Fuck passengers one through fifty-six!

The widescreen version of this stupid movie really justifies everything, y'know.

Enough said.

Prepare to be BLOWN AWAY

The Summer of 1994 had already exploded. Dennis Hopper was exploding everything in his path, including Jeff Daniels, in the movie that made you believe a bus could fly, Speed.

But a month after Keanu knocked Hopper's block off came the Irish 4th of July movie to end them all. A movie about identity, loyalty, and family. A movie whose tagline brazenly stated:

Boom Baby. Sweet Dreams.

And...

5...4...3...2...1....Times Up

It is the Boston Bomb Squad and IRA epic Blown Away.

The first scene introduces incarcerated Ryan Gaerity (Tommy Lee Jones) stabbing his cellmate in the face, throwing up a condom filled with explosives, building a bomb in his dirty toilet, exploding through the prison walls and escaping into a stromy Irish night. That is how Gaerity rolls.

The second scene pumps up the U2 (the movie is filled with it. Gaerity even buys a U2 cassette at a flea market) as Jimmy Dove (Jeff Bridges) motorcycles like a badass through Boston to his girlfriend's daughter's birthday party. He get's halfway through a game of pin the tail on the donkey when he gets a page from his bomb squad unit. Jimmy is pissed because of course it was his day off, but such is the life of go-to bomb squader James Dove.

Needless to say, Jimmy saves the day, and the reporters are all over him for the details. And who happens to be getting drunk as fuck in a local bar as the report airs? Why it's our old friend Stabby Exploderson, Ryan Gaerity. He watches the report with humor and intensity. He knows this man, but not as James Dove.

Bottom line, James Dove is actually Liam McGivney, former bomb builder for the IRA who was educated in exploding things by Gaerity. They built a bomb a long time ago that Liam wanted to use for good and Gaerity for bad. A whole bunch of innocent people exploded and Gaerity was arrested while Liam escaped to the US and assumed a new identity. So basically Gaerity is pissed and proceeds to explode everyone James Dove holds dear, no matter how improbable the bomb.

I don't know how he did it, but Tommy Lee Jones is zanier in this than his follow up as Harvey "Two-Face" Dent in Batman Forever. He must have been a fatigued from Blown Away. With an Irish brogue that has to be heard to be believed, Tommy plays around with crabs on the beach, sends cryptic and slightly gay videos dressed as the Statue of Liberty to the Bomb Squaders, and cranks up the U2 as he builds mega bombs.

The whole movie leads up to a climactic fist fight on the 4th of July between Tommy and Jeff inside Tommy's Rube Goldberg mega bomb he built in an abandoned ocean liner rusting on the bay. But even after Forest Whitaker jumps through fire to save Jeff from Tommy's final explosion, Jeff has to race to his girlfriend/fiance's orchestral performance of the 1812 Overture so that her daughter and her don't explode while driving back home.

Needless to say Jeff saves the day and walks home bloody with his girlfriend, shrapnel sticking out of his leg.

This movie contains the penultimate "OH MY GOD, DON'T TOUCH THAT, IT IS GOING TO EXPLODE" scene, but don't worry, it just ends with a dead dog.

Jesus, I haven't even told you the half the movie and I'm exhausted.

These Are REAL MEN

So basically there is a big shindig meeting in the wilderness around Washington DC that Agent Pillbox (who looks a lot like John Ritter) is gunned down on his way to. Big deal, right? Our government could just cough up another agent to attend the meeting.

Wrong!

It turns out that the world will end for some reason if John Ritter doesn't show up. Enter Nick Pirandello, uber-spy extraordinare with a mullet to boot. He is the slickest spy ever, able to make nail guns out of bandaid canisters, shoot baseballs into space with his space-pen, and battle clowns at a moments notice, and has sex no less than 3 times in the movie. Nick (played by the irrepressible James Belushi) is asked by the governement to recruit regular everyday dad Bob Wilson because he looks a lot like John Ritter.

