The Worst Movies I've Ever Seen: Cyborg

Ah, early 1989. You almost killed my love of movies those first four months. First my experience with Leviathan and that complete bullshit ending. Then you had to throw Cyborg at me. You were one heartless bastard, early 1989. Luckily, the other eight months more than made up for your callous behavior. Why did you hate me so?

You can't talk about Cyborg without discussing its star, Jean-Claude Van Damme. In 1988 he made his mark in the American action movie genre with Bloodsport, which is a story unto itself (Look up Frank Dux in Wikipedia to see what I mean). Suffice it to say, Van Damme plays Frank Dux, the first American to even win the Kumite, a supposed underground martial-arts tournament in Thailand. The action scenes were great and it even had Bolo Yeung. Bolo, man! How can you not like this film? Plus, Jean-Claude didn't really have to act, which was a plus.

Anyway, Bloodsport does killer business. It cost $1.5 million to make and earned nearly $12 million, which in 1988 was a lot of money. So Van Damme is now the newest and hottest name in the action film industry. He chooses Cyborg to be his next film, a post-apocalyptic tale where the Plague has decimated humanity and evil gangs infest the ruins. Van Damme is Gibson Rickenbacker, a "Gunslinger" hired by a cyborg carrying a potential cure for the Plague to escort her from New York to scientists in Atlanta. The leader of the strongest gang on the coast doesn't want this to happen, so he attacks Van Damme and takes the cyborg to go to Atlanta on his own. Van Damme eventually awakes and pursues the gang to save the cyborg. Lots of fighting ensues.

Now, this sounds like it should be in Van Damme's wheelhouse. There's lots of fighting, he doesn't have to act much...solid gold, right?

Wrong. Oh, you couldn't be more wrong.

First off is this basic disconnect; in a post-apocalyptic society that is advanced enough to build a cyborg, they can't build a freaking helicopter?? They still have boats in this world, so why does Van Damme have to walk through a thousand miles of swamp? Advanced, self-aware cybernetic beings are within their capability, but land and air-based combustion engines..that's a real bitch. And how does he get from New York to Atlanta in a couple of days? Did the Plague shrink the size of the United States as well?

Then there is the fighting. Talk about disjointed and lackluster...it's like the Charlotte Bobcats on film. Van Damme looks uninterested while pulling off his admittedly jaw-dropping moves. And his opponents, these filthy gang members/pirates/wackos, fight about as well as these two guys. The gang leader, the fearsome-looking Fender Tremolo, fights like Tank Abbott. Which, for anyone who is unfamiliar with the one-time MMA fighter, means a lot of big punches and little movement. Which is fine in a MMA match, but not on a cinema screen. And once you've lost the fighting as a draw, what does this film have left to offer?

There's also this weak subplot where Van Damme remembers a young woman and her two children who he escorted from a city to an isolated farmhouse in the worst days of the Plague. They fell in love, and then a young Fender and his gang appear. In the one emotionally effective scene in the film, Fender binds Van Damme, the woman and her son together in barbed wire and hangs them over an open well. He then gives the end of it to the woman's young daughter and tells her they'll live if she can hang on. Of course, she doesn't. Ironies of ironies, she joins the gang and Van Damme meets her again. The subplot adds nothing to the film. Plus, Van Damme looks ridiculous through the whole thing.

The Worst Movies I've Ever Seen: Escape From L.A.

Sigh…

I hate bringing this film up. Not because I have fond memories of it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be here.

I hate bringing this film up because I genuinely like John Carpenter as a director. He has given us some of the best action and/or horror films of the past 40 years, including Escape from New York. So it feels a little bad mentioning one of his films here.

Nevertheless…

The year is 1996. I was single and living in Boston. I was riding the dot-com boom, working odd hours. So I had a lot of free time (and cash). So I indulged my love of movies on a regular basis. I was living in the Allston section of Boston, so the closest theater was at Cleveland Circle where Boston and Brookline meet at the end of the “C” track on the Green Line. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time there.

So one night, my roommate and I decide to go and see “Escape from L.A.” It was a no-brainer. Snake Plissken, more dystopia, another US city gone to seed, lots of gunplay. A good time sure to be had by all.

Um, sorry, no.

It was a painful film to watch. In 2013, the US has become a cross between PETA and the Family Research Council’s idea of Heaven*. No cursing, no eating meat, no pre-marital sex and so forth. Anyone who doesn’t conform to the President’s moral code is exiled to LA, which has become the latest city/prison. Unlike New York, there is no return. Once you go, you’re gone.

Into this insanity the president’s daughter (aptly named Utopia) has fled, carrying a doomsday device that can shut down all the power sources on Earth. Why? Because a terrorist has somehow, over 3000 miles away, brainwashed her into doing so.

Oh, and the terrorist’s name? Cuervo Jones. So already you can see a couple of problems here. The main one being how we’re supposed to take seriously a terrorist named after a bottle of tequila.

Anyway, in order to retrieve the device, Snake Plissken is brought in. He’s supposed to go to LA, get the doomsday device and bring the President’s daughter back for execution for committing treason. As usual, he is persuaded to do so by imminent death. This time, it’s a virus that will kill him in nine hours unless the President gives him the antidote.

