Mrs. Hobbs has secured the use of a house out on the west coast and everyone is coming along whether they like it or not. The Hobbs family still has two ungrateful and moody brats living at home with them. There’s the girl who is very self-conscious of her new braces. We’ll call her Metal Mouth. Then there’s the boy who is addicted to TV. We’ll call him America’s Youth. Also joining them once they get out to the coast are two grown daughters and their families.

Each family comes with its own problem, but the most interesting thing is that one of the daughters is married to America’s favorite flesh-eating G.I., John Saxon! John amazed us when he went nuts in Cannibal Apocalypse and he amazes again as the uppity egghead college professor who has a hankering for the dumb, foreign blonde gal that’s malingering on the beach the Hobbs’ vacation home is perched upon.

The movie focuses on Roger’s reaction to the insanity that constantly assaults his senses during the time when he’s supposed to be relaxing. The house is one source of trouble the film weakly attempts to mine for laughs. There’s the expected problems such as the water not working correctly (this usually involves someone getting sprayed with a geyser of water from the kitchen sink), an impossibly complicated pump that Roger can’t figure out how to work, but the plumber fresh out of the neighbor’s cesspool has no problem with (cesspool is funny, right?), and various stairs, banisters, and doorknobs breaking off at inopportune times.

The problems with the house though are merely background noise on this vacation when compared to what a dysfunctional load of Hobbs DNA the rest of the family turns out to be.

Roger stands around trying to puzzle out what’s up with the failing marriages of his two grown daughters that includes one husband being unemployed and the grandchildren being undisciplined brats.

Roger also has to find a way to reach out to his young son and does so by taking him on a sail boat ride and getting so lost at sea that they almost die. That particularly uninvolving scene went on for so long that I was hoping they’d both start gulping ocean water until their tongues swelled up and they suffocated.

Roger also manages to solve Metal Mouth’s problem of not being liked by boys by forcing her to go to a dance and then paying every guy there five bucks to dance with her. One guy turns out to be Fabian and after taking Roger’s five bucks, discovers that he likes Metal Mouth enough to sing the hit song “Cream Puff” (a singularly hideous bit of tuneless trash) with her and return Roger’s five bucks!

Roger’s next problem to solve is the unemployed husband’s situation. Even though Roger’s son-in-law bailed out and went home earlier, he somehow has landed a job interview with General Research.

The only hitch is that the head of General Research himself has to okay him before he can get the job. This means he has to come down to Roger’s vacation house to hang out for a few days to see if the kid is suitable – even though the kid isn’t even there!

Roger goes bird watching with the guy and ends up beating him up later that night due to a misunderstanding involving this guy’s wife, Roger, and a steam valve in the bathroom. After this guy leaves in a huff the next morning, guess who calls up later to excitedly announce that he’s landed a job with General Research? Roger, your crazy scheming has paid off again!

Roger’s simple-minded and unconventional solutions to vexing and deep-seated issues are annoying partly because of how unrealistic they are, but mostly because they just aren’t that funny!

And is watching Jimmy Stewart walking weirdly while looking for birds supposed to get me to do anything more than marvel that a legend like Stewart had no problem looking stupid in a pallid movie, all in an attempt to throttle a laugh out of a script already choking on predictability and poor pacing? (John Saxon’s story line was particularly woefully underdeveloped and totally forgotten about for a good chunk of the movie and only explained away as things were wrapping up.)

Stewart and co-star Maureen O’Hara give the film a level of professional respectability it otherwise wouldn’t be worthy of, but in the end, this vacation is no more fun than the one you’d likely have to endure with your own family.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

There isn’t a story per se going on in this one – it’s more of an episodic slice of life affair, detailing a few days in the topsy-turvy life of Merlin Jones, a guy that spends his time driving around town with a helmet containing lots of wires and electrodes on his head.

Things begin at good old Midvale Vocational Institute with Merlin working on a really souped up EEG machine when some wire touches another wire and the next thing you know, Merlin’s helmet is electrified and he’s flopping around like a kid who really does need to wear a helmet.

The next thing you know, Merlin isn’t dead, brain damaged, or even wet his pants, but he has acquired a brand spanking new super power! He can hear other people’s thoughts!

So how long do you think it is before he hears somebody’s thoughts and ends up mistaking what they’re thinking for some type of crime spree they’re planning? About half a day. (He had to try his powers out in the library before he really got down to business.)

But who is this miscreant that’s plotting and scheming all these diamond heists? A judge! But not just any judge – it’s the very judge who has sworn to crack down on all those college inventors that are always running Midvale’s red lights with their EEG helmets and their EKG codpieces on. College inventors just like Merlin Jones!

