servo-9

I am sick of people denigrating films like this. It seems that the average audience member these days is offended by anything that requires a bit of thought. They dismiss characters with any complexity as either cases of "bad acting" or "bad scripting".

I enjoyed The Alamo very much, and my only regret is that the finished version is not longer. I found it absorbing and very satisfying to watch.

Another very fine film, Alexander, got a similar reaction from "critics" and mainstream viewers.

Meanwhile, the simplistic likes of "The Patriot" and "Kingdom of Heaven" are considered to be perfectly fine.

I'm glad there is documentary proof on IMDB that someone else has seen this film. It's so incredibly bad that I have wondered for years if I just dreamt it all. It's hard to see how Zarindast, reputation for woeful movies notwithstanding, could have really been playing this straight. It works as a comedy, being not a million miles from Naked Gun territory at times, but as anything else it is a monstrosity.

Cliche follows misfired stunt follows non-actor cameo follows cliche, etc, etc, ad nauseum, as the incoherent plot stumbles to a violent conclusion.

Structurally, it plays like two unrelated episodes of a very bad TV show. I saw it on Sky Movies in Ireland around 1992, and it was billed as "A cop goes undercover against the Mob", or some such, but the film seems to have nothing at all to do with the Mob. Instead, it seems to be about the kidnap of two glamour models by a bunch of bumbling idiots with machine guns.

The best bit is when our hero zooms across a car park on a motorbike, trying to prevent the bad guys from escaping in a helicopter. They must have done it in one take, because the helicopter has to hover for ages to give our hero time to reach it and then attain a tenable position on the leg things underneath the fuselage. The helicopter rises to an altitude of a couple of hundred feet. The bad guy in the passenger seat just sits there, hands on knees, looking at our hero, apparently unperturbed, until our hero reaches up and throws him to his death. Cuts then to a long shot of a dummy falling from a chopper.

This was shown on some American channel several years ago as part of its "100% Weird" series of movies. Essentially its an ineptly assembled assortment of various topics related to the "Unexplained" including UFOs, Black Masses, and (I don't remember specifically, but how could it not?) the Loch Ness Monster.

It begins with a quotation of the opening lines of HG Wells' War of the Worlds spoken over what seems to be some footage of the special effects from Plan 9 from Outer Space. Things fail to pick up thereafter.