Stupid Movies That I Love - They Live

They Live is John Carpenter at his angriest. In this movie he rails against modern society and its consumer led culture and while it has a powerful idea, it never really fulfils its promise. Still, despite the story's shortcomings and pacing issues, They Live contains some excellent ideas and scenes that have made it a firm favourite of mine.

Rowdy Roddy Piper (yes, the wrestler) plays Nada, a drifter who arrives in Los Angeles looking for work and a place to stay for the night. Nada meets up with a cardboard city community of other drifters and down on their luck cases and it's here that Nada becomes embroiled in a conspiracy. After a ruthless attack by riot police on the homeless community of LA Nada escapes with a box full of sunglasses. Nada tries on a pair and discovers that the world is not what it seems...



Nada realises that he is effectively a stranger in his own land when he sees that he is surrounded by aliens disguised as normal people. Nada reacts in the only sensible way available, he goes on an alien killing spree. When that doesn't work he joins with the human resistance to end the alien menace once and for all.

It's clear that Carpenter was pretty pissed off at American society when he wrote the screenplay and there's a constant sense of despair and anger throughout the movie. Each character seems to be either struggling to make ends meet or is a secret member of the rich elite, looking to profit from mankind's physical and economic suffering. Earth is treated as an easily exploited third world country by the occupying alien force.

Despite the downbeat tone of the film there are some fantastically silly scenes as Nada gets into fights with aliens and other humans that he's trying to convince of the alien threat. Watch the movie below and see one of the greatest fights committed to film - please note that this fight began because Roddy Piper insisted that Keith David put on a pair of sunglasses:



When worn, the sunglasses vision turns the movie black and white replaces all advertising signs, TVs, and magazines into stark white signs that contain commands such as OBEY, SLEEP, CONSUME. The scenes where Nada wanders the streets of LA with his glasses on are chilling and contrast well with the sunny, advertising covered, colour scenes throughout the rest of the movie.

They Live influence has been felt through the genre since its release in 1988. I'm sure that They Live influenced Valve's Half Life 2 as the alien Combine in that game have a similar goal and plan to the aliens in They Live. Both want to subjugate and dominate the human race in order to use them as a slave race, they both attempt to change Earth's climate to suit their own needs, and both alien races have technology that is far in advance of our own. Unfortunately, They Live even influenced a Simpson's computer game - Bart Vs The Space Mutants. Check out the intro to the game:



*Sigh* I remember that into being amazing when it was first released. Time has not been kind...

Anyway, They Live is a B-Movie classic that introduces an interesting take on the Invasion of the Body Snatchers theme. What if the aliens had already invaded and we had already surrendered? What if we were blissfully unaware that we had already lost the war? Obviously we need wrestlers with mullets and sunglasses to save the day.

Stupid Films That I Love - Event Horizon

This instalment of SFTIL features a Paul WS Anderson movie, Event Horizon. No, wait, come back! It's really quite good. You see, years before Mr Anderson made a mess of Alien Vs Predator (and the Resident Evil franchise, and made a movie where Kurt Russell says bugger all), he made an entertaining horror movie.

Event Horizon stars Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne (who admittedly seems to sleepwalk his way through this movie) as a scientist and spaceship captain, respectively. Their mission is to travel to Neptune to retrieve a missing ship, the Event Horizon, that has returned to the solar system after spending seven years missing. Laurence Fishburne and his crew of stock characters travel to Neptune where they discover the price the Event Horizon crew paid for meddling with black holes.

Needless to say things do not go well for the intrepid crew of stock characters (look, it's Sean Pertwee playing a gruff cockney! Oh, and over there is the wisecracking crewman who gets all the catchphrases! If you peek around the corner you can see the inexperienced crewman who will do something stupid and get into trouble! And there's the guy who works for the government and therefore cannot be trusted!) The ship seems to be possessed and has it in for the retrieval team, cue lots of dark, space corridor porn and loud bursts of sound designed to make you jump.



Despite its faults there's a lot going for Event Horizon. The ship itself has an interesting design, especially the engine room with its pool of coolant and spherical gravity drive. The effects work is good (the shots of the space station orbiting Earth and the Event Horizon orbiting Neptune are great) and the technology looks solid and largely plausible. The stock characters are entertaining in their own sub-Alien way and Sam Neill puts in a fun performance as the scientist who, SPOILER - goes a bit loopy and serial killerish.

