Wild Wild West (1999): A Sunday "Bad" Movies Anniversary Rewatch

Once in a while, I like to make one of the Sunday “Bad” Movies posts a little more personal.  I spend so much time writing about the movies and where they fit into the film landscape, or just writing about the ridiculous things in the movies.  I already did that with Wild Wild West when the topic of the original post was about film adaptations of television shows.  It fit into that 1990s/2000s flood of television inspiration.  As for the ridiculous things, there’s a giant mechanical spider, and some crazy facial hair on Kenneth Branagh.

This is the anniversary post.  It’s a little bit late, but that couldn’t be helped.  There were some issues in life that forced me into a hiatus for a few weeks, and those weeks just happened to fall around the time of the anniversary.  Bad luck, I guess.  The anniversary post is the one time a year where a vote is sent out to the potential readers of the blog and they get to choose which movie I’ll be rewatching from the past year.  You guys chose Wild Wild West, which I was all too happy to agree to.  I didn’t want to watch Death Race: Beyond Anarchy again, and that was sneaking pretty close to the top.

The anniversary post is a time when I get to indulge in nostalgia.  Usually I have a solid topic going into the rewatch.  I know I definitely did the first couple of years when I rewatched The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure and Winter’s Tale.  This year, I let the nostalgia take over, though not in the form of the blog.  I’m going to dive back into my entire movie history here.  I want to pinpoint some moments of seeing movies or getting home copies of movies that helped define me.  No, not all of the movies were good.  What kind of person would I be if every movie that come along with stories was good?  That’s definitely not me.

So, this is where we are with this post.  I’m going to take ten movie moments from various times in my life and give little snippets about those moments.  What does this have to do with Wild Wild West, you might ask?  Spoiler alert!  It’s going to be involved in one of the stories.  I’m not going to call any of these stories good.  Most of them are probably pretty stale if you’re not me.  That’s okay.  This is more of a nostalgic release for me than anything.  I just hope that anyone who sticks around to read the whole thing learns something about me.  Maybe you’ll reach out to me, interact with me, whatnot.  If you don’t, I won’t be hurt by it.  It’s life.  Let’s get started with the first movie I saw in the theater.

1) I was four years old when I remember gearing up to go see a movie in the theater.  It was 1994.  The Lion King had just come out, and I was prime age for Disney.  Prime age is any age, but I was a four-year-old who wanted to see lions.  Saying it was the first movie I saw in the theater might be a lie.  I don’t remember if I actually got to the theater.  I remember being at my dad’s auto shop, back when he had one, and my aunt was coming to pick me up and take me to the theater.  Four-year-old me decided that was the perfect time to go outside and stand under the downspout from the eavestrough.  I got in trouble for that.  I know I ended up seeing The Lion King at some point.  I just don’t remember if it was in the theater that day.

2) The first movie I remember seeing in the theater was Home Alone 3.  I don’t remember too much outside of knowing I saw it in the theater, remembering where the theater was, and knowing that it’s not a theater anymore.  It was a second run place.  The first theatrical experience I remember vividly, though, was A Bug’s Life.  I went to see it for a friend’s birthday party.  We all had the popcorn, toys, and got to see a Pixar movie on the big screen.  It was a good time that taught me that the theater is a place to be loved and not loathed.  I go much more often now than I did as a child and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

3) As a child growing up in the 90s, you were always wanting your parents to get you things.  Home video was one of those things because VCRs and, at the end of the decade, DVD players became a pretty common thing for people to own.  I’ve always liked movies, so I would constantly ask my parents for movies.  I can remember going to Circuit City (I’m Canadian, but we went to the USA a lot) one time.  It was probably 2000.  The TVs were playing Wild Wild West as their showcase video.  I can’t remember if this was the same day I begged for the DVD of The Phantom Menace, but I definitely got my parents to buy me a copy of Wild Wild West that day.  It’s the same copy that I have sitting beside the Blu-ray player right now.  It’s the one that I watched twice for this blog.  Am I showing my privilege by telling you that my parents bought me movies?  Maybe.  It’s a part of me, though, so that’s why it’s here.