Merlin eventually convinces the cops that he can read minds, but they still won’t go dig up the judge’s rose bushes to find the diamonds he’s hidden there. Merlin immediately goes to Terror Alert Level 5 and gets girlfriend Jennifer (Annette Funicello) to grab a shovel and head out with him under cover of darkness to start digging the evidence up on his own!

Merlin gets busted for digging up the flowers and everyone goes into the judge’s house where the judge explains that he has all these thoughts about crime and stuff because he is really secretly best-selling crime novelist Lex Fortas.

When it was all done, I was thinking, “well that was pretty good – we had some misunderstandings, some solid gags in the library where everyone was thinking funny stuff, and a kid with a helmet on his head, but you know what would have really elevated Merlin Jones’ game from role-player to franchise player? A chimp!

But how to work the chimp into things? How indeed. Merlin’s science class begins a unit on hypnotism so the second half of the film concentrates on his efforts to hypnotize animals! I couldn’t help but feel like I was witnessing one of the great moments in cinema history when I was watching Tommy Kirk trying to hypnotize a cat.

Next stop is the research lab housing Stanley the chimp, who is being watched by Norman, a football player who is mean to Stanley. Merlin uses his hypnotic powers to get Stanley to “stand up for his rights” and this involves Stanley punching out Norman and causing Norman to go crashing into a bunch of beakers and getting conked on his noggin.

Merlin is brought up on assault charges and the truth comes out about how Norman mistreats Stanley and in the end the judge issues protective orders preventing either Merlin or Norman from harassing Stanley.

After the case is over, the judge smells a good plot for the eagerly awaited next Lex Fortas novel and enlists Merlin and his expertise in hypnotism. The judge wants Merlin to hypnotize him into committing a crime. (“Nothing felonious”, the judge says. “A misdemeanor will do.”)

Following the perhaps not unexpected botched scheme to hypnotize the judge into kidnapping Stanley, Merlin somehow finds himself on trial for the crime instead!

He tells Jennifer in an amusing jail house scene that he is going to try and use an old oriental method of hypnosis that just involves hand gestures and music on the judge in court to get him to recall that he really stole the chimp. I dare you not to snicker when they’re in court and Jennifer is making a kazoo noise with a napkin while Merlin is using all these swami-style hand motions on the judge.

There are enough moments of dopey teen inventor fun here to keep fans of such things mildly satisfied. Kirk is actually pretty good at selling his good natured enthusiasm for his experiments and gets off some nice facial expressions during the stranger occurrences he encounters.

Annette doesn’t have a lot to do in this, other than play the befuddled and put upon gal pal, but she generates some laughs when she’s visiting Merlin in jail and utters every bit of cliched jail conversation you could think of.

The first half of the movie is a bit bland and any yuks you’ll get are mainly in the second half, but it’s like I always say, “a half a movie starring a chimp is always better than a whole movie without a chimp.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

The movie begins with Doris Walker, single crabby mother, in charge of making sure that none of the drunks in the Macy’s parade get carried off by the Underdog balloon and she finds Kris Kringle hassling this drunken Santa Clause. Like all those classic movies where the understudy goes on after the star breaks her leg or is just too much of an alcoholic to perform, Kris steps into the roll on a moment’s notice and does a splendid job.

Doris was also divorced quite some time back, so she pretty much hates the world and manifests this by raising her kid (Susan) not to have any kind of imagination and more importantly not to believe in Santa Claus!

Backstage in the Macy’s locker room, Santa has an encounter with a young janitor named Chucky. Chucky is one of those chubby, ugly do-gooders who likes to dress up as Santa and hand gifts out to the kids at the Y. Santa is all for this, since anything is better than having a drunk run around dressed like you and passing out on parade floats.

Meanwhile there is a guy named Fred who has been sucking up to Susan in an effort to get into her mom’s panties. I know what you guys out there are thinking: There has to be an easier way. Well there isn’t, so just buck up and get interested in Barbie dolls and Holly Hobbie.

Susan and Fred work together to get her frigid, I mean reserved, mom to invite him over for dinner. Susan does her part by asking Doris to let her new buddy Frank come over, but then asks Frank in front of Doris if that was the way he wanted her to do it. You’ve probably already gone ahead and identified this burgeoning relationship as one that is going to need a little help from Santa.

Back at Macy’s, they’ve decided to hire Kris on as the department store Santa, since he comes with his own beard and costume. He immediately shows himself to be one of those Santas that plays by his own rules, by promising kids toys their parents can’t find, then telling the parents to go get them at someplace other than Macy’s, and even by speaking Dutch!

The people at Macy’s are a bit disconcerted that the dude they are paying to move overstocked merchandise (there’s a great scene where the scummy store manager is telling him to push the toys they bought too many of) is sending customers out to places with better deals. Before they can put him on suspension though, the customers tell them that they think it’s great that Macy’s has their best interests at heart and that they will be buying all their stuff at Macy’s from now on! (Unless Santa tells them not to of course.)

