My Copy of Terror in Beverly Hills (1989)

Back when I wrote about a movie called Cruel World, I wrote about how my dad buys almost every movie that he sees at a yard sale.  That tendency has not changed one bit.  If he goes to a yard sale and sees a DVD for a dollar, he will buy it.  It doesn’t matter what movie it is.  If we already have it, he’ll still buy it.  If he thinks someone will like it, he’ll buy it.  Hell, he’ll even buy a movie that nobody will like because it’s cheap and he knows that I will give anything a chance.  Everyone knows my movie watching habits.  He’s no different.

My dad’s mentality of buying anything that he comes across has led to some interesting discoveries, as well as some entries in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Thanks to his hoarder-like nature, I own Cruel World, a movie that I covered last October.  I also have a copy of Going Overboard, which I watched earlier this year.  And then there is this week’s addition to the Sunday “Bad” Movies, a film titled Terror in Beverly Hills.

Terror in Beverly Hills stars Frank Stallone as karate sensei Hack Stone.  When Hack’s former soldier friend takes the president’s daughter hostage, it is up to Hack to save her.  There are gun fights, fist fights, car chases, and emotional beats meant to entertain.  Do they?  Not really.  That is, until the final fifteen minutes or so, which are fun to watch.

What I really want to discuss is something about my copy of Terror in Beverly Hills.  It’s something that is not as prominent in the present time, due to the growth of the digital market.  With movies being featured online in places like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube, there is not as much need for physical copies of movies.  This isn’t even taking into consideration the concept of pirating movies.  And that’s much more relevant to this discussion than Netflix anyway.  That’s because it is a digital version of what I want to discuss.  The copy of Terror in Beverly Hills that my dad bought at a yard sale is a bootleg copy.

My first memory of media bootlegging actually comes from the audio world.  This isn’t my personal experience just what comes to mind as the first instance of bootlegging.  In the 1980s, audio cassettes became the main format of music releases.  People would buy the tapes and use them to listen to music in their homes.  You know, like a CD or an mp3, but before those existed.  There were cassette players in homes, in cars, and there were Walkmans that people would use like iPods when they wanted to listen to music while walking.  The industry also produced small recording devices that people would take to concerts so they could record their favourite musicians live and listen back to what they had experienced in person.  When people decided to sell their experiences, it was the birth of the bootleg industry.

The movie industry also got a healthy dose of bootlegging when VHS hit the market.  After a while of high priced videos for people to watch at home, the concept of a VCR recording device and a blank tape came around.  People would copy the movies that they had rented to their own tapes to watch over and over.  They would record movies off of television.  They would sell some of these recorded versions to make a quick buck.  Movie bootlegging was born.

This tradition of recording and selling continued when the movie industry moved on from VHS to DVD.  Blank discs made it even easier for video transfers.  The quality of the transfer could be altered to fit more or less onto a disc.  The size of the discs were much less than that of the VHS copies that came before.  It was both easier to fill the discs and easier to store the discs which made the bootlegging industry blossom farther than it had before.

I remember going to a flea market once.  It was a big flea market.  By big, I mean humongous.  You could walk around the place for an entire day and still not see everything.  This flea market was the size of an amusement park.  It had everything.  I’m not going to list everything off, lest I sound like Stefon from Saturday Night Live without the cool human fire hydrants and that kind of stuff.  I will say that there was a guy with a ginormous display of DVDs, and I’d say that a good 50% of the movies were bootlegs.  I can tell you that bootlegging was a big industry within flea markets.

The bootlegging industry subsided with the rise of the internet.  As the internet became more popular and sites like KickassTorrents and ThePirateBay came to the forefront, bootlegging began to dissipate.  People were learning how to get the movies they wanted without having to pay someone to find the movies for them.  The people could go to YouTube and look up movies such as Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and find the whole thing up there to stream.  The rise of online piracy was the downfall of hard copy bootlegging.

There is still a small market out there for cheap hard copies of movies and it can lead to some interesting bootleg discoveries.  I’ve certainly discovered some movies thanks to bootlegs.  Terror in Beverly Hills was one of the discoveries.  Did I like it?  Not so much.  But I am glad to have found out that it exists and I am glad to have seen it.  If there is one good thing about bootleg copies it is the discovery factor.

I have some notes to put in here at the end:

• I mentioned two other movies that I’ve covered that were bought at yard sales.  They were Cruel World and Going Overboard.
• I also mentioned Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.
• If you have any suggestions of movies that you want me to watch that I will cover for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me on Twitter.  Or comment below.  I’m still waiting for the first comment on the new blog.  Will it be you?