4) This one will be pretty quick.  There was a point in 2003-ish where, for whatever reason, I decided I would watch Final Destination once a day every day forever.  I don’t know why.  I lasted about a week.  Though, for a couple years, my regular rotation of movies included Final Destination, Joy Ride, and Jeepers Creepers.  I would watch each of those at least once a week.  I don’t understand myself sometimes.  I like those movies.  I still do.  But that was a little bit overboard.

5) I was sixteen or so when I saw Boogie Nights for the first time.  It opened my eyes to what movies could be.  There was something more than entertainment there.  There was an artform that I appreciated on a deeper level.  Performances.  Deliberate camera movements.  The use of music to underscore a scene or a specific dramatic beat.  The lighting.  The set design.  I started noticing each and every one of these things through Boogie Nights and it changed who I was as a movie watcher.  It was one of those pivotal moments that changes everything.

6) Sometime in high school, I can’t remember the exact year or grade, my music teacher took us on a trip to Toronto to visit a foley studio.  We got to go in and experience how hard people work to put the sounds together for a feature film.  The specific film they were working on when my class was there was Outlander, a movie starring Jim Caviezel about Vikings and aliens going to battle.  The movie came out in 2008/2009, so I was probably 17 when we visited the place.  It wasn’t my first step into actually being in the business (I did lighting for a couple televised concerts before that), but it was the first time I saw a movie being put together.  I’m a film student now.  It’s a good eleven years after that.  Funny how things work out, eh?

7) Let’s go with something a little bit lighter, while being darker.  When I was in university for engineering, I used to have a weekly bad movie night with the people I lived with so we could blow off steam after a week of math and science.  We weren’t huge into drinking or partying, so bad movies were our outlet.  One of the guys suggested that we check out The Human Centipede II since it had just come out.  I didn’t want to.  I ended up watching them because of the deal the guy made with me.  If we watched the first two Human Centipede movies, he would pay for my end of term dinner at East Side Mario’s.  I got some food out of it.  I’m okay with that deal.

8) Halloween has always been one of my favourite horror movies since I first saw it.  Without it, we wouldn’t have many of the great horror flicks that have come out since.  Would John Carpenter have been able to make The Thing without the success of Halloween?  Would Friday the 13^th exist without Halloween?  Scream definitely wouldn’t exist the way it is without Halloween.  And Jamie Lee Curtis might not be a big star without Halloween pushing her to the forefront.  It was an inspirational movie for what came after it.  The masterful way everything played out also pushed me into writing more often because I needed to get my thoughts about it out.  Without Halloween inspiring my blog writing, the Sunday “Bad” Movies might never have happened.

9) There was a movie directed by Atom Egoyan that came out in 2014.  It was called The Captive.  I had seen The Sweet Hereafter in about 2011 or 2012, and I loved it.  When I heard that The Captive, which had a different working title, would be filming out front of my work, I was excited.  They were setting up during the last couple hours of my shift and I got to see them design the street to look like the middle of winter.  It was interesting to see the production design.  They were only going to be filming a car driving up the street, but they put so much work in to make things as perfect as possible.  It was captivating and might be another push into the right direction for my future.

10) Much more recently, at the end of 2018, I got to meet Greg Sestero.  It wasn’t a huge meeting.  I got a picture with him before seeing Best F[r]iends Vol. 1 and Best F[r]iends Vol. 2.  He was there for a Q&A, but also signed books, shirts, and stuff while taking pictures with people.  I had been a fan of his work since long before this blog.  By “his work,” I mean I liked The Room and The Disaster Artist.  I saw The Room when I was in school for engineering and have seen it many times since.  I read The Disaster Artist when it first came out, while I was in between my original career plan and my current one.  To watch his spiritual follow-up to The Room was great.  I had a good time with a few of my film school friends, going to Toronto to see the double feature and meet Greg.

Those are ten stories of my movie watching history.  They are ten stories that helped to make me the person I am through the things I watched or experienced.  I may not have seen Outlander or The Captive, but I got to see them being made and that most certainly had some influence on me.  I’m making movies in school now.  I helped make a short film last semester, and I’ll be helping with a documentary this semester.  I’m a filmmaker, influenced by seeing other movies be made.

