Tom Sizemore isn’t renowned for his comedy, but he is a damn fine actor and has brought comedic moments to his more serious roles. Héctor Jiménez is, and he’s also a damn fine actor who’s done serious roles and brought the right amount of drama to things like Nacho Libre. Having never heard of this 10-year-old film, it needed to get a watch.
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I appreciate that time has passed since this novelty film came out, but I’m going to talk about it anyway as I absolutely loved it I want to get some thoughts out of my head about it. Firstly, I want to say that it is incredibly good fun if you go into it with the right “this is an absolute piss-take of a film that considers reality to only have value if it adds to the gag”. It’s also an incredibly mind-melting experience to watch it when the person behind you is apparently convinced that it’s a documentary and is vocally complaining that the audience laughing at the comedic over-violence is being grotesquely disrespectful. Honestly, I didn’t know if I should laugh harder at them or the movie.
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It’s the mid-sixties, so whilst New Hollywood is being forged, Rock-&-Roll is tuning on to acid, and Vietnam is still considered winnable, there were kids’ movies to be made! In this case, with one of the stars and a number of the behind-the-scenes team from the outrageously popular Andy Griffiths show. It made crazy bank then, and secured a four-movie deal for those involved, but do the ghostly hijinks and gurning promised in the trailer hold up to today’s cynical psychotronic audience? Well…
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The high-concept pitch for this is “Santa rescues a rich family from the clutches of armed criminals from the cut-and-weld version of Die Hard & Die Hard 2”. And if the recipient’s instant reaction wasn’t “KA-CHING£$!” they need to be fired. David Harbour is Santa McClane, and that covers half the bill by itself.
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Once again the nights are drawing in, the country is a death trap because it snowed for one day of snow, and Trash or Treasure is doing its annual Christmas Onslaught of seasonally themed exploitation movies. The first present out of the chimney is a 2005 “what if Santa was a psycho?” comedic effort from director and writer David Steiman, which stars Goldberg from back when he had just quit the WWE. It’s also got a sleigh drawn by a pissed-off buffalo, which has the cutest little nose.
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Working in an office is hell, so they make great places to center black comedies around. Most people can relate to them, so you’d don’t need to explain the premise, and most people know co-workers whom they would chuckle at the misfortune of, so if you rack up a varied body count the script is off to a good start. What can I say? Familiarity builds contempt and a lot of people are bastards.
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It’s another micro-budget genre movie, this time rocking it at a tight $15,000 AUD (I’m not converting that into GBP, because by the time I’ve finished this review the figure will be horribly wrong) gathered by crowdfunding. It stars a gaggle of reasonably talented people, including writer Rita Artmann and writer/director Joe Bauer, and it has a bloody silly title as google keeps going “Did you mean Australians?”. It’s also funnier than Bouncer being drop-kicked by Skippy, and about as polite.
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Much like rock-&-roll and professional wrestling, the Acid Western is one of the few truly American art forms. It’s a deconstructionist approach to the highly stylised American-myth making of the Western, itself a deeply political genre, that was steeped in the counter-cultural of the 60s. Whilst it’s heavily influenced by European new wave cinema, and its most famous creator is Chilean-French, it’s fundamentally America looking at itself looking at itself, and that’s strange before you get to all the uneasy weirdness that gets poured on top. And given the amount of religious fervor in The Old West, it’s almost an inevitability that Robert Downey Sr – satirist, firebrand, and reputably terrible father – would make one that’s based on the life of Jesus.
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I can vaguely remember this making a splash as an indie darling when it first came out, with the buzz being split between the marketing gimmick of Morgan Freeman doing something quirky and the marketing gimmick of being officially available online at the same time it was in the cinema. It got a reasonable amount of sofa-based interview TV, made some noise as “a touching, romantic comedy”, and then dropped out of view. So when we picked it for viewing, based mostly on the title but also because of Morgan Freeman, and had very little expectations as to what would happen next.
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The inherent danger of making parodies of bad movies is that if you’re not careful, what you end up with is a bad movie. This 2019 released parody of Ozsplotation and general 80s renegade-cop action movies skirts dangerously close to that outcome, and then dives headfirst into it whilst literally pissing all over the place. This is a shame, as it had the potential to be really good.
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