The higher ups immediately see this as a wonderful public relations opportunity, but Doris has already gone and fired his fat ass!

Through the machinations of the plot too ridiculous to tell, somehow Santa ends up rooming with Frank. This allows Santa to hang out with Susan and teach her the importance of pretending and stuff. She tells Santa that the only thing she wants for Christmas is a nice home in the suburbs.

Complications arise though when Chucky tells Santa about how he’s not going down to the Y anymore because the store counselor told him that the only reason he did those good deeds is because he has a guilt complex and is trying to make up for the bad stuff he did even though he hasn’t done anything bad at all!

Santa is enraged and he goes off to confront the guy and Santa sets him straight, telling him that he has no business playing his amateur head games with poor little Chucky. Then, just to make sure he’s gotten his point across, he whaps the guy on his head! Santa gets hauled away and he intentionally fails all the tests at the mental hospital because it’s obvious that the world has turned into one giant reindeer turd sandwich!

Frank and Santa decide they there are going to fight the commitment hearing and Frank embarks on an effort to prove Kris Kringle really is Santa.

What’s great about this movie is the underlying cynicism that pervades it. Santa has to go to court to prove he’s real, the only reason the judge declares him to be Santa is because he’s concerned about his decision’s ramifications on his re-election bid and Macy’s only puts up with Kris sending people to other stores, not because it’s the best deal, but because it gives Macy’s good publicity!

Even so the movie was enjoyable and its message that we could all benefit from having a little faith is a good one. Thankfully, Santa is well-played by Gwenn and while his Santa is trying hard to make people believe again, he isn’t about to take any crap either!

Natalie Wood also shines as the kid who desperately wants to believe in spite of what her worthless mother has tried to hammer into her. And when you’ve got a Kris Kringle who’s assaulting people, beating the rap at trial, and most importantly sets you up with a sweet new house in the burbs, it’s not hard to understand how she’s able to learn to get some of that good old fashioned Christmas cheer into her!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Despite that, it’s easy to say that it isn’t nearly the Christmas disaster that their previous snow job, Mickey’s Once Upon A Christmas since this time they manage to include some material that wasn’t generated by their “straight to video” division.

Specifically, you’ve got one short from the fifties featuring Pluto and Mickey Mouse and then you have the A Christmas Carol featurette they did in the early eighties. These two segments are the highlight of the disc, but it’s questionable as to whether their thirty or so minutes of material justify purchasing this.

This particular night at the House of Mouse (Mickey’s nightclub) is Christmas Eve. We arrive just as they’re finishing up for the evening and everyone is preparing to go home, presumably for Christmas. I say presumably because of the make up of the crowd.

The House of Mouse is one of these multicultural clubs where characters from all the past Disney animated films gather to relax. You can see the Beauty And The Beast crowd, the Cinderella crowd, the Mad Hatter, and the likes of Eyeore there. I even saw Pete’s Dragon!

Old Man Winter though has gone and snowed everybody in at the House of Mouse and you know what that means! Time for an all-night show of shows with a distinctly Christmas theme!

Aside from everyone being snowed in and forced to sit through these things (I’m guessing most of them were pretty wasted by the middle of the first segment – I know I was), you have the story line of Donald being all “bah humbug” about the holidays and his best buddy Mickey trying to give him some holiday cheer by torturing him with these stories.

And in fact, Donald (and his three nephews) were the subjects of the first little bit involving the building of a snowman and some problems Donald had ice skating. Crudely animated and indifferently scripted, this tale immediately lost my interest as it became evident that it would merely be one of these cartoons where the characters would get chased around a lot.

The next segment, Pluto’s Christmas Tree is instantly recognizable as coming from an earlier time when some effort was put into the backgrounds of the drawings and the characters looked like they actually had some depth to them and the colors didn’t seem as garish.

To be fair, this cartoon is basically one where Pluto just chased Chip and Dale around Mickey’s Christmas tree. There is actually some imagination here though with bits like a chimpmunk hiding as one of the Santa candles on Mickey’s mantle and Mickey trying to light him up.

Following that is a version of The Nutcracker with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy and it goes on too long and features Donald in mouse ears and buck teeth as the bad guy, making him look Count Duckla.

It’s narrated by John Cleese and they try to go for that “too cool for school” bit where the narrator is a smart aleck who interacts with the characters, but it isn’t terribly smart and certainly isn’t funny.

Finally they get to the meat of this thing and pull out Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Released back in 1983 along with The Rescuers re-release, it ended up being nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short category.