I have to mention the soundtrack, it's a combination of Michael Kamen and Orbital and it works very well. The blending of traditional orchestra sounds with techno elements creates a pulsing soundtrack that gives the Event Horizon an ominous, growling, pulsing heart beat.

Event Horizon is a fun B-movie and, as with all the Stupid Films That I Love, not an example of cinema as high art but it is an enjoyable and occasionally frightening way of spending an hour and forty minutes. Also, the film ends with a Prodigy tune over the credits which always scores bonus points in my book.

"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."

Stupid Films That I Love - Big Trouble In Little China

Big Trouble in Little China (or BTiLC) is a comedy rollercoaster action movie where the hero, Jack Burton, is an incompetent, swaggering, truck driver. If you’ve never seen BTiLC then I’ll try and explain what the film is about without sending myself mad. Jack Burton (trucker extraordinaire) visits an old friend in San Francisco China Town and becomes embroiled in a mystical adventure when his friend’s bride-to-be is kidnapped by a street gang. Shit gets unreal when Jack hits a sorcerer called Dave with his truck. There’s a lot of running around, guys on wires, guys shouting into camera, facekicks, a journey into the Underworld, and guns and explosions in that special 80s way where people get catapulted into the air by explosions and automatic weaponry always misses its target at less than 10 feet. The story is also told in flashback but the flashback doesn’t actually frame the story from beginning to end, and it doesn’t really make sense as a framing device as the character telling the story wasn’t present for most of it. The faults don’t matter though as the film is infused with so much energy and enthusiasm that you just feel yourself going along for the ride and forgiving the plot holes.



Jack Burton is played by Kurt Russell, who, after his hard bitten heroics in other Jack Carpenter movies (The Thing and Escape From New York), clearly relishes playing an action man that isn’t quite as capable as he believes. Jack Burton is a trucker, drifting from town to town whilst broadcasting his philosophical pearls of wisdom over a CB radio. Jack likes to think he can handle anything and sees himself as very capable; the great thing is that he isn’t and a lot of the fun in the movie is seeing Jack overcome obstacles through dumb luck and pluck. Jack's bumbling makes his act of genuine skill at the climax of the film all the more enjoyable.

BTiLC is full of great quotes and one liners, almost all of them given to Kurt Russell. The quotes from the movie are so popular, certain blogs have featured them as the sole content in a post. BTiLC quotes entered my teenage nerd lexicon as my friends and I would often quote movies during games and BTiLC was a source of quite a few of them. God, we were annoying.

The special effects are a little creaky in comparison to today’s modern CGI creations but that’s part of the charm. The slightly dodgy effects and costumes give the movie an almost theatre-like feel and add to the action-movie-as-pantomime atmosphere. I especially like the temple draped in neon (complete with giant neon skull) which is something I haven’t seen in an evil cult’s lair since. The flying eyeball monster is still cool though.



BTiLC is a unique film; there’s never been anything quite like it since (probably due to its failure at the box office.) What’s interesting is that the story was initially conceived as a Western with Jack Burton as a wandering Clint Eastwood type. Now that’s a movie I would love to see.

Stupid Films That I Love - Demolition Man

The next film in the stupid but great collection is Stallone’s 1993 opus, Demolition Man. It stars Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Denis Leary, Rob Schneider, and erm, Nigel Hawthorne. Bit of backstory here, I actually won a local newspaper competition to see this movie when I was 15. I won a pair of tickets and a Demolition Man beret. Yes, a beret. I never did summon up the courage to wear the beret in public as I was too busy wearing my military deerstalker (with Judge Dredd badge stuck on one side, fashion fans!). So there is some nostalgic value to this film, not a great deal, it’s not like I placed the beret in a special display cabinet or dedicated 1993 as the year of the Demolition Man beret and Simon Phoenix haircut.

Talk of berets aside, Demolition Man is the story of supercop John Spartan and his feud with criminal Simon Phoenix (got to love the over the top character names, they’ve been a big influence when choosing names for my own fictional creations). The movie starts in the near future (now the recent past to us) as Los Angeles has become a war zone due to gang warfare. Simon Phoenix (played by Wesley Snipes) is a super criminal whose amazing plan seems to be kidnapping school buses and ransoming them off. Having watched The Wire, I’m not convinced that Phoenix’s business model is sustainable in the long term, I mean stealing a school bus is something you could only pull off a couple of times surely? John Spartan doesn’t approve of kidnapping school kids so he decides to singlehandedly infiltrate Phoenix ’s lair and bring him to justice.