Bob Wilson is a bitch and Nick knows it, but he has to work with him in order to save the world. And so begins a cross country road trip where Nick teaches Bob the way it is in our dangerous Cold War America.

They meet danger at every turn and every time Bob bitches out, leaving Nick to kill everybody, which is annoying for Nick because there are a lot of people to kill.

It's ok though, because eventually Bob becomes the butch while Nick turns bitch while longing for a dominatirx he met in Nashville.

For those of you not convinced, writer/director Dennis Feldman had to wait 8 years to find work again. His drought ended when he sold his script for Species. It was another 4 years after Species when he sold his next and possibly last script, Virus.

Enter the KILTRO.

When you watch enough movies, you get jaded. You begin to feel like nothing phases you.

Then KILTRO comes along and phases your nigger balls off.

This is the main character of KILTRO.




He wants to feel you from the inside.

He's had it up to here with these fucking evil Chilean ninjas, and he's not going to take their evil Chilean ninjitsu bullshit anymore!

If you want to be a prick about it, you could boil this marvelous film down as "A Few Dollars More" meets "Enter the Dragon," with some Marvel Comics origin story for good measure.

The main character, Zamir (I assumed his name was Kiltro, but imdb tells me otherwise -- he's the leader of the Kiltros, a gang), is a street punk with abs of steel, fists of fury, legs of lightning, and dicks of huge. One day, he rescues the daughter of a Korean kung fu master, and he falls in love with her or something.

Then a total bad ass shows up and murders everybody, schools the kung fu master (for revenge, I think), and takes the daughter hostage.

Then, he bests and humiliates Zarnir.

Zarnir gets some better kung fu training from the midget who trained his ancestors or something like that. At any rate, Zarnir gets pissed, paints his face, and rips everyone's CGI innards out with his bare hands.

At one point, during his melee against a hundred other ninjas, my girlfriend Hannah leaned over and asked, "Jesus Christ! Why won't they just run away?! Can't they run away and not fight him?!"

Good question.

KILTRO is a bad ass fucking movie. Watch the dubbed version, because if the version you see has any serious editing difference, it won't be the genuine KILTRO experience.

Which is a bad ass fucking experience.


On DVD today! Not on Blue Ray ever!

SHAKEDOWN Breakdown.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096087/

Peter Weller is a scrupulous public defender with woman problems by night and civil liberty problems by day. Sam Elliott is a distant acquaintance of his -- he's an undercover cop 24/7, with a raging boner for dispensing his own brand of PLAID JUSTICE.

In "Shakedown," they team up to take out the trash -- corrupt cop trash, that is, and any other form of refuse that gets in their way. Because in New York, in the 80s, there was no such thing as recycling.

Sam Elliott couldn't give a fuck about recycling, unless it's recycling JUSTICE.

Sam Elliott doesn't have time for due process. He only has time to shoot, kill, and explode EVERY MOTHER-FUCKER who pisses him off.

If these sentences have no connecting theme or purpose beyond Sam Elliott, it's because I'm replicating the film's actual structure.

Those cops who take the meddling Peter Weller hostage? DEAD. The two muggers who confront Sam Elliott at Coney Island? REALLY DEAD. And Coney Island? Sam Elliott just gave it back to the Atlantic.

Peter Weller solves the case, defends the weak, and gets the woman. Sam Elliott grenades airplanes while dangling from their wheels over the World Trade Center.

I SHIT YOU NOT. (Because you're so baffled by the mental image of Peter Weller getting the woman, right?)

"Shakedown" is the only movie I've ever seen that actually uses its tagline ("Whatever you do... don't call the cops!") as a thesis sentence. Every scene, every karate chop, every flying car, and every Sam Elliott-inspired, massive city-block-consuming explosion reinforces writer/director James Glickenhaus's argument that you should never ever call the cops.

Cuz they might show up in blue jeans.