Also making appearances are Donald, Goofy, Daisy, Minnie, Jiminy Cricket, Uncle Scrooge, and even the evil Pete! This is a pretty quick and dirty retelling of Dickens’ story and its twenty five or so minutes go by really fast.

The animation looks good, there’s actually a story, all-star cast, and no horrible musical numbers to mar the Christmas action. A definite winner.

Once Scrooge gets finished becoming warm and fuzzy, we make one more unwelcome trip back to the House of Mouse and everything is wrapped up with one of the worst sugary songs about the season or giving or friendship or whatever that I’ve ever had the displeasure to endure.

Obviously, your enjoyment of Mickey’s Magical Christmas will depend on your tolerance for the stuff on it that stinks, but if you’re just interested in seeing Mickey’s Christmas Carol, you’re best bet is to hunt down Mickey Mouse in Living Color – Volume 2 where you can see it in all its widescreen glory.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

And if that seems like a decidedly un-Christmas-y spirit to be in, then you haven’t endured this cheaply made, cynical holiday cash in, particularly the segment featuring Goofy and his extreme sport loving son Max.

First up though was a tale featuring Donald Duck and his three delinquent nephews. While strictly average and sporting a story as familiar as the Christmas Day that Huey, Dewey, and Louie are forced to relive over and over, this is the most entertaining part of the movie, though you’re left wishing that the writers had worked a little more imagination into their retread story.

Basically, this is the same concept behind the movie Groundhog Day. The kids wake up on Christmas, play with their presents and have a high old time all day and at the end of the day, one of them wishes upon a star that Christmas didn’t have to end.

This results are predictable: Initially, the three of them are excited about this Twilight Zone-ish development, but rapidly grow bored (didn’t they realize they’d be opening the same crappy presents every day for eternity?) and grow to dread seeing Chip and Dale playing with their new train in their tree house every morning, just like the audience in Groundhog Day grew to dread hearing Sonny and Cher on Bill Murray’s radio every morning.

Sure, they try to freshen things up as the Christmases pile up, but their efforts aren’t terribly impressive. (The only thing they could come up with to avoid their tubby aunt’s kisses was to get dressed up in scuba gear?)

They also replace Daisy’s cooked turkey with a live turkey and this ends up with Donald’s house completely wrecked and Christmas ruined. The boys feel real bad about this and resolve to make the next Christmas Day the best ever.

Uh, why would they feel bad? Wouldn’t every thing be back to normal the next morning? Why the sudden attack of conscience in a world where actions no longer have any consequences because you get a do-over the very next day?

For whatever reason (probably so that all the bratty kids watching will learn some kind of lesson) Huey, Dewey, and Louie finally figure out that a strictly secular Christmas experience isn’t just about getting lots of crappy toys, but is in fact about giving.

While that one was okay and left you wishing that someone had cared enough to add some originality to that worn out, but intriguing idea (surely kids that could live the same day over and over and over would do more than use their toys to make Donald drop breakfast, especially since he did that anyway on the original Christmas), the next story involving Goofy and Max makes you wonder just how punishing the full length movies these two were in (A Goofy Movie, An Extremely Goofy Movie) were.

The story in this one is that Max wants a fancy snow board for Christmas from Santa, but once Pete, his jerk neighbor tells him there isn’t any Santa Clause, he loses his faith that there really is a Santa and more importantly, becomes convinced that he won’t get his precious snow board.

It’s up to Goofy to restore Max’s faith in Santa, though good parenting would dictate that it was up to Goofy to tell Max to quit being such a freaking cry baby and that if your entire existence is based around whether you get a free snow board, then you’re seriously maladjusted.

The final episode is a bit of a letdown since it’s only run of the mill boring. It’s Mickey and Minnie in their version of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”. We all know how this one goes down: each of them sells their prized possession to get the other a gift related to the prized possession the other has just sold.

Kids who aren’t familiar with the story might be interested, but for everyone else, there’s nothing new in this version save the crappy Christmas songs that Mickey plays incessantly on his prized harmonica. (You’re just counting the minutes until he has to sell that obnoxious thing.)

In addition to the lackluster stories involved in this thing, the animation featured is likewise lackluster, showing all the effort that Disney’s cartoons churned out for television do. Flat, ugly, and generally looking dashed off, any company that actually had some pride in having a reputation for quality animation would be embarrassed to let this out with its name on it or featuring its characters. The best bit of artwork in this thing is the cover of the DVD, but since that’s all you see until you give them your cash, that’s all they probably care about.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

I gave the film credit though for going easy on the very senior Mr. Flynn since it was all wrapped up in slightly under an hour and half. This allowed him to only gasp, sweat, and wheeze his way through three or four sword fights, a number that his insurance company probably demanded as an absolute ceiling.

