It's ironic I suppose that I'm writing this on Memorial Day since this entry is about soldiers who aren't exactly Real American Heroes. But I guess at least they try.
McBain: From the title you might think this 1990 action movie is an adaptation of the Schwarzenegger-like character from The Simpsons. But really it's about a bunch of middle-aged guys who overthrow the government of Colombia.
Back at the end of the Vietnam War Bobby McBain (Christopher Walken) is being tortured in a POW camp. A US helicopter sees the camp and the soldiers come down to save him and the other POWs. The head of the soldiers was for some reason a Colombian guy named Santos. He gives McBain half a $100 bill and says if McBain is ever given the other half it'll mean Santos needs repaid for the favor.
That happens almost 20 years later when Santos tries to overthrow the Colombian government. But the brutal dictator threatens some civilians so Santos stops the rebellion and then is killed. His sister goes to New York, where McBain is working as a steelworker.
McBain gathers up his old squad: a doctor, a bodyguard, a cop, and a rich guy played by Michael Ironside. They need money to fund their coup so first they attack a drug dealer played by Luis Guzman. When he doesn't have the millions they need, they shake down a mobster. And for some reason blow up an airport in Jamaica before stealing a plane to go to Colombia. Why? Who knows?
The most unintentionally hilarious part is the dogfight as the guys are heading to Colombia. They're pursued by a few Colombian F-5 fighters. First McBain shoots one down by killing the pilot with a handgun. He shoots the pilot of a jet fighter through the window of a small airplane. Think how utterly ridiculous that is. But it gets better! Michael Ironside calls in some support in the form of a British Hawk trainer jet that's armed with machine guns and rocket pods. Meanwhile the F-5s are armed with only fuel tanks and machine guns. Why the hell would they launch fighters carrying almost no weapons to intercept a plane? I guess the production couldn't get hold of any Sidewinder missiles. Though somehow one of the F-5s launches missiles at one point. From where? It's worse than some movies where they'll just show the same missile launching under a plane's wing like 4 times.
Of course in the end these like 5 American guys and Santos's sister with the support of an armed rabble take down the dictator. I mean sure that's plausible, right?
Unlike most of the Rifftrax VODs they show on Pluto TV this one isn't available on Amazon. You can only watch it on Pluto TV or with the Rifftrax site.
The Starfighters: When I first saw the title I thought it was a Star Wars-type movie but actually it's this incredibly boring movie about a group of F-104 Starfighter pilots in the 60s. Most of the movie is stock footage of F-104s refueling and flying around. The plot? Yeah, there really isn't one. There's some blather about a young pilot whose Congressman father wants him to fly bombers, but that's pretty much it.
If you like watching F-104 fighters flying to Lawrence Welk music then this is the movie for you! For the other 7 billion people, not so much. This was on MST3K back in about 1994 and one of the fun things during the intermission sketches is Crow T Robot's struggles to get on the "information superhighway." Remember when you had to use a dial-up modem? You couldn't just turn on your phone and get to the Internet, you had to set up the IP address and everything yourself. And even then all it was then was like message boards. Ugh. That's probably funnier than anything in the movie.
Red Zone Cuba: Another MST3K episode from about the same time. It was made around the same time too but it's in black-and-white not color. And features far less stock footage of planes flying around. This is about an escaped con and two ex-cons who wind up being part of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion.
Made with almost no budget the locations for this really make no sense. Most of the movie looks like it was shot in west Texas or New Mexico, not an island in the Caribbean. The three guys get captured but escape from the Cubans in a stolen plane to somehow end up in a location that again looks like New Mexico, not Florida or Louisiana or anywhere you'd expect them to escape to. So it doesn't really make much sense.
John Carradine "guest stars" as a train conductor in the beginning who supposedly saw the guys but really this contributes nothing. Though he does sing the theme song, which is pretty cool. So there's that.
Deadly Prey: Back to a Rifftrax episode for this late 80s movie about a militia in southern California that abducts random people to hunt them for sport as part of their training. But when they kidnap a mulleted shirtless guy in tiny shorts they soon realize they've kidnapped the wrong person. He starts to kill them one-by-one.
Now you might think you know how this ends: the guy kills all the bad guys and lives Happily Ever After, right? Nope. The bad guys kill his girlfriend and he screams with rage. The end. Hooray?
Probably the most unintentionally hilarious part of this is our hero has multiple opportunities to take some clothes off the bad guys he kills. At least take a pair of shoes, right? Nah, he'd rather go around in only a pair of tiny denim shorts. I guess that was for the ladies. Yeah.
No comments:
Post a Comment