1988 science fiction movieRating: 15/20
Plot: An unemployed former wrestler exchanges his kilt for jeans and looks for a construction job. While crashing at an urban campground for the homeless, he stumbles onto a sort of rebellion centered in a small church. The government comes with powerful bulldozers, and the former wrestler finds a nifty pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the truth. He runs out of bubblegum.
The famous "I'm all out of bubblegum," "You know, you look like your head fell on the cheese dip back in 1957" (I rewound to hear this one three times to make sure I caught it correctly), "Mama don't like tattletales," and "And who are you, little fellow" are all lines that show what happens when you let Roddy Roddy Piper write his own dialogue. And no, I do not mean that as a criticism! It's taking the whole 1980's action movie one-liner thing, something I've always blamed on Arnold Schwarzennegar, to its logical crux. I just love what John Carpenter does with a limited budget here. The glasses effects are eerily fantastic, the switch to black and white and those expressionless alien faces combined with the subliminal messages make for some classic sci-fi horror with, more than likely, some heavy-handed satire. Personally, I don't mind heavy-handed satire. What does annoy me are action movie cliches, and this has more than a few of them as well as what is probably the longest and most absurd scene of extended fisticuffs in science fiction movie history. I think the fight between Piper and the black guy was probably longer than most of Roddy Roddy's wrestling matches though not, if I'm remembering correctly from back when I watched WWF wrestling (its golden age, in my opinion), nearly as long as some of his speeches. Piper, to be honest, makes the transition from ring to movie role much more smoothly than I expected. He plays Average Joe just fine and his action hero chops are as good as any other 80's superstar they would have thrown in there. Pretty cool sci-fi flick with several great scenes and a few that need to be reconsidered or completely removed before they do a remake of this in a few years, probably with Vin Diesel.
3 comments:
you need to see roddy piper in it's always sunny...
There's is probably no excuse for me liking this as much as I did, and I should probably watch it again to validate the 16 I would give it. I remember it as a fun action film with a charistmatic lead.
Right, this should not be as good as it is and Roddy Piper should not be as good as he is. You take individual pieces of this and try to put them together in your head and it doesn't work.
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