Early on, the film desperately tries to establish that Errol is still a guy with a lot of gas in his tank by showing us that he’s a womanizer and a gambler and quick to saddle up to fight in some ill-fated Scottish rebellion. I don’t think you have to be a history major to realize that you’re probably going to want to sit this rebellion out when it all starts with guys in dresses running around shrieking that “Bonnie Prince Charlie is back! Bonnie Prince Charlie is back!”

Flynn plays Jamie Durrisdeer, the first born son of a Scottish lord and a guy that went off to fight in the rebellion. Once Jamie comes back, he and his brother Henry make arrangements to get smuggled out of the country since all the guys who fought the Brits are going to be executed once captured.

One of Jamie’s ex-girlfriends hears of the plan and double crosses them getting Jamie shot in the process. Jamie immediately blames his brother and even though he’s just been shot, challenges him to a sword fight. Somehow or other Jamie ends up with a knife in him and you can bet that’s he’s going to blame Henry for that, too. Especially since Henry stabbed him and all!

Jamie makes his escape and Henry decides to just let everyone think that the British killed Jamie in that drive-by that went down ten minutes before the brother vs. brother knife fight. Did I mention that Jamie also has a wife that he asked Henry to “look after”? I guess she comes with the castle or something.

Jamie and his Irish buddy Francis sail on a smuggler’s boat to Tortuga Bay where all the really cool pirates are hanging out in 1746. Flynn is able to display flashes of what made him so great in his earlier pirate adventures – that combination of humor and dangerousness that we expect in our buccaneers.

When a pirate ship captained by a French guy rams the smuggler’s boat, Errol takes the opportunity not to fight the pirates but to fight the smuggler captain instead! We are told by the narrator that the captain of the pirate ship is a “French dandy” and by golly if that ain’t the truth!

The movie may not be much more than a forgettable pirate adventure elevated by the fading presence of Flynn, but you get some real laughs when during the big battle between the smugglers and the pirates, the French Dandy is watching Flynn fence with the smuggler and is shouting tips to Flynn about the proper fighting style.

Jamie and Francis eventually head back to Scotland. I was never entirely sure just what sort of plan Jamie had in mind since he was still wanted by the British for his treasonous behavior.

Then as I watched him make his entrance at a party his brother was having to celebrate his engagement to Jamie’s wife while the British military guys are there as guests I realized that maybe this was going to be one of those “I’ll beat my brother’s ass for trying to kill me, stealing my woman, and turning traitor and go from there” kind of plans that makes all kinds of sense right before you do it, but whose failings become apparent to you once you’re in lockdown facing execution in the morning.

But that just goes to show you what a dummy I am in these things because by the time it’s all said and done, Jamie and his brother make up, Jamie and Francis escape through a tunnel in a fireplace, Jamie’s narc ex-girlfriend redeems herself, and Jamie and his wife end up together again!

The movie has a very rushed feel and resorts to the narrator to move things along with a minimum of action, especially in the early going. The brevity of the movie also means that Flynn’s pirate career here lasted about twenty minutes and involved one stolen galleon.

Flynn is certainly one of the great cinema action heroes (see The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, and The Sea Hawk for instance) and it’s sad to watch him going through the motions when he’s so clearly past his prime, but he still has a few moments that keep this one from being a total waste of time.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Mercenary For Justice is all about highlighting the best of Seagal’s recent oeuvre of little-seen action flicks where the budgets consist of two items – Seagal (and his army of stand-ins, stuntmen, dubbers, and guys that make his full length leather trench coats) and ammo – and taking it to the next level! An example would be the big fight in the restaurant bathroom.

A lot of cheesy low rent merc movies would use the toilet to give the bad guy a swirlie. That’s what it’s there for, right? And make no mistake, Seagal is a pro and it isn’t long before he’s taking a break from snapping various joints and ramming this dude’s head into mirrors to give him nice hard dunking. But Seagal has trained in the Far East and knows the secrets of the ancient masters so he chucks this dumb bastard into the urinals as well!

Steve knows though that part of any good potty fight is selling it once it’s finished. Just as he’s finished thrashing and flushing this loser, one of the mercs he was at dinner with comes in and surveys the damage. Steve’s response? “That’s work.”

Then he goes on to ask the other merc if he’s from Detroit and wouldn’t you know it but Steve is a Michigan boy as well and let’s go get a drink and Steve’s buying, etc. And to make sure you get the full sense what sort of movie we’re dealing with, the other merc’s name is Bulldog.

As all the classic merc movies do, this one starts with a mission gone tits up the to the moon! The only reason Steve was willing to go on the mission was because his good buddy Radio asked him to.

Considering the mess that Radio gets Steve into, this may be the same Radio from that movie about the retarded football player named Radio. It goes without saying that the no name dude playing Radio in this movie is a much better actor than Cuba Gooding, Jr.

