MonsterHunter

And on the sixth day, God created Trash! And it was good. Especially his hair! That’s right Trashers, Mark Gregory hits the big screen yet again, this time portraying the greatest role of all time, the very first man! Well, after his role as Trash in Bronx Warriors, his role as Johnny Hondo in War Bus Commando, and his role as Thunder in all three Thunder films! Still, playing Adam looks damn good on his resume, too. It certainly plays to his strength of standing around with a stupefied look on his face. After all, everything is new to Adam, so when he acts like a confused five year old when Eve announces she’s making a baby, it’s completely believable!

Enzo Doria and Luigi Russo do Italian film fans a great service with Blue Paradise. So much of our lives are devoted to watching every spaghetti western with Django in the title, every film starring Christopher Connelly, and every TV movie that Lamberto Bava somehow got financed that very little time is left for religion. We all know our spiritual life needs to be almost as full as our exploitation movie life and so we often find ourselves making time for God whenever we’re watching a movie and praying that someone is about to be stabbed or that a jeep is about to explode.

Blue Paradise then is the way that us trash film aficionados can get a little dose of the Good Book. As a straight edge strong Christian that doesn’t mind knocking back a few brews and smoking a few blunts with my neighbor’s wife, it’s quite reassuring that I’m getting some credit from the big man upstairs while watching Blue Paradise. It’s also really good since movies like King of Kings and The Robe don’t really cover this Adam and Eve business. I mean, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t some chimp’s grandson or whatever like those secular humanists, liberals, and women’s rights groups are always trying to say. It’s just nice to finally have some confirmation from a credible source. I daresay that if Blue Paradise had been screened at the Scopes Monkey Trial, this country wouldn’t be smack dab in the middle of the turd sandwich it finds itself in today!

I’m somewhat offended that I probably need to rehash the whole Adam and Eve story for some of you atheists and communists out there, but if Jesus loved us so much that he stretched out his arms and died for us, I guess I can swallow my bile and address all you hellbound non-believers. Just don’t expect me to go dying for you or nothing. It ain’t like this movie was Treasure Of The Four Crowns or Delta Force Commando.

As soon as Trash gets created, Trash spends a lot of time wandering around checking out his environment. He hangs out with some animals, discovers water, and maintains extraordinary conditioning of his God-like heavy metal perm. This was paradise you know. But Trash gets bored and lonely, so he creates the world’s first sex doll! Technology not being terribly advanced six or seven days after Earth started up, his sex doll is actually just a sand sculpture. Incredibly, despite only having himself as a model, Trash sculpts a super hottie!

This was still a time of miracles, so a magical rain came and washed all the sand off of the sculpture, revealing a very blonde Eve! Like all relationships, things were pretty sweet first. But also like all relationships, Eve starts whining about how bored she is and the next thing you know she’s eating this apple that this snake kept telling her to eat, even though Trash repeatedly told her not to. This is obviously the part of the Bible not even Democrats and other satanists could deny. At this point, I thought I was watching a documentary on every relationship I ever had!

It goes without saying that God is super pissed over this whole apple business. And his wraith is fearsome indeed! Trash and Eve get evicted via the worst special effects in the history of all existence! God pulls out all the stops, letting loose from heaven the Three Plagues of Cheap Optical Effects: grainy stock footage, grade-school level stop motion animation, and blue screen work composited by a Lucifer himself! We’re talking Old Testament level vengeance! Times a hundred!

Trash and Eve survive their brush with low budget filmmaking and travel across the newly inhospitable landscape. Along the way, they run into a variety of obstacles to happiness. There’s the pterodactyl they fight. Then you’ve got the mega-ugly ape men who take them prisoner while Trash and Eve squabble about their relationship. It was a pretty intense argument and Trash only stops arguing when the cavemen accidentally bump his head on a rock while hauling them back to their village. Eventually they escape and decide they “need some space” and break up! Eve climbs a tree and refuses to keep journeying with Trash, while Trash says screw it and just moseys on without her!

Eve falls in with a tribe of guys painted green and hooks up with one of their hunky warriors. Trash continues his trek, seeking the sea since that’s where life began and he’s convinced for absolutely no reason that that is where they need to return to. Eve’s new boyfriend and his tribe end up fighting some way ugly hairy humanoids and Trash magically appears during the battle to pitch in. Lots of guys getting bashed with rocks and stuck with big sticks illustrate the Bible passages on not messing with guys who are kick ass.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I tell you that Eve and Trash start dating again and continue to search for the sea. One really short Ice Age later, and these two are having a baby in the sea and living happily ever after.

Blue Paradise is certainly a weird concoction, even for an industry that served up stuff like American Rickshaw, Yor, and Shocking Dark. Much of the time it feels like it wants to be one of those Italian Conan rip-offs like Conquest or Conqueror Of The World, except that the level of violence and gore isn’t really there. But it is also rooted in its Trash and Eve Bible story, except that Trash and Eve are portrayed as being the stereotypical bickering couple. Trash stands around a lot staring and saying things that lead you to believe that he is an odd mix of arrogant a-hole and retard, while Eve is a whiny shrew. And of course, as if guided by a divinely inspired hand, it all works! For all of us! Christians will love its simple-minded view of creation! Non-Christians will love it for its car wreck like execution! And fans of Mark Gregory will experience the Rapture right in their pants!

© 2008 MonsterHunter