The Lion King, A Bug’s Life, Final Destination, and Boogie Nights built me during my formative years.  They pushed me into enjoying movies for the imagination, the emotion, and the artistic qualities that they could convey.  Little would I know it at the time, but my childhood love of The Phantom Menace and Wild Wild West would eventually lead me to this blog and this post.  Halloween would be the reason that I would keep blogging at all.  And to cap it all off, I got to meet one of the main creative forces of one of my favourite bad movies.

Nostalgia can be a great thing.  Wild Wild West brings me back to a time where Will Smith was at the height of his stardom.  I was a kid without a care in the world.  I wanted to see cowboys use technology to overcome a paraplegic megalomaniac.  I wanted to see a giant mechanical spider wreaking havoc on the frontier.  Most of all, I wanted fun.  Wild Wild West was fun.  Watching it brings back that fun.  It might not be the best movie, but it’s fun.  It brings back the nostalgia.  So does this post.  I’m done now.

Well, not quite.  Here are some notes:

• The Room (week 25), the Human Centipede movies (week 180), and Death Race 4: Beyond Anarchy (week 311) were mentioned in this post.
• Here’s the original post for Wild Wild West (week 296).
• Here are the anniversary posts for The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (week 53) and Winter’s Tale (week 105).
• I also mentioned The Disaster Artist, so here's a post I wrote about the book.
• Wild Wild West was directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed Nine Lives (week 228).
• Ian Abercrombie was in Wild Wild West.  He was also in The Ice Pirates (week 128), Sextette (week 141), and Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (week 159).
• Salma Hayek and Frederique Van Der Wal co-starred in two Sunday “Bad” Movies, Wild Wild West and 54 (week 266).
• Musetta Vander showed up in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (week 140) before Wild Wild West.
• Wild Wild West featured Gary Carlos Cervantes.  He was in 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (week 10).
• James Lashly showed up in Wild Wild West.  He also showed up in a little movie called Howard the Duck (week 75).
• Wild Wild West had an actor named William Victor Skrabanek.  Another movie with that actor was Batman & Robin (week 138).
• Gigli (week 225) actor Scott Haslip popped up in Wild Wild West.
• One of the more memorable people in Wild Wild West was Bai Ling.  She was in Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance (week 241).
• Christian Aubert had a part in Wild Wild West, after having been in Godzilla (week 282).
• Finally, Wild Wild West starred Will Smith.  He had a small, yet important, role in Winter’s Tale (week 89).
• What are some movie moments from your life that you have nostalgia for?  What are your thoughts about Wild Wild West?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
• Twitter and the comments are also good places to drop suggestions for what I should be checking out.  I don’t have too many suggestions right now, since I don’t have my old bad movies list, so I’m trying to get some more.  Tell me about some bad movies.
• The Sunday “Bad” Movies have an Instagram account now.  Check it out @sunday_bad_movies.
• Check out my Snapchat if you want to, too.  Add me (jurassicgriffin).  I sometimes share bits and pieces of bad movies.
• That’s another year down for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  On Sunday, I’ll be covering something called Attila.  Check out that post when it’s out.  I had one the other day about the three Snake Eater movies.  Check that one out too.  Thanks for sticking around, guys.  The writing is for me.  The reading is for you.  It’s been a great six years, even if the movies aren’t always great.  I hope we’ll keep going for a long time to come.  See you soon.

Snake Eater (1989), Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster (1991), and Snake Eater III: His Law (1992)

The early 1990s were a good time for action stars.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were coming off a strong action decade of the 1980s.  Bruce Willis had the Die Hard movies.  Lethal Weapon was an ongoing franchise.  There were Chuck Norris movies, Steven Seagal movies, Dolph Lundgren movies, and Jean-Claude van Damme movies.  Other action stars and series would come and go throughout this action hey-day, making for an abundance of explosions, gunfire, and car chases.

Lower budget filmmakers wanted to get in on the action that these blockbuster hits were a part of.  There were low budget action flicks churned out all through the period.  Laser Mission and Squanderers came out of this era, putting Brandon Lee, Chad McQueen, and Don Swayze in leading roles.  The lead actor tended to be someone related to a big star, or someone from a popular television show of the time.  It was an easy way to get some sort of an audience.