So just what sort of crazy-assed mission has Radio signed us up for? Well, after Steve singled-handedly tore up Uruguay in Submerged, Poland in Out Of Reach and Las Vegas in Today You Die, he finds himself fighting the French army in the island nation of Galmoral!

While Galmoral sounds a bit like the sort of place that you would expect to see Seagal using his kung fu on hobbits and orcs, it’s really just some African cesspool that needs liberating from some despot or other.

Now while Seagal himself wasn’t the one that kidnapped the French ambassador, his wife, children and staff and he also wasn’t the one who blew their truck up sending their shattered bodies into the Galmoralian sky, they were members of his merc team.

Just so you don’t think Seagal condones that sort of behavior, he does threaten to kill the crazy South Africans who did it. He ultimately decides against it, but you can bet there was probably a pretty stern lecture in the helicopter as they were escaping the war zone.

It turns out the mission was done at the behest of some crooked CIA types and Seagal and his crew were left hung out to dry. Radio buys the farm on the mission and Seagal stupidly promises to take care of Radio’s wife and kid. It isn’t more than ten minutes later before Radio’s family gets kidnapped so that Seagal will be forced to take on one more merc mission, this time to bust a Greek arms dealer’s son out of a South African prison!

And not just any prison, but one that is described as not quite as tough as Leavenworth, but certainly the toughest in South Africa! And they have only four days to get the job done before the Greek is extradited to the U.S. You can practically sense Seagal yawning. “Four days? Hell, I just broke out of a U.S. prison in Today You Die and it took like two minutes!”

As it turns out, Seagal wasn’t going to be busting into any scuzzy foreign prison! While the crazy South Africans are breaking into the prison, Seagal is safely ensconced in some high tech bank breaking into their computer system!

But don’t think Steve is missing out on any action. He hangs around the bank making all sorts of transactions for so long that the cops finally catch on and start shooting. Guess who ends up walking out of the bank smiling while stepping over about fifty bodies?

Seagal is the picture of the professional merc throughout the film. Every ten minutes when his boss figures out Steve’s latest double cross, he threatens to kill Radio’s family, but Seagal blows him off, blithely announcing he needs “proof of life” before he can take any further action on the mission.

At the end of the movie, he lets his boss drive off prompting complaints from the surviving mercs including a comment regarding the boss’s less than manly personality. Seagal responds, “I thought he had an explosive personality.” Then he pushes the detonator in his hand and blows up his boss inside his car leaving Seagal to chuckle and remark “I said ‘had’!” That Seagal was always the class clown at merc school!

© 2010 MonsterHunter

One desert raid and princess kidnapping later and we are finally delivered from our beefcakeless bondage! Goliath (Peter Lupus as Rock Stevens) arrives on scene sporting muscle tits so mammoth they were easily the eighth and ninth wonders of the ancient world!

All over smooth and rocking a luscious blue tunic that gave proper respect to man tit number one and two as well as the two redwoods that were his legs, Goliath immediately accepts the assignment to go deep undercover and rescue the princess!

There’s quite a bit of political intrigue with spies, different alliances and armies marching here and there and even the most ardent of muscleman maniacs have to admit that it slows the movie down, especially in the second half, but there’s more than enough of Goliath and his gorgeous gluts grunting and grasping other guys to keep your grip on things!

Goliath doesn’t waste anytime wading into an ocean of available men either! After first meeting with the good king, Goliath is told to go get some rest. So he heads to the tavern! Where they hate outsiders!

As soon as he walks in, you’ll be sizing up all the tables, chairs, and railings for imminent destruction! And you can’t blame Goliath! He just wants to sit down and have a drink, but the patrons treat him like he has cooties!

What follows can only be described as entirely predictable and undoubtedly awesome! It’s Goliath against fifty guys with Goliath adopting a strategy that sees him go with a hand to hand approach and then as he gets loosened up, transitions to using giant chunks of table.

By the end of things, Goliath has got this ugly look on his face and was just swinging a huge plank of wood at whomever was stupid enough to blunder within reach!

Goliath heads off on his secret mission the next morning, but the idea of him going undercover seemed suspect considering the fact that a tall, tan rippling Rock Hudson look-alike in a cape wasn’t exactly the sort of costume that blends in on the streets of Middle Eastern city.

It all worked out though when he happened upon a group of gladiators wrestling each other in the street! Is this heaven? No, it’s Damascus!

Goliath stands in the audience watching with evident appreciation, smiling and raising his eyebrows as these big dudes in brown briefs played grab ass while people bet on the outcome of the match.

Unable to contain himself, Goliath offers to wrestle the champ in an effort to win some money back for a guy he needs to talk to about his mission. But is this guy a double agent?

