Joe Don Baker acted in movies for almost 50 years and he's been in some pretty good ones like The Natural (as the Babe Ruth character); several Bond movies: The Living Daylights as an evil mercenary man and Goldeneye and other Brosnan ones as the CIA operative; Walking Tall (the original); and Mud. But MST3K and Rifftrax fans know him best for a couple of middling, low-budget action movies: Mitchell and Final Justice.
As the eponymous Mitchell, Baker was a chunky LA detective who was like a fatter, dumber Columbo in annoying and badgering people until finally solving the case. An example of his fine police work is that he's assigned to watch a gangster's house and immediately goes up to the house to introduce himself and start hassling the gangster and his "butler" Merlin Olsen.
Meanwhile someone sends a hooker (Linda Evans) to Mitchell's apartment and only after they fuck does he wonder who paid her and why. And then he runs her in for lighting up a joint. So fucking him for money was OK but a joint gets you busted? Mitchell has weird standards. Our "hero" also gets into a shouting match with an annoying kid and forces an old woman out of a car to walk; I guess the screenwriters (if there were any) thought that would really make him likable.
In the end Mitchell kills all the gangsters and Merlin Olsen. Hooray! Most of the fights were pretty lame and one car chase was pretty hilarious because an opposing Mustang's headlight was broken in one shot and back in the next shot!
This MST3K episode was notable because it was the episode where they switched hosts from Joel to Mike. The setup is that Gypsy overhears the evil scientists plotting to kill Mike, the temp cleaning their lair, and thinks they're going to kill Joel. With Mike's help she finds and prepares an escape pod that lands Joel in the Outback. With Joel gone the mad scientists need someone else to put on the ship and Mike is conveniently at hand...
About 5 years later MST3K featured another Joe Don Baker film: Final Justice. This time Baker is a chunky Texas deputy Geronimo (Hair-on-emo) whose sheriff is murdered by Italian gangsters who happen to be in town. Geronimo kills one and arrests the other. Because Malta was helping to fund the movie, there's the implausible setup that Geronimo has to escort the gangster to Italy when some henchmen sabotage the plane so it lands in Malta.
Geronimo goes to a bar trying to get information, gets in a fight, gets taken to jail, and then is released. This happens about four times during the movie. There's also a lengthy foot/boat chase and a lot of milk drinking for Geronimo's heartburn.
The plot itself doesn't make a ton of sense. I mean there's the military, the CIA, FBI, US Marshals, Secret Service...and the government has some dumbass deputy escorting a prisoner? Really? And why the hell does he try to order Maalox and milk in a bar? The patrons have every right to mock him; it's a bar, not a pharmacy! What kind of bars do they have in Texas?
There was also a Rifftrax version a couple of years ago but the MST3K version is better for the intermission sketches, especially Crow's rant about the wussiness of Maltese men. And at the end Mike goes to an "escape pod" that turns out to be a water heater because when you watch a terrible Joe Don Baker movie it means it's time to escape, right? Not so much. And the riffs on the end theme song are pretty funny too. "Meatballs fried in lard!!!"
While Joe Don Baker has been in some decent movies, I'm not sure if James Nguyen has even seen a decent movie. No one who knows anything about real movies could have been responsible for the cult classic Birdemic and its predecessors Julie & Jack and Replica.
You might ask what's wrong with Birdemic. Um...everything! The story makes little sense, the effects are godawful, the acting is worse than a local used car dealer commercial, and it looks like it was shot on a 90s camcorder. The "story" features a dumb software salesman and a "supermodel" falling in love. Though he just cashed in stock options for millions and she's a Victoria's Secret cover model, for some reason they go to a cheesy local festival and then stay in a Motel 6 to fuck.
The next morning birds start attacking the town. For some reason the birds set off explosions like they're full of nitro and both the birds and explosions look like they were made on a Commodore 64 in 1985. The smart thing to do would probably be just stay in the motel and let professionals handle the threat, but nah our "heroes" hit the road with another couple. They pick up a couple of kids while the other couple dies--the female half of the couple killed by a bird while she was squatting to take a shit outside!
And then...the birdemic just ends. Why? Who knows? Why did it even start? The whole thing is just so hilariously bad that it makes riffing on it pretty easy. I mean the main character can't even pronounce "solar panels."
The scariest thing about the birdemic is that it spawned an even lamer sequel. As of this writing I haven't seen a Rifftrax of that, though it seems redundant.
The first movie by James Nguyen was almost as bad, though as I admitted about a year ago I actually kind of like the story. It's just that it needed real actors, sets, and special effects. Julie & Jack is the tender love story of a computer chip salesman and a woman he meets online. Julie is secretive about her past so like a good stalker Jack starts to investigate only to find out that Julie is dead! She was a computer genius who uploaded her consciousness online though so they could meet in virtual reality. But then for...reasons she has to leave to...somewhere. This was about 2003 so there wasn't even a "cloud" to load herself to yet.
Like I said the story isn't terrible, but everything else is. Which makes it rife for riffing. A lot of the riffing is making references to Birdemic, which is appropriate since it uses some of the same actors and some of the same premise with characters working for a computer company. Our "auteur" even has a cameo as a professor who has "cup of coffee" with Jack to discuss Julie.
For a couple of years those were the only two Nguyen masterpieces I'd seen Rifftrax of, but late last year our prayers were answered. Another James Nguyen movie was finally added...and holy shit is it bad. It's a pretty low bar, but it is the worst Nguyen movie I've seen of the 4 that I've seen.
Replica starts out with a screen full of text that pretty much boils down to, "Did you see The 6th Day with Arnold Schwarzenegger? Because this is pretty much that, only much, much worse." The plot of that slightly more competent film was that in the future cloning had been developed for organs and pets but was not to be used on people--but of course it was.
In this far less competent movie, we start out with the Nguyen template of a chip salesman (see Julie & Jack) who's recently had a cloned kidney transplant. He
Then after a night of fully clothed lovemaking, Evelyn gets into her car and pulls slowly into traffic, which is something you see about a hundred times during each Nguyen movie, so no big deal. Except this time we see shots of a car coming the other way. Evelyn throws up her hands and...we cut to a graveyard. Wait, what? The two cars were going slower than bumper cars at a carnival, we never see the cars crash, and we never hear a scream or metal crunching or anything. It is literally the worst excuse for a car crash stunt ever.
So somehow Evelyn is dead and chip salesman Joe is bummed. He's not making his sales quota! I mean he just sold $100 million a few weeks ago, but if he doesn't sell more, he's fired! Geez, what have you done for me lately?
Then he
But then the obvious twist:
Joe and Claudia go to Evelyn's boss for the least convincing showdown in movie history. During which Evelyn's boss reveals his plan to create a master race of clones...or something. "We can end racism by making everyone the same race!" Um...yeah, that's not crazy at all. Somehow Claudia is killed by a gun that makes no noise and a wound that shows no blood. But the bad guy is killed by a detective played by the director's brother? Nephew? Son? Someone from the Nguyen family tree--with just as much talent for movies. The end. Yay?
The plot might have been able to work (see that Schwarzenegger movie) but with the terrible stunts, lame green screen "sets," actors worse than the robots in Disney's Hall of Presidents, and the creepy stalkery tone to the second act of the script, it is a truly awful movie. A lot of filmmakers can have a sophomore slump and when you're already really, really bad to start with...yeah, that's pretty bad. Hall of Fame badness.
So there you go, two legends of MST3K/Rifftrax!
1 comment:
Mitchell!! The police template for the Midland police department :p Still probably my favorite episode of MST3K...it's so bad that it's good
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