One of the lesser known franchises to come out of that era of action flicks was Snake Eater.  The franchise followed Jack “Soldier” Kelly through his various revenge exploits.  All of the revenge ended in violence and death.  Lorenzo Lamas took on the lead role, making the jump from his soap opera background into the action world.  Over the three films, he would take on rednecks, drug lords, and biker gangs.  He started with the rednecks.

Snake Eater

Snake Eater began with Soldier going undercover for a drug bust.  He and a woman both got naked to show that they weren’t wearing wires, then her bosses came in and threatened Soldier’s life.  He pulled some booby traps on them and got them captured.  Because of his recklessness, he was suspended from the force.  It was good timing, since his parents were about to get murdered by a group of rednecks.  He would need to go rogue to save his sister, who the rednecks kidnapped.

There were many low budget tropes present throughout Snake Eater that made the first film a chore to get through.  The rednecks lived in the woods, which meant that there was a good chunk of time spent in the woods.  It wasn’t as bad as it could have been because they were swampy woods, but they were still woods.  There was a lack of proper lighting during nighttime sequences, which made it difficult to see anything.  Then there were the many extended sequences of travelling.  It was as though the director wanted to show entire trips.  This is something that higher budget films tend to avoid unless it pushes the story forward.  Lower budget movies do it to pad time.

Lorenzo Lamas was good as Jack Kelly, though.  He was the shining beacon of something good, and the reason to keep coming back to the franchise.  Though the movie wasn’t good, he had a charm and action presence that made his scenes stand out.  It was everything else that didn’t work.  He tried his best to make something fun and entertaining out of a dud, and it almost worked.  The sequels would fare better.

Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster

Soldier was back, and like the beginning of Snake Eater, he was taking on the drug trade.  This one kicked off with Soldier’s friend Speedboat (Larry B. Scott) running a community center and witnessing some people overdose on drugs.  Soldier and Speedboat went, separately, to the hangout of the dealers and shot the place up, killing everyone inside.  Speedboat escaped, but Soldier was arrested for murder.  He pled insanity and got sent to a rehabilitation center.  He snuck out at night after learning how to from the other people staying there and continued his quest to take down all the drug dealers in the city.

One thing that put Snake Eater II above its predecessor was the character work.  It’s not that the characters were deep.  Many of them were as surface level as could be.  This was particularly true of the rehabilitation patients.  One was a sex addict, one was a pyromaniac, so on and so forth.  There wasn’t too much to the characters.  At least they were well defined and got good moments to shine in their one note roles.  Speedboat was a solid buddy for Soldier to play off when he was outside the rehab.  The supporting characters in the first film weren’t lacking their one-notedness.  The difference was that their one-noted trait was the same for everyone.  Each character in the sequel was well defined, though not deep.

Also helping was a boost in production quality.  The lighting was better.  There were nighttime scenes where it was easy to tell what was happening.  The sets were better than the woods, with different homes and buildings that all had individual looks and feels.  The booby traps were still there, though slightly more elaborate.  The finale was also much better, with more of a lasting impact because the production value was better than the conclusion of Snake Eater.  All around, the first sequel was a step in the right direction.

Snake Eater III: His Law

Going into the third Snake Eater, expectations were a little higher.  The previous installment had been a solid low budget action flick.  Maybe a little insensitive to people with disabilities, but the overall filmmaking quality had seen an improvement.  The third kept the filmmaking quality, but maybe went a little too far in the oversexualization.  That’s weird considering the franchise began with two characters getting naked.  It’s the case, though.

Soldier was back for his third adventure.  He was suspended from the force once again and took on a private investigator job.  A family’s daughter was kidnapped by a biker gang for an extended period, and when she came back, she was a completely different person.  She was willing to sleep with any man she met and be treated like a sex slave.  Soldier teamed up with Cowboy (Minor Mustain) to take on the biker gang that caused problems for the family.

