I’m going to start this post off with a little bit of insight into my thought process when it comes to this blog. I’m not going to get into how I choose a movie, but rather how I come up with post ideas. This was a tougher post to get into. I didn’t want to deep dive into a topic because I just did that with my look at Killer Sofa. I had also done a really long post for another blog recently, so I wanted something a little shorter. Not too short, though. My post for Breaker! Breaker! was an easy, breezy short post. All that was to say I wanted something that fell into the middle ground of length.
The Breaker! Breaker! post was a simple review. I watched the movie and talked about what the movie was. That was it. I didn’t want to do that again. At least, not so close to the last one. That’s not my style. I, instead, wanted to find a topic that would give me some middle-ground length. Not too big, not too small. Something that might end up around 3000 words instead of 1500 or 6000. No deep dive into the history of Sunday “Bad” Movies, but also not a basic look at a movie. So I sat down and started brainstorming. I put my pen to paper and, eventually, my fingers to typing. All that led to this exercise to see if I could find something to write about that wouldn’t take up too much time. And I think I finally found a topic. But first, the movie.
Crash Dive was a 1997 direct-to-video movie that came in the decades long wake of Die Hard madness. It was one of the many “Die Hard in a…” movies, this time taking place on a submarine. James Carter (Michael Dudikoff) was tasked with boarding a nuclear sub he helped design because it had been hijacked by terrorists. With all the personnel taken hostage or killed, he had to eliminate the terrorists to prevent an attack against the United States.
That synopsis got me thinking about something. Let me quickly get out my Jerry Seinfeld costume. What’s the deal with terrorists in action movies who frequently want to start World War III. I don’t understand the appeal of that endgame. This would be a no-win situation for the entire world. If you started World War III, nuclear missiles would deploy around the world. The fallout would kill all life. The bad guys never see this as a “we want to wipe out the Earth, us included” scenario. They see it as a bargaining chip, to get something they want. Money, power, or revenge are frequently the motivations. But this type of threat, if followed through on, can only end one way. The destruction of all life on the planet. No survivors.
Take the movie that inspired this post, for example. Crash Dive saw a group of terrorists aim to start World War III by attacking the United States with a nuclear submarine. They threatened to send missiles at the eastern seaboard. At first, it seemed like the terrorists just wanted money. They were holding the submarine hostage as leverage to get $100 million. If they didn’t get the money, they would send some nukes at Washington. However, the leader had every intention of detonating the nukes, regardless of the monetary situation. That was when I got confused.
The whole endgame for these types of situations never sits right for me. They’re kind of like when somebody wants something and can’t have it. Their mindset switches to “well if I can’t have it, nobody can.” Then they go on a path of destruction to ensure that nobody can have the pleasure of the object of their desire. However, in a movie like Crash Dive, there was never an object that was desired. It wasn’t a case of if the terrorists couldn’t have the $100 million, then nobody could. The $100 million was never a desire for the lead terrorist. He wanted to watch the world burn just to watch it burn. Kill humanity just for the sake of killing humanity. That lost me a little bit. Where was the motivation?
Some movies at least tried to give a poorly thought-out motivation. Expend4bles shared the idea of the bad guys trying to start World War III. Only, in that case, they were taking a nuclear vessel into Russian waters and letting the Russian army kick off the war. A motivation was revealed late in the movie that had to do with war profiteering. However, the villain never spent the time to think about the war that was being started. They only thought about the profits. The war would have ended humanity. It was being started with nukes, it would have ended in a nuclear apocalypse. There wouldn’t be any profiting off a war in that case. A few buttons would be pressed and human life, as we know it, would cease to exist. This villain probably wouldn’t even be alive to earn any money off the war. And if he did somehow manage to survive the barrage of nuclear explosions that would surely engulf the Earth, there wouldn’t be the people or infrastructure for money to even have meaning. Toilet paper and bottled water would probably be the biggest trade chips. We saw that during the Covid lockdowns.
Going back to Crash Dive, it’s hard to imagine a situation where, if the bad guys won, the whole world would not be ended in a similar way to the World War III nuclear apocalypse. The only difference was that the villain didn’t have any additional motivation. Sure, things started as a nuclear sub hostage situation where the villain claimed he wanted money. That was only a claim. Like I said, he never wanted the money. He wanted to attack the United States with a nuclear warhead. As soon as that nuclear warhead was sent on its collision course, the United States was likely to retaliate. And other countries, not knowing who was firing missiles until the United States retaliated, would try defending themselves from the United States. It would likely lead to more missiles flying. Countries attacking each other out of fear of being the next attacked. That sort of stuff. Not good.
The point of these movies isn’t so much to get into the villain’s mindset, though. The villainous plan was meant as a simple setup to get the hero(es) where they needed to be. The hijacking of the sub was a way to get a Die Hard type of plot into a sub instead of a building. The threat of attacking the United States with the nuclear missile was meant to ratchet up the intensity. It was a way to raise the stakes. It was a ticking timebomb that James Carter had to defuse to save both his country and the world. The villain didn’t need any depth to create that scenario.