Spartan’s plan doesn’t go well and it ends with both him and Phoenix sentenced to several decades of cryogenic jail time. Decades later Phoenix and Spartan are thawed out to continue their feud in a more civilised and sterilised future age. Wacky hi-jinks ensue as the two men from the past use brutal methods unseen by the peaceful future inhabitants of San Angeles.

This is a culture shock movie with lashings of comedy violence, it’s actually quite dark in places but you’re never shown anything explicitly nasty directly on screen. The film has a pretty decent cast for a mainstream comedy action movie, Wesley Snipes is great fun as Phoenix as he clearly delights in his crimes. Stallone as Spartan is pretty much playing the clichéd maverick cop who DOESN’T HAVE TIME FOR RULES DAMMIT but uses his charisma to make it work. Sandra Bullock appears in one of her early main character roles in a big budget movie and she does her usual job of being the sexy girl/future cop next door. Rob Schneider is well, Rob Schneider. I assume his performance in this movie is why he was cast as comedy sidekick Fergie in the Judge Dredd film a couple of years later. Oh yeah, Jesse Ventura is in it too!



Demolition Man is an inoffensive movie with a simple message about corruption in paradise and a warning about over reliance on technology. One of my favourite ongoing jokes is the constant fines levied by a faceless but omnipresent computer whenever John Spartan swears. It’s not ground breaking but it is a lot of fun, the action sequences are well done and quite imaginative in places and the future world is well realised, if pretty silly. This is a stupid but endearing action movie that obviously won’t tax the brain but will leave you entertained.

Here's the trailer:

Stupid Films That I Love – Crank

This is a new feature and much like My Favourite Episodes it will focus on something I like, namely films that are stupid but that I love all the same. It will probably appear once in a blue moon just like My Favourite Episodes. I am nothing if not unpredictable.

The first movie up is from the Jason Statham brand – Crank.



Crank is very, very, stupid and silly. Do not begin watching this movie expecting a work of art, a discussion of the human spirit, or a story of the triumph of the human soul. Expect violence, bad language, car chases, gun play and Amy Smart in a summer dress. It’s best to regard this film as a live action version of Grand Theft Auto with better dialogue.

Jason Statham is the improbably named Chev Chelios, he is a cockney assassin living in Los Angeles (this is never explained but I guess it’s because Jason Statham’s American accent is awful and his natural cockney accent is funny when heard in conjunction with American antagonists). Chev has made enemies amongst the Latino gangs and they have poisoned him with some “Chinese shit,” a toxin which will eventually slow his heart down to a complete stop and kill him. Chev discovers that if he keeps his adrenaline pumping his heart won’t stop and he won’t die, so he embarks on a heart pumping rampage across the city – will he find a cure, gain revenge on his enemies, and finally confess to his girlfriend that he’s not really a computer game programmer?

Now you’ve just read the synopsis and you’re probably thinking to yourself, “that sounds like absolute crap” and that’s exactly what I thought before I watched Crank. I was wrong. Dead wrong. Crank has a wicked sense of humour running throughout the movie and a tongue so far in cheek that it’s burst through the skin and is waggling around manically. The film starts with the movie title rendered in lurid 8 bit graphics, giving a large hint at what is to come – fun, violent, fun.

It’s clear that everyone is having a great time in this film, Statham maintains a manic cockney menace throughout, Amy Smart is a ditzy stoner chick oblivious to events around her, and every bit part player is a memorable character from the Haitian cab driver that constantly talks about drugs made from “plant shit” while berating Chev and calling him a crackhead, to the male nurse forced at gunpoint to shock Chev with a defibrillator paddle.

The story itself isn't particularly complex as it's standard revenge fare. What is interesting is Chev's rampage throughout L.A and his effect on everyone he meets. At one point Chev even takes a break from the plot to ride a stolen police motorbike through the streets while he comes down from a massive adrenalie shot that he took earlier. To use the old saying, it's not the destination - it's the journey.



Crank is great entertainment. I'm not advocating it as the greatest film ever made, heck, it's not even the greatest action movie ever made but it is one of the most enjoyable. Next time you're feeling a little down, give Crank a watch and it'll cheer you right up.

Here's the trailer but be warned that for some reason they decided to remove almost all traces of humour from it. Fortunately they rectified this mistake for Crank 2...