The story may have been strongest in the third outing.  There were layers to it that weren’t present in the first Snake Eater.  There weren’t the offensive tangents of what was going on in the rehab from the second Snake Eater.  It was one main story that had different parts to it, which all added up to create a whole.  The suspension, the teaming up with Cowboy, the search for answers, the protection of a stripper, and the full on assault of the biker gang’s hideout all felt like part of the same story.  There were different parts to the story that made it feel like more than the “Suspension, abduction, attack” that the first film was and whatever the second film was.  Good writing on that part for Snake Eater III: His Law.

The only real downside was how sexualized it was.  The sex was a major part of the overall story with the biker gang sexually abusing the daughter of the family Soldier was working for.  She constantly offered her body to people, including multiple times to Soldier.  There was the confrontation at a strip club that led to Soldier taking the stripper away for her own protection.  There was Soldier’s own relationship with his girlfriend, which had some sexy time.  There was probably a way to tell the story without using the female body so much, but the movie was going for some unnecessary nudity.  So that was that.

The Snake Eater trilogy of films were an interesting watch.  None of them were good.  None of them were movies that warranted any sort of rewatch.  They were action movies as forgettable as they were watchable.  The one redeeming quality running through all three was Lorenzo Lamas, who was an entertaining leading man.  He knew exactly what was needed for the movies and brought his best to fit that.  He made me want to watch more of the Lorenzo Lamas early 1990s action movies that are out there.

Action movies on the level of the Lorenzo Lamas films are still out there today.  Many of the older action stars are in lower key action movies.  That’s where you’ll find Dolph Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Steven Seagal now.  They’re alongside people like Steve Austin, Scott Adkins, Michael Jai White, and Dominic Purcell.  They’re the lower tier action stars who are doing a bunch of work outside of the standard theatrical fare.  They’re making the Snake Eaters of this generation.  And it’s a movie world that needs to exist.

Now for a few notes:

• Lorenzo Lamas was in the Sunday “Bad” Movies before, showing up in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190) and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (week 300).
• Squanderers (week 245) and Laser Mission (week 139) were mentioned in this post.
• Ron Palillo was in the first two Snake Eater movies. 
• Neil Kroetsch popped up in Snake Eater and Snake Eater III: His Law.
• Both Alexander Chapman and Michael Scherer were in Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster and Snake Eater III: His Law.
• Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster saw the return of Larry B. Scott, an actor who was in Iron Eagle (week 90).
• Walter Massey made an appearance in Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster.  He did some voice work in How the Toys Saved Christmas (week 158).
• Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster also saw Harvey Atkin turn in a performance.  He was previously seen in The Stupids (week 188).
• Wrapping up Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster was Richard Zeman, who could be seen in Timeline (week 222).
• Moving onto Snake Eater III: His Law, there were a couple of three-timers in there.  The first was Mark Camacho, who was in How the Toys Saved Christmas (week 158) and Nine Lives (week 228).
• The other three-timer was Jason Cavalier, who was in Nine Lives (week 228) and Battlefield Earth (week 275).
• There were two more Battlefield Earth (week 275) actors in Snake Eater III: His Law.  They were Michael Berron and Alan Legros.
• Another actor from Nine Lives (week 228) was in Snake Eater III: His Law.  He was Serge Martineau.
• Matt Birman came back to the Sunday "Bad" Movies with Snake Eater III: His Law.  He was previously seen in Exit Wounds (week 93).
• Finally, Mike Mitchell played a part in Snake Eater III: His Law as well as Catwoman (week 174).
• Have you seen any of the Snake Eater movies?  What did you think of them?  Let me know in the comments.
• The comments and Twitter are good places to let me know if you have any suggestions for what I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks.  I’m always interested in seeing things I don’t know about.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad” Movies now.  Check it out.  It’s @sunday_bad_movies.
• I also share clips of bad movies on Snapchat when I’m watching them, a lot of the time.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if that sounds like your kind of thing.
• There are a few suggestions that I want to get to coming up, but next week isn’t going to be one of them.  I want to go back to a studio I’ve been neglecting for a few months since I have a bunch of their DVDs and Blu-rays.  That’s why next week’s movie will be Atilla.  It’s from The Asylum and I don’t know much about it, so that’ll be interesting.  There will also be a belated anniversary post for Wild Wild West out sometime during the week, since I need to get that done too.  I’ll see you soon for those posts.