No time to worry about that small detail because Goliath’s next step in his big plan is to follow a bad guy across the desert to the cave hideout of the evil tribe that has imprisoned the princess.

He gains their trust by beating them all up and going on a mission for them to capture the prince that was going to be married to the princess. Then he goes on another mission to deliver a message to Thor in Damascus!

When these people aren’t yakking about all the alliances and schemes, they’re sending poor old Goliath all over on what amounts to a very dry and dusty scavenger hunt! Goliath never evidences any wear and tear, but the viewer sure does! Let’s get back to Goliath flexing some poor bastards into Jahannam!

And then like an oasis to a man dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara, the phrase “Pass of Death” is uttered and Goliath is charged with his most action-packed mission yet: leading a small team of men to hold the Pass of Death against the charging cavalry of the bad guys!

And his team of men? All the gladiators from Goliath’s days as a street wrestler earlier in the film! Goliath ups the ante by putting on a disguise so he can beat up the very tribe he is supposed to be working for! Much carnage ensues, highlighted by several walls of fire used to keep the cavalry trapped!

Even if Goliath isn’t, the movie is pretty much blown up by this point and director Domenico Paolella (Hercules Against the Mongols) can barely muster up much of a final battle with Goliath getting all his friends killed in a rather silly charge against the walls of Damascus.

Goliath doesn’t even get the main event showdown with Thor! The old good king gets that and it’s brief and completely forgettable.

Whatever the movie’s faults (too long, too slow, Goliath never tied up or whipped), you can’t fault Goliath. Whenever he and his jacked up jugs are given the chance, he’s working hard at brawling and being strong and stuff.

Solid Middle East sword and sandal with nice locations. And Goliath even manages to take part of the statue of the bad guys’ god and stabs their leader with it! Guess your god should have spent some time in the gym like Goliath, huh?

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Who needs that boring old Kenpo anyway when you’re fighting a killer satellite thousands of miles above the Earth? What? Speakman vs. killer satellite? This will surely be a Memorial Day we will never forget!

Except that even though they mentioned Memorial Day about three times in the movie, I still had no idea what it had do with anything or why the movie was titled Memorial Day except that maybe they tricked the government into letting them shoot some scenes at Arlington by pretending it was a film to honor our war dead. And in a way it did honor the dead. The dead careers of several people involved that is.

There’s Bruce Weitz who is best known for playing Mick Belker in Hill Street Blues a thousand years ago. He plays Speakman’s old mentor Jules. Throughout the film, the main heavy is referred to as Number One and his identity is not disclosed until near the end of the film.

As soon as the movie begins we assume that Number One is really Jules and that he’s going to pull the ultimate double cross on his old pal Speakman. And we assume correctly. Thanks, dogbreath.

The part of General Willard is played by Paul Mantee. It was his last role and he was the star of the infinitely superior Robinson Crusoe On Mars.

You’ve also got the female lead, whose main skill is her funny-looking nose and a complete lack of screen presence that’s nicely complimented by Speakman’s own lack of screen presence.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking Speakman. He’s doing what he’s asked to, running up and down stairs, rappelling from the ceiling, punching guys in the balls, and shooting all comers. It’s just that he seems to have two emotions: perturbed and mildly perturbed.

He does show more range than someone like Steven Seagal since he’s wearing a leather jacket in this one while he wore a jean jacket in The Expert. He also quotes Shakespeare a lot in this movie. There’s really nothing better than having the Bard’s words shoehorned in amongst the banal action dialogue about conspiracies, the Agency, and Space Shuttle launches.

The premise of the film is one of those stupidly complicated plots designed solely for the purpose of having Speakman trying to save the United States from rogue agents intent on getting bigger budgets for their intelligence operations.

With the Cold War having ended, defense expenditures are being slashed and departments are being downsized. Jules gets the idea to create a fake terrorist group to scare the country into increasing the funding and powers of the groups he’s involved with.

He aims to do this by using a secret killer satellite to blow up stuff like a space station, a submarine, and the place in Hawaii that built the satellite in the first place.

Seven years before all of this, Speakman found out about the satellite and tattled to the media. The agency discredited him as a marine with mental problems and had him locked up in an insane asylum for the next seven years. And it wasn’t one of those nice asylums where you sit in the garden all day soaking up the sun and watching nurses. This was one of those asylums where the doctors would give you shock therapy and say “no pain, no gain!”

Apparently having this stuff blown up wasn’t sufficient for Jules because the next part of his plan involved brainwashing Speakman into assassinating a presidential candidate who was unwittingly aiding Jules in this whole fake terrorist scheme.

But what Jules didn’t count on was that he was going to have Speakman try to assassinate this guy while he was being interviewed by the very same pig-nosed reporter that Speakman squealed to all those years before!

