The Great, The Lame, And The Ugly

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching one movie a night for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condo into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

This isn't going to be pretty: some of the titles being discussed here rank among the most hysterically lame movies ever conceived, so I'd better start with the good stuff and we'll head down to the basement from there.

There aren't many movies that knocked my socks off the way Baraka did when I first saw it sometime in the middle of 1996 (if memory serves). I'm not even sure how I first became aware of this movie, though I suspect it might have had something to do with the opening portion of the Dead Can Dance concert movie Toward The Within (which, as it happened, was the work of Baraka producer Mark Magidson). The beginning of Toward The Within was basically a striking and hypnotic music video for the song "Yulunga" and was comprised entirely of clips from Baraka, after which the film switched over to its advertised live concert setting.

It was a year or so later (most likely during the summer I was working part-time at Suncoast) that I came across a VHS copy of Baraka and decided to give it a whirl. Almost instantly, it became one of my all-time favorite movies, and it was one of the first films I upgraded to DVD after Sarah and I finally made the digital transition after Christmas, 2000.

Completely unencumbered of dialogue or any kind of plot (but putting forth an overall theme of man's relationship to the Earth), Baraka is nothing but wondrous, breathtaking imagery set to music ... a kind of feature-length video album, if you will. One thing that becomes immediately apparent while watching this film is that it was not shot on the cheap: using high-definition 70mm film and traveling the entirety of the civilized world for source material, Baraka continually astounds with sights from locales as diverse as the Galapagos islands, the (burning) oil fields of Kuwait, the city streets of Bangkok, and (in the movie's most chilling sequence), an abandoned "re-education center" in the backwaters of Cambodia.

While researching this post, I also made the joyous discovery that director Ron Fricke is presently working on a sequel to Baraka, titled Samsara, which is slated for release possibly this year. Count that as one film I'll definitely be sure to catch on the big screen.

At some point waaay back in the early days of our first family VCR, my parents rented out the 1978 cult classic Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes. I clearly remember watching this with some other friends one evening not knowing what to expect and we wound up having a grand old time. Billed even back then as one of the worst movies ever, I can definitely assert a quarter century later that Attack... falls pretty short in that particular category. Seeing this film again recently, I am happy to report that many of its gleefully cheesy charms have remained intact over time: some of them almost certainly enhanced thanks to all of the period clothes and hair on display, not to mention some of the less-than-PC dialogue between the principals.

So, uh, what exactly happens in this movie? Do you even have to ask? Oh, very well ... for reasons unknown, humanity is at war with tomatoes. These little red fruits roll and leap about in a blindly murderous rage, while a crack team of undercover agents race against time to find some way to stop the menace once and for all. Intrigue, treachery and ham-fisted satire are served up in spades as our "heroes" run into a host of obstacles standing between them and the salvation of mankind.

From a movie that was born to be bad, we'll move along to films that aren't really intended to suck, but wind up doing so anyway. Under this category we'll find the entire oeuvre of Mr. Jean Claude Van Damme, and in particular his sci-fi masterpiece (cough) Timecop.

One thing about science-fiction films that are set in the future is that the events shown during many of these movies are by now in our past, which tends to make you consider just how wildly wrong-headed these visions of the 21st century really were (especially when hardly anyone predicted the rise of the World Wide Web in any form). In this category, Timecop packs a few very amusing futuristic "sights" indeed such as near-windowless cars that apparently drive themselves (and look like a cross between a station wagon and a battleship), people from the 21st century using MiniDiscs for music playback (gawd, they barely did this in the twentieth century, for crissakes) and a secret sect of police that patrol the space-time continuum looking for "ripples" that are caused by bad guys heading back in time and attempting to alter the future, usually by holding up gold shipments during the Civil War or buying up lots of stocks in 1929.

Don't even ask how these temporal "ripples" are detected by computers since theoretically any successful operation that alters the present would be utterly un-noticeable to anyone in the here and now (not to mention how it's possible that anyone aside from the police are able to travel back in time): Timecop is one of those movies that doesn't reward analytical thought. However, if you simply have the need to turn your brain off for an hour and a half while watching The Muscles From Brussels kicking ass and taking names, then step right up for some cheaply-composited CGI, typically soft-boiled action-movie dialogue and plotting, and a fair amount of hulking bad guys getting themselves beaten into hamburger. You can do a lot worse.

Finally, we arrive at 1979's Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, which launched one of the most howlingly bad post-Star Wars sci-fi TV shows to date. What can I say? I was young and didn't know any better: my beloved Battlestar Galactica was killed by ABC in only six months while this dated NBC romp ran for two years. I had to get my space fantasy fix from somewhere, damn it.

With a likable enough Gil Gerard doing his best Han Solo impersonation in the title role, the original theatrical release of Buck Rogers is basically a retelling of the hoary old Trojan Horse fable set on a desolate post-war Earth of the future where the recently-arrived Air Force Captain (and astronaut) has wound up after being frozen alive in his spacecraft in a freak accident way back in 1987. Found drifting in space by the evil Draconian Empire and their skanky princess Pamela Hensley, Rogers is released and sent home with a homing beacon hidden on his spacecraft that will reveal to the Draconians the secret route through the Earth's defense shield. Once back home (where he receives the shock of his life when he is informed of what happened while he was away), Rogers must then overcome the suspicions of the Directorate Of Earth, keep himself from being executed as a spy and also find out what happened to his family and to the old world he left centuries ago.

Admittedly, Buck Rogers... could have been pretty good in the right hands, but instead the presentation winds up aping the worst aspects of Roger Moore-era James Bond with comic assists from a midget in a robot suit voiced by a slumming Mel Blanc. That said, there are some positive aspects to this movie: while the Earth may very well indeed become an inhospitable radioactive desert by the year 2491 if current events keep up, we can at least look forward to the ladies of the 25th century to be walking around in skin-tight blue catsuits (bonjour, Erin Gray!) when not in similarly form-fitting alabaster white military uniforms. Of course, we'll also have those irritating little silver "drones" toddling about underfoot as well, carrying the leaders of our terrestrial government on their chest looking for all the world like flashing Lite-Brites on silver dinner plates.

Now, I do have the complete run of the subsequent TV series on DVD (hey, when the manufacturer drops the lost price to $24.98 for a 5 DVD set, how can I refuse?) in case I feel the weird urge to sit through them all someday. That said, if my memory is correct and the series went nowhere but downhill from this point onward, I'll be having some serious second thoughts with that idea.

Seacrest out.

Baraka rating 5/5

Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes rating 3/5

Timecop rating 3/5

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century rating 2/5