The Legend of Hercules (2014)

In 2006, the film 300 was released.  It brought about a style of action that has been reused by other similar genre films and television shows since.  The Starz series Spartacus used the speed ramping style that Zack Snyder popularized in 300.  The ancient Greek gods were brought to the big screen in the film Immortals by using this same action technique.  Earlier this year, Renny Harlin decided to try his luck at aping the style by releasing The Legend of Hercules.

Kellan Lutz of Twilight fame stars in this action movie as the titular Hercules.  After being ostracized by his father and brother, Hercules must fight his way back into his kingdom and save the woman he loves.  That woman is to be married to his brother, the future king.  It is a tale of love and muscles.

When I say that Hercules fights his way back to his kingdom, I mean that the entire movie is fighting.  He fights in gladiator matches to earn his way back to Greece.  Then Hercules starts a war against his father, the king.  All of the action is in a style very reminiscent of Zack Snyder’s Spartan epic.  The fact that the action is relentless only makes the movie feel more tedious.  This style can be very effective in small doses but when all of the action plays out this way, it becomes irritating.  That’s the big problem with The Legend of Hercules.  I don’t mean to keep bringing up 300, but this movie feels like the pit kicking scene of 300 for an hour and a half.  Slow motion kicks, lots of yelling, and sped up impacts.  The whole movie.  It doesn’t stop until the end.

At the end of The Legend of Hercules, once the awe at how terrible the action was wore away, I was left with one thought.  Near the beginning of the film, Hercules managed to kill the Nemean Lion.  That is the first of the twelve labours of Hercules in Greek mythology.  Mind you, his name was Heracles in the Greek mythology, and Romans changed it to Hercules.  That’s not the point.  My thought upon the slaying of the lion was that the movie was going to cover the twelve labours.  I was excited.  What I soon discovered was that the Nemean Lion would be the only labour that Hercules performed during The Legend of Hercules.  Why bring up the idea of the twelve labours without following through?  Why go on this entirely different tangent that involves lots of fighting and very little of the Hercules mythology?  It made no sense to me.  There is a nod to the mythology that some people know and then the movie turns into a below average gladiator movie.  If there were more nods to the other labours, the movie may have played a little better.  As it is, there are hints at something with a little more substance, yet no real exploration.

Also in the no exploration section of The Legend of Hercules come the performances.  The vast majority of the performances are very one note.  Kellan Lutz does not bring anything to Hercules but muscle, in much the same way that Scott Adkins brings nothing but brute force to his role.  Though, I guess Adkins at least got to chew up a few lines in there making his performance at least the smallest bit entertaining.  The highlight of the movie is Liam McIntyre who plays a betrayed, beaten down soldier named Sotiris.  His performance has enough depth that you feel his pain.  He stands above and beyond the other performers by making you care for what happens to his character.  He has enough presence to make his part of the story captivating.  He’s only playing the partner of Hercules, but manages to be the more interesting character of the two.  McIntyre both brought more to his performance than anyone else brought to theirs, and brought down the movie by overshadowing the lead who should be the most fascinating part.  It was a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario and he decided to do.  At least someone in this movie decided to do.

The Legend of Hercules is not a good movie.  The action is bad.  The acting is bad.  The whole movie is just plain bad.  I wasn’t expecting much in terms of quality going into the movie but it really surpassed my expectations in how bad it is.  It’s not even an entertaining kind of bad.  It’s just a bland, poorly made movie that tries to hide how bad it is beneath a bunch of muscles and derivative action.  It is not worth the time it takes to watch.  Damn you, Renny Harlin.  Damn you.

Notes, notes, I’ve got your notes:

• There is another Hercules movie that was featured in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I watched Hercules in New York a while back.
• An actor named Trayon Milenov-Troy was in The Legend of Hercules.  He was also in a movie called Death Race 2.
• If you have any suggestions or you just want to give me your thoughts on The Legend of Hercules, comment.  Or go to Twitter and find me there.  Either way works.

Gymkata (1985) and the Popularity of Non-Actors

The film industry has deep roots in popular culture.  Whether it be the current trend of movies based on the nostalgia that people have for the products they grew up with, or the use of popular musical artists for scores, movies are always trying to capitalize on trends and popular things.  One of the oddest ideas that filmmakers have ever come up with to capitalize on pop culture is when they build a film around a non-actor because that person is currently part of the zeitgeist.  We’ve seen it happen with Paris Hilton.  We’ve seen it tried with Eminem.  In the 1980s, we even got a movie starring gymnast Kurt Thomas.  If society in general is following the lives of these people, Hollywood will want to do the same.