After some ominous quotes, Snake goes into LA. Insanity ensues. He (of course) escapes with the girl and the doomsday device. And, if you remember how New York ended, you’ll know the President doesn’t get what he wants.

Now, from what you’ve read it sounds decent, right? But there were two things against it.

The Worst Movies I've Ever Seen: Leviathan

The year is 1989. It's a Friday night in March. Which, in north-central Connecticut, means its likely to be straight-out cold. So the options for a group of 17-year-olds is limited. And the one my friends and I almost always chose was the movies.

(Note: I have to admit, that isn't true. But since some of the other choices weren't, oh, I guess the word would be "legal", I am not mentioning them here. Not so much for preserving my image [which is beyond salvation at this point] as much as to keep my son from finding this five years from now and going "You hypocrite!")

There were a couple of theaters in the area, and the one we frequented most often was the Bristol 8, which had opened two years prior. Since then it has closed down and re-opened twice, only to close down again, mostly due to the 12-16 screen mega-theaters that opened around it. But in its day, it was a great place to see a film. There it is to your right. Looked a lot more impressive back in the day...well, slightly more impressive.

So that blustery March evening we went into the Bristol 8. The choices were slim. We'd already seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (that sentence makes me feel a hundred years old...), and the other choices were films like Lean on Me, the Corey&Corey flick Dream a Little Dream and Police Academy 6. In other words, nothing too great.

But then we saw Leviathan. It had Peter Weller, whom we all loved from Buckaroo Banzai and Robocop. It had Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters! It was about a mutant monster killing people underwater. It had everything! And I knew it was directed by George P. Cosmatos, who had helmed one of my favorite movies at the time: Rambo: First Blood Part II.

Aside: You know how flims tend to "cluster?" Like how Armageddon and Deep Impact came out at the same time in 1998? Or how these two Capote films came out one after the other? Well, 1989 was the year of the underwater horror/suspense film. Not only did Leviathan come out, so did The Abyss and Deepstar Six. In fact, Six had come out only two months before Leviathan. So, when you're complaining about too many torture-horror films coming out these days, it could be worse. Trust me.

So we went to see Leviathan, ready to be knocked off of our feet. And we were...just by the total crap the film turned out to be.

See, they're underwater miners down to their last few days on the job. They see a Russian ship wrecked on the ocean floor. They investigate and unwittingly bring back a bad bottle of vodka, which then gets someone infected. He and another crew member die. When their bodies are dumped into the water, they mutate into some creature which then hunts the crew. They try to survive until they can get to the surface. Which will be hard to do since their employer (the ice-blue eyed Meg Foster) has hung them out to dry and told the press that they're dead after a long search, rather than mount an actual rescue attempt. Think "Alien" underwater with a monster only 1/100 as cool as the Alien, and you get the idea.

So, it kind of meanders along. The build-up takes a loooonnnggg time. There are some deaths. The oxygen goes on the fritz, they're facing implosion and a scary monster, what will they do? At this point, it is an inoffensive but forgettable film.

So, at the end, three characters make it to the surface: Peter Weller, Ernie Hudson and Amanda Pays. The rescue helicopter from the faux rescue attempt sees them. The credit music begins to play. Oh, our heroes have made it! That's when the mutated monster (by now it has grown quite large) bursts out of the water....

AND EATS ERNIE HUDSON!!

When it happened, I and my friends were stunned. It was the classic movie cliche (black man dies at end of film) come to life. I still can't believed it happened. There's Ernie Hudson, escaping one second, and a mutant snack the next. And, at that moment, the film was utterly ruined. It ripped you right out of any state of enjoyment you were in and mocked it. I was offended. Not because the black guy got eaten, but because Cosmatos had opted to insult my intellgence.

We all walked out of the theater, bitching about the ending. That one moment instantly ruined the film beyond all hope and made it one of my personal worst films. To the point that I avoided Cosmatos' Tombstone like the plague, despite the fact I love Westerns like a fat kid loves cake. As Comic Book Guy would say "Worst. Ending. Ever."

1989 would get worse that year, with another horrible film, van Damme's Cyborg coming out in early April (which is a story all to itself). And then, all of a sudden, 1989 became the year for great movies.

• April 14: Say Anything
  
• April 21: Field of Dreams
  
• May 24: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
  
• June 2: Dead Poets' Society
  
• June 23: Batman
  
• July 7: Lethal Weapon 2
  
• July 14: When Harry Met Sally
  
• August 2: Parenthood
  
• August 16: Uncle Buck (I will hear no ill spoken of Uncle Buck. You have been warned.)
  
• November 22: Back to the Future Part II (Noticed that two-month gap, did you? Yes, September and October were pretty bad. Black Rain came out around then, which I like. But no else seems to for some reason.)
  
• December 1: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
  
• December 14: Glory
  

That's a powerhouse lineup. But those were all in the future. At that time in March, I was dreading the film season to come. And all thanks to Leviathan.