes the pro wrestling world by storm and finds a family to call his own (or even got the film title he wanted), but he at least touched my heart. I’m actually not entirely convinced that Russell Madness wasn’t made specifically with me in mind & it’s highly likely that it will remain my favorite “bad” movie of 2015. Once again, Buddy took it to the hoop.

-Brandon Ledet