Guestie: The OTHER Mark Has Some Thoughts

[The post count coffers fill when the other Mark gets one of my email addresses correct and sends me this opus]

Full disclaimer: These musings came to me as I was reading about Roadhouse getting a reboot.  Terrible idea, says I.  However, this is not specifically about Roadhouse.  No one is challenging its place among the most entertainingly terrible films of all time.  I’m here to stump for the various movies that, because of various throughlines with RH, deserve their place next to it. 

These films generally represent a fairly fleeting moment in time and will never (or shouldn’t) be made again.  These movies share several commons threads:

1.      Produced mostly in the mid 80’s through 90’s

2.      Feature a SUPER NICHE hobby, profession, or obsession (or “HPO” or “SN-HPO”)

3.      The filmmakers frame said HPO as (i) either the MOST important thing in the world/in life or the ONLY important thing and (ii) much more highly pursued and competed in than maybe common sense or real life would suggest

4.      These movies aren’t very good and the acting is terrible. 

Along with Roadhouse - which espoused the lucrative and apparently well-known and highly competitive bouncer/cooler industry – the movies I’m proposing for the inaugural induction into the super-niche HPO movie all-stars: 

·        Center Stage – The film about the highly competitive world of professional (or aspiring to be professional) dancers.  We meet several [narrowly drawn] dancing architypes that are competing for spots in selective ballet companies.  To make it in this cutthroat world, you have to impress some really discerning corporate dancing folks, including, most surprisingly, an engaging and firing-on-dozens-of-cylinders Peter Gallagher.  PG might have 6 total minutes of screen time sprinkled throughout, but the promise of his next scene will power you through sparse dialogue, withering glances to dancers of the opposite sex, male sleeveless attire, clichéd plot lines, and cheeseball smiles.  I have no idea how they got PG to do this movie - there's no way he actually had to audition, right?  I’m thinking they needed him much more than he needed them, and what does that sell job from the producers look like?  Regardless, he had every excuse to pocket the check and mail in his performance.  Instead, he gives the FULL GALLAGHER.  Also featured is an extremely catty dancer played by a young Zoe Saldana.  And is there an elite, bad boy male dancer who plays by his own rules, [consensually] sexes up most of the female hopefuls, and starts his own dancing company?  You bet there is!

With some notable exceptions, the cast is comprised of professional dancers moonlighting as actors.  Spoiler alert: it shows.  The acting in this movie is maybe the worst you'll see in a major motion picture.  If you watched this and then watched Attack of The Clones you'd be like "Wow, Hayden Christiansen NAILED this" or even “I wasn’t watching Hayden Christiansen, I was watching Anakin Skywalker.”  I get they had to hire people who were athletes/dancers first given the choreography is super legit, but I have to believe they could have done better.  Baryshnikov in White Nights is our benchmark here.  

·        Best of the Best – To contrast with our first entry, I actually think the acting here is dynamite, insomuch as these people were acting like they were making a legitimate film.  Very few movies I’ve seen have had a more absurd premise.  There are several credentialed people - James Earl Jones, Chris Penn, Sally Kirkland and Erik Roberts – in a movie about an international team karate competition limited to the US and "Korea".  JEJ as a legendary karate coach?  Yup. Roberts as a single dad, fighting for his son who was recently hit by car, who wins his match (spoiler alert) with a dislocated shoulder by going to his ZEN Happy place?  Apparently.  Chris Penn as a rotund, racist cowboy who somehow qualifies to fight a weight class below Roberts?  I’m getting a migraine.  I watched this movie a couple dozen times when I had one cable movie channel as a teen and I still have no idea how the scoring was calculated.  There are 5 matches scored on points, somehow the U.S. loses the first three but still has a chance to win on points??  Regardless, our final fighter, Tommy – fighting the guy who obviously killed Tommy’s brother in a similar competition years ago - goes full ’14-’15 Golden State Warriors on his opponent.  The scoreboard couldn’t keep up.

·        Sideout - oh, the high stakes world of semi-professional beach volleyball.  From what I remember of the plot: C. Thomas Howell blew off clerking at his rich uncle's (Weekend at Bernie's guy!) law firm to learn 2-man Vball from a mulletted pro volleyball washup (played by Thirtysomething’s Peter Horton – but I’m calling him Mullet Guy) and impress a beach cocktail waitress played by Courtney Thorne Smith (this, after Summer School, continues CTS’s unfortunate run of typecasting as a mostly brainless, directionless SoCal girl). 

