Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: Rock'n'Roll Nightmare (1987)

"You've overstepped your line again, Bub. There's a creator's highest law that keeps you in your dark place and yet you and your brethren still insist on coming into this world and trying to steal a place in the world of the living. When will you ever learn?" - Triton

"This is incredible! It is almost no fun to kill one so stupid as to not know who it is that slays him. You are in my domain, and I will kill you as I have killed your pitiful friends." - Demon

"Or is it less familiar to call you Beelzebub? Or do you prefer Abaddon; or as the Hindus called you, Shaitan; or as you are known to answer to, Ahriman? Belial? Apollyon? Asmodeus? Because, you see... I *do* know you." - Triton

Originally titled THE EDGE OF HELL, this piece of Canadian garbage is REALLY bad. No disrespect to Canada. I love Canada, Canadians, their cities, their country, their food (poutine and pogos), their comedy, their weed, and most of all their music (Rush, April Wine, Voivod). Herein lies the problem. This movie stars an awesome Canadian Rock Star, none other than Thor! But man. I don't know what to say. Its a direct to video piece of camp trash. Shot probably with a camcorder definitely in seven days, you can bet this bad boy went straight to video. Now, if anyone has a copy they wanna pass my way, that's a different story. Thor and some of his friends in ROCK'N'ROLL NIGHTMARE!!! (There's no trailer available anywhere, so you'll have to watch this scene. And careful because it DOES CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!)

So in the beginning of this film, a pretty hot mom is making breakfast for her son and husband. She's mumbling to herself about something and (cut upstairs to the husband looking in the mirror) she starts screaming. He runs downstairs and sees the oven shaking and slowly opens it. BOOM! Red smoke and a really fake skeleton with googly eyes pops out and he screams. Then we see a kid on the staircase looking down into the kitchen saying "mommy?", then screaming-- and I'm PRETTY sure it was the fucking "redrum" kid from THE SHINING. Roll intro cards.

While the cards are rolling we get a wild POV shot of the camera running quickly on the floor like we are looking through a dog or cats eyes, or some other little small creature from the synth soundtrack. Then a badass vans hauls ass down the highway. The van is headed up to the same old house from the beginning. But it doesn't arrive until dusk. Out jumps Thor and his band Triton and their girlfriends. They are there to record an album for the next five weeks and its supposedly ten years later. "A month to come up with ten minutes of new music". HAHAHAHA! The van is SO badass, but we're supposed to believe that like 11 people came with them in it? So they start figuring out the living situations. This leads us to believe that there will be much pairing off for dirty 80s sex. Then the evil winds start blowing.

Then they have dinner! Then they go out to the barn to ROCKNROLL! The girl's wash the dishes except the bitchy one. They perform a song called, "We live to rock". Its really bad. Slash awesome. The drummer's girlfriend starts getting all hot and bothered. A little one eyed dick monster pukes in the manager/recording engineers beer. Then they all freak out because he breaks a stick on the last hit of the song.?? The manager goes to get sticks from the basement. Then the drummer's girlfriend comes down and takes her shirt off and starts hitting on him. Its confusing. I think maybe it was supposed to be her drink that got the cyclops dick puke in it. I don't know. She bites his neck and he screams for a minute and then everyone finally hears it at the same time. Ridiculous. So he is disappeared with the van, and so everyone peels off to bang each other.

Thor finds the sticks and knows something foul is going down. A hot chick/gross monster kills the drummer/takes over is body. Groupies show up to hang with the band and the manager shows back up and is creepy as hell telling them to go to the basement and pull out their boobs. Then the next day the band rocks another jam in the barn. "Energy... takes me where I want to be"... Then they all go to have more sex. A huge hand comes out of the drummer's chest and grabs his girls tit. Then yes more sex. Then a little boy shows up and everyone chases him around to find out who he is. Then he has a dog face. Then everyone disappears. Then the little dick monsters run rampant. Then Thor's chick turns into a huge Demon. Thor keeps calling it Bub. Then we find out because its name is Beezlebub. Then they have a really long fight. There's another complete song during the fight. Thor explains the whole thing to Bub. Apparently none of his friends were real and the whole thing was a trap set up to bring out the demon to kill him. Then why did they make us sit through it? BOGUS ending! Anyway, should you watch this? I recommend other bad rock horror movies instead such as TRICK OR TREAT, or SHOCK 'EM DEAD. They're bad too, but ... one has Traci Lords and the other is at least halfway funny.

Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: The Prophecy (1995)

"I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why." - Gabriel

"You see, I'm not here to help you little bitch because I love you or because I care for you, but because two hells is one hell too many, and I can't have that. - Lucifer

"Years later, of all the Gospels I learnt in seminary school, a verse from St. Paul stays with me. It is perhaps the strangest passage in the Bible, in which he writes: "Even now in Heaven there are Angles carrying savage weapons." - Daggett

I remember seeing this one in the theater! I remember it being built up in the press as to be super evil and scary and satanic and everyone was psyched to go see it. It was supposed to THE EXORCIST good. Was it? Well, let's not freak out. Its a pretty good flick from a formula that happens every few years or so. Specifically good angels versus bad angels a la LEGION from a few years back. But with a very good lineup: Christopher Walken, Eric Stoltz, Viggo Mortensen and CASEY JONES from the first TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES flick! Curiously this one also stars Virginia Madsen who I didn't even mention, but was in the last movie I reviewed HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING as well. All of them starring in THE PROPHECY!!!

So this cop (Casey Jones...real name Elias Koteas) Daggett was supposed to be a priest but he chickened out because he saw visions of demons. Fast forward to present day and he's lost his faith and chasing crooks. One day two angels decide to fall to Earth from heaven searching for this super evil dude's soul. Simon (Stoltz) is trying to find it before Uziel (who is supposed to be a bad angel I think). Uziel tries to kill Simon but ends up getting iced. They call Daggett down to the morgue because he was on the scene. They're all tripped out because the dude has both male and female organs, and other weird stuff. I think he didn't have any eyes. Anyway, Simon is tracking down this veteran who died (the evil guy) and gets his soul and removes it from his body. Daggett does some investigating, gets a warning from Simon, finds the obituary in his rented room and goes to the town where the evil soul was.

The coroner finds a handwritten bible on Uziel and gives it to Daggett. It contains a 23rd chapter in Revelation that is unknown. Daggett translates it and finds out there was a second war in heaven where all the angels are pissed that God made and favored humans in a greater light than all his other creations... even the angels. He learns that the "dark soul" it speaks about is the old man's and whoever has control of it can use it as a weapon in the heaven war I guess. So Gabriel (Walken) the head neck chopper for the bad angels comes down to earth to get shit done. He gets a helper and finds out where they have to go to retrieve the soul. Simon meanwhile hides the dark soul in this little Native American girls body. She gets sick but is taken care of by her teacher.

Daggett finds the charred remains of Uziel thanks to Gabriel and decides to go to Chimney Rock Arizona to investigate whatever is going on. Gabriel finds the body of the vet but sees the soul is gone. He then sniffs out Simon and tries to convince him to give it up to no avail. He then rips Simon's heart out and sets him afire! BRUTAL! Daggett finds out the old man was a fucked up cannibal. Gabriel questions the schoolchildren. The teacher goes to the little possessed girls house to check on her and finds Daggett. She takes him to some cave and they see visions of a gnarly angel war with dead bodies and angels impaled on stakes and all manner of heavy shit that would make mom's cringe. They head back over to the girl's house and find Gabriel trying to extract the soul from the little girl. They foil his plans by killing his assistant and blowing up the little girls family's trailer.

Gabriel recruits another helper from a local hospital. Daggett and the teacher go to a Native American reservation and they prepare to perform an exorcism on the girl. All of a sudden Lucifer himself (Mortensen) shows up! He basically tells them that nobody has went to hell since this war started and he's pissed. He thinks that if Gabriel wins then the "new heaven" they are trying to create will be exactly what he already is the king of. Another Hell. And that for Lucifer is one Hell too many. So he tells Daggett to use Gabriel's lagging faith against him. Then we have the big showdown. I won't tell you how it ends. If you're wondering whether or not you should watch this one, go ahead. The one anyway. I can't say anything for the four sequels. But maybe I'll get to those one day. I'll be the second one is at least worth watching. Maybe...

Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: Highlander II: The Quickening (1991)

"Most people have a full measure of life... and most people just watch it slowly drip away. But if you can summon it all up... at one time... in one place... you can accomplish something... glorious." - Ramirez

"Okay, now let me just see if I can get this straight. You come from another planet, and you're mortal there, but you're immortal here until you kill all the guys from there who have come here... and then you're mortal here... unless you go back there, or some more guys from there came here, in which case you become immortal here... again." - Louise

"Enough of this useless banter, I will be on my way and leave you to converse with your skull. Farewell, dear shithead, farewell." - Ramirez

Alright. Where to start with this piece of shit? Don't get me wrong-- I respect a movie's right to absolutely suck as much as anybody. I gush about bad flicks. But this one is in a category filed in outer space somewhere. Literally. Someone thought it was a good idea to basically completely throw out the origin story of the Highlanders from the first flick and revamp it and make it like they were from space and throw in a couple of flying Hawkman bad guys that look like they're from THE fucking MATRIX. You like grade "A" dogshit? Strap in. Christopher Lambert, Michael Ironside, and Sean Connery in HIGHLANDER II: THE QUICKENING!!!

So, we start off with an okay premise. Connor MacLeod won "the prize" at the end of the first movie. That means that along with gaining all the knowledge available on Earth and becoming one with every man, woman, child, and animal and basically being all powerful, he has also earned the right to grow old. He chose to do so with his wife, but by the mid 90's she was dying with cancer because the ozone layer was really messed up. He promised to help fix this problem and starts a corporation with a bunch of scientists that covers the earth in a "shield" and saves the humans from the sun's harmful rays. The only problem is that now Earth is in a perpetual state of darkness, and twenty years down the road the people and the general way of life has declined to the point of madness. The shield is governed by an evil corporation that makes huge profits off of the people just to keep them safe from the sun.

Connor MacLeod is now an old man and much like him watching wrestling in the beginning of the first flick, here we find him watching a performance of one of Wagner's operas. Here's where shit go completely mental. All of a sudden, Connery's character (a Spanish Egyptian played by a Scotsman) Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez comes to him and he remembers a flashback from his past. Apparently somewhere on a planet called Zeist, Ramirez is telling a bunch of members of a rebellion that he's choosing a great warrior from their ranks to battle some bad guy named Katana. Just then Katana's forces bust up the party, kill everyone but Ramirez and MacLeod and sentence them to go to Earth and compete for "the prize". Now if you are at all a fan of the first movie and you watch this sequence, you are saying to yourself, "WHAT are they talking about?" This makes absolutely NO SENSE whatsoever. They are aliens? What the fuck was that "there can be only one" shit about then???

So this chick named Louise is a terrorist (?) who wants to take down the shield. Several groups have been trying unsuccessfully to do the same thing. She goes to meet with MacLeod who claims his days of saving the world are over. Meanwhile Katana decides to send these 2 hawkmen matrix goons on flying skateboards to kill MacLeod so that he can't come home to his home planet of Zeist. MacLeod easily kills these ugly mothers and then gets "the quickening" again and becomes young. He's furious about it, but uses it to his advantage because he hasn't even known that chick Louise for an hour and he takes her panties down right there in the alley and bangs her. Its been several months since I've seen this, but I'm quite sure that's how it happens. That means one of four things: He's smooth, OR, she's a slut, OR, this is written TERRIBLY, OR, I'm completely remembering that part wrong. But I think I'm right. She's gotta be a huge slut. Ok, also- SOMEHOW while he was re-quickening, he says Ramirez's name and that gives him the power to resurrect? How did he not know that already? Besides, this is so crazy, if he had all the powers of a god, he could do what he wanted anyway. Correct? Who the fuck knows? So Ramirez comes back to life in the middle of a production of Hamlet, buys an awesome expensive suit with his earring and has enough bread left over to fly to NYC. Plus since the matrix goons failed, General Katana decides to come to Earth and battle MacLeod himself.

So we get another half hour of REALLY BAD one-liners from Katana and then he goes to team up with the evil corpo dudes in charge over at the Shield. They think somehow that they can hold the world hostage with the notion that shutting it off will blow up the Earth. Or something. That's the thing, Louise found out that the sky repaired the ozone on its on, but the Shield corp was basically holding the Earth people hostage by taking their bread for a promise that was a lie. Let's move on to the spoiler warning. If you haven't already watched it, I'm not going to recommend you do, but if you plan on it: SPOILER WARNING **************************************************** Somehow after defeating Katana, MacLeod just walks into the room where the shield is, and basically walks into the light and it breaks it. THAT'S IT!!! That's all he had to do??!! Then the chick sees the stars for the first time and according to which version you actually watch (there are like NINE of them) he takes her and flies back to his stupid goddamn made up planet. Being the fan of the first film that I am, I never need to see this again, and I recommend skipping to the third if you're going to go deep into Highlander territory. Maybe the catchphrase for this one should be: THERE SHOULD BE ONLY ONE... MOVIE.