Seeing her jogs Speakman’s real memory and he doesn’t kill the guy, thus setting the stage for about an hour of Speakman running around steam tunnels and killing Jules’ thugs.

The movie also suffers from way too much non-Speakman time. How many interviews between Pig Nose and the presidential candidate did we have to sit through? Three or four? I thought I was watching Meet the Press!

Even worse were all the cutaways to Number One and his general buddy where they discussed how nefarious their scheme was. I’m not really looking for two old guys sitting around a darkened conference room rehashing their idiotic plans every ten minutes during what is supposed to be a Jeff Speakman vs. killer satellite movie!

Recommended if you just fast forward to Speakman’s way too infrequent outbursts of violence. Watching on normal speed will leave the viewer asking “O Speakman, Speakman! Wherefore art thou Speakman?”

© 2010 MonsterHunter

As is to be expected in this kind of film, the lovable grandfather comes through and lends his tuxedo to the young man. I’m not sure what it says about Judy’s date that he would have the same build as a seventy year old man, but this was back in olden times where chicks actually wore corsets instead of letting their beer bellies hang over the fraying elastic waistband of their stretch pants like so many of St. Louis’ women do today.

Judy Garland plays Esther Smith, the second child in a family of four, snobbish, social climbing, and whining daughters. The Smiths have it rough, what with their father being a fancy lawyer and only having one maid and all, but somehow they make it through the hard times, their hearts kept warm with the knowledge that the World’s Fair will be opening up in their neighborhood the next year.

Esther is hung up on John Truitt, a generic dude that lives next door and that she pines after for no good reason. When Esther isn’t singing about how much she loves John Truitt or how much she enjoys riding trolley cars, the movie focuses on her kid sister, Tootie.

Tootie is about five years old is one of those precocious movie tots that gets into all kinds of mischief like singing drinking songs at Esther’s parties, throwing flour in the face of mean neighbors and derailing trolley cars.

Tootie gets herself all busted up in the big trolley car crack up and immediately begins selling the idea that it was John Truitt that inflicted the injuries upon her by beating her up. Aside from the fact that Tootie is the coolest five year old you ever saw outside of a juvenile detention center, you have to really question Esther as she swallows this line of malarkey and marches on over to John Truitt’s house to teach him a lesson.

The best part of Tootie’s story is that I don’t think she ever came out with a discernible motive as to why Truitt laid her out like the five year old girl she was. Esther goes over there and assaults John, then comes back and finds out that maybe Tootie was not being entirely truthful about it. Initially she’s mad at Tootie because she caused Esther to go beat up her true love, but since this is a feel-good movie about small town dummies, they all have a good laugh about the incident in pretty short order.

The real drama occurs when daddy Smith comes home one night and announces that he has just gotten a kick ass lawyering job in New York City!

Everyone else in the family looks at him like he cut a smelly Kansas City fart! Immediately all the women prattle on about how they simply can’t move to the City because Rose is graduating and needs to find someone dumb enough to marry her, Esther is going to be a senior, but most of all because St. Louis is going to have the World’s Freaking Fair!

Naturally, this causes Tootie to suffer a complete emotional breakdown. It all happens when she gets sad around Christmas time about leaving St. Louis. She throws a classic temper tantrum that involves her bashing a bunch of completely fake snowmen that the family had built earlier.

Esther comforts her and they get her all settled down and the old man eventually realizes that having five or six women (depending on if you count the maid who doesn’t know her place) pissed at you when you’re trying to start a new job, just isn’t worth the professional opportunity and advancement you would be gaining, so he announces that they are in fact staying in St. Louis, causing real New Yorkers everywhere to breathe a sigh of relief.

The movie then peters out as they go to the World’s Fair and everyone creams their pantaloons over the gaudy lights that adorn the exhibit halls.

The musical numbers include a variety of slow songs I couldn’t remember (I did recall the title tune, that horribly cheesy Trolley Song, and the classic Christmas song) and the fact that they tried to “integrate” the music into the movie meant you didn’t get any big show stopping production numbers.

There’s some rather bland hoe-down style dancing and the closest thing you get to a memorable song and dance number is when Esther and Tootie team up with hats and canes to do some kind of cake walk. (You’re not really going to count the number where they just lurched back and forth on that fake trolley are you?)

The story is just too thin to support this film for almost two hours. Slice of life movies tend to be episodic (read: meandering), but things of some interest need to occur regularly. Nothing much really happened to this family that I felt like I needed to see.

Garland is a pro, but the material she has here is over-rated, over-ripe, gooey Americana that turns you off more than makes you nostalgic with its absurdly unrealistic view of life at the beginning of the 20th Century. It felt like it was more a product of the St. Louis Area Chamber of Commerce rather than an actual motion picture.

© 2010 MonsterHunter