Of course, there’s a big “All-Valley”-type round robin beach volleyball tournament at the end for CTH and Mullet Guy to team up in so they can bury some type of hatchet, CTH can get the girl and MG can wager on himself/CTH to win it all, pay off his debts and screw over his former business and sex partner, Harley Jane Kozak.  There’s romance, redemption, some vague mentions of obscure CA real estate law, and a very decent sex scene here between MG and HJK, esp when you consider it's a PG-13 movie.  This movie also features one of my favorite insults ever, when, after a resoundingly winning spike by MG in one of the early round robin matches, one of his opponents calls our hero a “Cheesedick”.  I feel like the volleyball scenes (which were supported by a bunch of real life former Olympians) were actually pretty convincing even if I remain dubious that people could bet on the outcomes of these matches.  I’m pretty sure the tourney was sponsored by a country club.

·        Airborne – Most of the characters in this film espouse the simple premise that you’re a loser if you don’t do highschool hockey and roller blading.  But I should note that this is actually the rare “double SN-HPO”, as our fish out of water California protagonist, played by Shane McDermott, waxes poetic about surfing as much as the new kids in Ohio that confront him talk about hockey.  Shane, once displaced to the OH suburbs to stay with his aunt and uncle during the school year, even surfs on his bed at one point.  But I'll give him this, he buys into the fact (a) he is in a good movie and (b) he is the coolest guy in the place.  He can't be bothered by the school bullies who are REALLY into hockey and anything else on skates.  The reputable name actors with this on their resume (sorry, not you Shane) is somewhat staggering.  Jack Black as a twitchy nintendo playing cool guy bully.  The guy who parlayed this movie into New Johnny Lawrence in The Next Karate Kid.  Then there’s Edie McClurg playing Shane’s aunt!  But Seth Greene – playing Edie’s son and Shane’s cousin as an awkward, misunderstood teen - absolutely steals this movie.  And I'm not gonna lie, the (feels like) 30 minute racing scene at the end is pretty well-shot.

·        Drop Zone - Yes, we've gotten to the competitive skydiving portion of our programming.  Air Marshal Wesley Snipes goes undercover as a parachutist to find the band of evil parachutists who staged an elaborate, probably unnecessary, and totally infeasible in-flight kidnapping on a 747, killing his fellow marshal and brother... wait for it... MALCOLM JAMAL WARNER in the process.  Everyone in this movie is 100% committed to the notion that sky-diving is a paying, full time job, and being a part of a competitive sky-diving team is like being in an elite military fighting unit.  Parker Lewis (nee Corin Nemic) as a rookie jumper embodies this spirit most fully.  But then you’ve got Gary Busey as the head bad guy, doing totally insane things.  This is probably where everyone started saying things like "guys... do you think maybe Gary Busey isn't acting?”  I swear there are a couple of scenes where I think Gary is doing something not written in the script that visibly surprised the other actors.  I also had a thing for Yancy Butler - she totally convinced me as the jilted spouse and 1/2 of a formerly legendary jump team, and she may have invented hot looking yoga pants.  I have no idea how this movie ends or if YB and WB were supposed to be romantically connected - there was more sexual chemistry in the Shania Twain/Billy Currington "Party for Two" video.

·        The Fast and The Furious – Okay, so these last two may hurt some feelings.  It’s a little later in time than others on my list, and the sequels were successful in changing the overall tone and arc, but the original TFATF movie (as well as third installment Tokyo Drift) absolutely fits into this category.  The thing that’s massively important that everyone is passionate about here is, yes, car-racing, but also pretty much anything Vin Diesel says is important.  Like “I live my live a quarter mile at a time” and “You can have any beer, as long as it’s a Corona.”  CORONA IS THE ONLY BEER THAT MATTERS AND IT’S SO IMPORTANT.  The acting is super wooden in this movie but it deserves an Oscar next to the performances in Tokyo Drift.  I also like the one guy who straight-faced tells Paul Walker that engines are the only thing that calms him down.  Just a huge collision of the SN-HPO energy and bad acting.

·        Point Break – I’ll concede that, on its face, PB has a lot going on – including a feisty game of beach football, a SWAT operation run amok that ends with a bullet stopping a running lawnmower, skydiving, Anthony Kiedis, masks of the ex presidents, and a makeshift gas station flamethrower – that would make it APPEAR that this movie is not singularly focused on one thing (in this case: Surfing, again).  Lest we forget, our merry band of miscreants are robbing banks in the aforementioned masks to FINANCE THEIR ENDLESS SUMMER of surfing.  For the love of God, Bodie dies on a 60 foot wave in Bells Beach, Australia!  Plus, there are no less than three scenes where some character is monologuing (usually around a campfire) about how awesome surfing is.  Sorry, it’s gotta go on the list.   

Happy to spitball others, or tell you why Karate Kid DOESN’T make this list (it was on the bubble).