If you’re looking for a recent movie that tackled nuclear missiles in a way that thought about this sort of stuff, you need look no further than A House of Dynamite on Netflix. It wasn’t a movie about someone threatening to end the world with a nuclear attack. It wasn’t a movie about people dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It covered the moments before a nuclear missile hit the city of Chicago. The debate about what to do. The discussions of what was going to happen. People reacting to the impending doom that was being brought upon them.
I wouldn’t say that A House of Dynamite was a great movie. It was alright, if repetitive through the way the story was told. The interesting part was the conversation that happened in the leadup to the missile. Which, I guess, would be the conversation of the whole movie. The government, while trying to figure out what to do, weighed the options. To do nothing would make them look weak. It would make it look like someone could attack them and they wouldn’t fight back. To retaliate against an unknown enemy was going to start a catastrophic war. It was a no-win scenario for the government and they had to figure out an option that would cause the least amount of bloodshed.
The characters in A House of Dynamite considered the implications of a nuclear missile being fired at a major city. Sure, they never figured out who fired the missile. It was the deliberation that was the important part. No motivation was necessary for the villain because the villain was never seen. Crash Dive never had the debate. The bad guy that was seen throughout the movie never thought about what would happen after he got his attack out of the way. The heroes never considered what would happen beyond the initial attack. Nobody really thought about the destruction of the planet. They simply thought about an attack on Washington, not the war that would likely result from it.
During the writing of this post, I went to the theater and saw the new Masters of the Universe movie. It wasn’t a nuclear war movie or a movie where a bad guy threatened to attack something with a nuclear missile. It did sum something up nicely, though. I want to bring that aspect into this post because it really put things into perspective. In a scene where Adam tried to reason with Skeletor, Skeletor rejected the reasoning by saying straight up that he was “the villain.” Sometimes bad guys just do bad things because they are bad. That’s it. Simple as that. When it comes to villains who want to attack with something nuclear, without thinking of the repercussions… Sometimes they’re just bad people.
Crash Dive might have been one of those movies. The villain acted like he wanted the money. Then it was revealed that the whole hijacking was solely so he could attack Washington with a nuclear missile. There wasn’t really any motivation behind it other than he wanted to do it. He was a villain who wanted to be a bad guy. That was it. It doesn’t matter how much I question why he would want to commit an attack that would likely wipe out all life on the planet. Sometimes bad people do bad things because they’re bad people. He was one of those bad people.
This topic stemmed from a question I’ve thought of while watching a bunch of action movies. Why don’t the villains think about the fact that starting World War III would likely mean the end of the world? So many countries hold nuclear weapons and know the destruction they could cause. If one were to send off a nuclear missile, there would likely be response from many of the other countries. End of Ze World video, anyone? But now I know, thanks to a recent theatrical release, that sometimes villains are just bad because they’re bad. They do bad things not because they get anything out of it, but because they are bad people. Simple as that.
I came up with that question as a topic after starting this post trying to figure out what I would write. I called for something longer than my last post, which was 1100 words. I just looked it up, so I’m correcting my claim of 1500 from the beginning of this post. I wanted it to be fewer than the 6000 words from the post before. It was actually 6500 words. Anyway, this one is far shorter. A good old… Probably around 2200 words once the notes are completed at the end. I’d say that was successful.
All I needed so that I could write up the post I wanted was a topic I could ramble my way through in a slightly coherent way. I found that. I’d say I did a good job. You can disagree with me. I don’t care. I write these posts for myself anyway. I use them as a way to make sense of some of the things tumbling about in my mind. Now, that’s the type of insight I’m sure you wanted.
And here are those notes:
- Kane Hodder made his sixth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Crash Dive. He was previously in Jason Goes to Hell, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, 3 Musketeers, Hardbodies, and Wishmaster.
- Did you recognize John Lafayette in Crash Dive? He was also in a couple movies called Jaws: The Revenge and Remote Control.
- Crash Dive featured Michael Cavanaugh from Iron Eagle.
- Catherine Bell was one of the primary performers in Crash Dive. She played the titular character in The Good Witch.
- Reiner Schöne played an important role in Crash Dive. He was also in a little movie called Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
- Crash Dive wasn’t the only movie featuring Pasha D. Lychnikoff in Sunday “Bad” Movies. The other movie was Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star.
- Time Winters was in both Lavalantula and Crash Dive.
- Christopher Titus returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Crash Dive after previously popping up in Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
- Finally, the star of Crash Dive was Michael Dudikoff. He also had an important role in Ringmaster.
- Have you seen Crash Dive? What did you think of it? What do you think of movie villains who want nothing more than to start World War III? Let me know in the comments or get a hold of me on Bluesky.
- If there’s a movie you think I should check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know what it is. You can tell me on Bluesky, or leave a suggestion in the comments.
- And with that, we take a look forward to what’s coming up for Sunday “Bad” Movies. The next post will be for a little horror movie called Screamboat. I followed that up with a romantic comedy called Love on a Leash. After those two is a franchise week, and I’ll be checking out the three Fred movies for that one. Yeah, you have some spicy movies to look forward to. I don’t know when the posts will be ready, but those will be the next three posts. I’ll see you when the Screamboat post is ready.