I am sure that many of you know about Paris Hilton’s rise to fame.  She has always been a rich socialite due to her family’s hotel chain.  It has allowed her to be somewhat known for her whole life.  But she was never really a popular figure until the release of her sex tape.  From there, her career exploded.  Paris Hilton became a reality star.  She and her friend Nicole Richie headlined the show The Simple Life, where they would do things that lower class people would do.  Basically, they were both Beth Behrs’s character from 2 Broke Girls.  Paris Hilton also managed to have a few films written for her to star in, two of which (The Hottie and the Nottie, and Pledge This) got recognized as two of the worst movies ever.  Both have spots on the IMDb Bottom 100 within the top twenty.  Ever since her film and television career fell apart due to these movies and performances, Paris Hilton has faded from the limelight.  I bet she doesn’t think “that’s hot.”

My second example rose to prominence with the beginning of the new millennium.  A new rap superstar named Marshall Mathers, known professionally as Eminem, was making a name for himself.  He came out of Detroit, was filled with anger, was writing respected lyrics, and was white.  Of course this would cause some movie makers to get excited.  In 2002, Eminem would be starring in a movie called 8 Mile.  He was playing a character that was basically himself.  8 Mile was about a down-and-out white kid in Detroit being empowered by rap.  Sure, there was a lot more to it, but that’s the short of it.  It’s pretty much the story of Eminem as people know it.  The movie was fairly well received and it earned Eminem an Academy Award for Best Original Song.  He has not been the star of a film since, instead choosing to focus on his music career rather than breaking into film in a huge way.  He’s probably the most successful of the non-actors having a movie built around them because of their popularity.  He’s definitely the most successful of the ones I will be writing about.

In a similar vein to Eminem are Vanilla Ice and Mariah Carey.  In the early 90s, Vanilla Ice was one of the most popular musicians in America.  Ice Ice Baby was all over the place.  At the peak of his popularity, a film called Cool as Ice was commissioned.  Vanilla Ice played a biker that saved some people from the seedy underground of a city.  It was released after his popularity had subsided and did not do too well.  Mariah Carey’s movie did even worse and is infamous as one of the worst movies ever made.  Glitter came out in 2001 and starred Carey as an up-and-coming musician dealing with relationships and commercialization.  It led to a dark spot in Carey’s career that it would take years to recover from.

Moving on from musicians, we get to a man named Kurt Thomas.  He was the first American male gymnast to win a gold medal in floor routine at a world championship.  Much like when Gabby Douglas won gold at the 2012 London Olympics, people loved Kurt’s victory.  Unlike Gabby Douglas, people’s love for Thomas got him a starring role in a movie.  That movie was Gymkata.  It told the tale of an American going to the foreign country of Parmistan to compete in a deadly game.  As a form of defense in the game, he learns gymkata, which is a mixture of gymnastics and karate.  The movie was a massive flop when it was released in 1985.  In recent years, Gymkata has gained a huge cult following.  It was released on home video.  Podcasts inspired by MST3K have covered it.  People are more aware of it now that they ever were before.  But using Kurt Thomas as a star did not work in the 1980s and he never got another starring role.

Kurt Thomas isn’t the only athlete who has had a movie built around him.  I haven’t seen Space Jam in a long time, but there is no denying that it was cashing in on the fame of Michael Jordan.  At the time that the movie was made, Jordan had left basketball for baseball.  That was written into the movie.  Space Jam was about Bugs Bunny and his buddies getting Jordan to play basketball again in order to get rid of some aliens.  People love that movie now.  I think a lot if it has to do with nostalgia.

There are many more instances of non-actors getting movies to star in (Steve Irwin in Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, Gina Carano in Haywire) based on their popularity outside of narrative film work.  But I think you get what I’m saying by this point.  People who make movies like to exploit the popularity of people who aren’t movie stars.  Models, athletes, and musicians all get used based on their cultural saturation.  Gymkata didn’t open my eyes to this idea.  It sure made me think about it, though.  And it’s an interesting trend to think about.

There are a few notes that I’m going to throw in here before this post is over:

• Kurt Thomas was nominated for Worst New Star at the 1986 Golden Raspberry Awards.
• I brought up the movie Glitter, which I covered in a previous post of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.
• I wrote about the IMDb Bottom 100 in my post for Crossover.
• Gymkata is the first movie in the Sunday “Bad” Movies to have been suggested by two people.  Both @Mimekiller and @Movie_Doc said I should watch it, so I did.  Thanks guys.
• If you have any suggestions for future bad movies to watch, suggest away.  I read the comments (if they ever show up) and I check the Twitter account if you message me there.