Friday, October 14, 2011

bad/awesome flixxx review: Arena (1989)




"Oh, I could stay all night, folks, but I gotta go. A hand for the boys in the band, and remember, I hate your guts!" - Space comic

"I had this dream that one day I could come up here and fight in the Arena. There's just no room for real fighters up here anymore, at least not for humans." - Steve

""I've only got four hands!"" - Shorty

YES! Here we have another flick executive produced by Charles Band. Usually when you see his name attached to something, you can bet its gonna be pretty good/bad. OR if you see a movie about monsters fighting in space, you can pretty much guarantee I'm gonna be into it. This is pretty much like ROCKY- if all the cast members were out of the cantina in STAR WARS. So, yeah- it fucking rules. A cast of mostly unknowns (5 of which who went on to be in STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE & BABYLON 5) in ARENA!!!





Our story begins with a big match going down between current intergalactic space champ "Horn" and top contender yet out of date old fighter "Spinner" on a space station arena floating somewhere in the galaxy. Fry cook Steve Armstrong saved up all his life to go on the space station and get a job. Unlucky for him- he sucks as a fry cook. These 2 little fish dudes are trying to order a number 3, a number 5, and a number 7, and ITS TAKING FOREVER! His four armed boss Shorty is yelling for him to hurry up, but he just keeps fucking up. Horn slaughters Spinner. The fish kids start mouthing off and then Steve tells them to basically eat shit. The fish kids dad comes in and starts mouthing off, and then Steve comes out and he's like 7 feet tall. And they go toe to toe, and Steve throws him through a plate glass window. Turns out, the fish dad was a bigtime fighter himself named Fang, but Steve beat the shit out of him. Steve and Shorty get canned from the burger joint for fighting and Steve loses his room on the space station because he doesn't have a job.



Shorty is like, don't even trip, we're gonna get you all taken care of. So he takes him to an underground hide out with a bunch of homeless space colonists including the very last human contender/champ who is also now homeless. Another part of the story is that there are 2 rival space boxer managers: Quinn and Rogor. Quinn is the chick who managed Spinner and Fang. Now both of her fighters are out, and she wants to meet the human who beat one of them up. Steve is disillusioned by the whole space boxing scene now and wants nothing to do with it, so he turns her down. Rogor is Horn's manager. He is crooked as Hell, runs illegal gambling on the ship, and gives Horn special space steroid shots that make him ravage his opponents. He has an ugly assistant named Weasel, and a hot chick girlfriend named Jade who's a singer.



So, Shorty tries to gamble to win enough money to buy Steve a ticket back home to Earth, but loses terribly. But when the space cops come in to break up the gambling, Shorty grabs 15 large from the vault and buys Steve's ticket after they escape. Weasel tracks them down & takes them to Rogor. Steve takes a job with Quinn to get the money to pay Rogor back. Next day he fights some big ass grasshopper looking alien. He wins and then all the humans are psyched cause no human has one in like 50 years (even though the poster says a thousand). Steve quickly kicks all the aliens asses and then becomes the top contender.



So finally Rogor sends his chick Jade to bang Steve. And he does. And she drugs him and almost costs him the fight, but luckily they get him the antidote just in time. So even though the championship match is postponed for like an hour, it finally happens. So Rogor can't believe it and he calls Weasel to get his friend Skull to jack his head into the computer mainframe and mess with the "handicapper" system. Steve wins the first round even after being groggy from the drugs. But then they juice the handicapper against him. Then Shorty smells a rat ("or a weasel"). And he goes to take care of him. He throws Weasel off the catwalk to his death and frys Skull's skull, brains and all. With nothing to hold him back, Steve kicks Horn's ass even after Horn gets a steroid injection. Steve becomes the champ, Jade leaves Rogor, Quinn knocks Jade out. The End. If you like really bad space movies, this one is for you. Because even though its bad, its still good bad. It didn't make me pass out 10 minutes into it, if that's what you wanna know. Check it out!

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