skylarkz

Despite being a scathing satire of the film industry, I think the makers of this should have looked in the mirror, because ironically this deserves the same criticisms it puts out. I laughed when Robert Vaughn's character receives a new cut of the film and remarks "The runtime's 168 minutes? That's too long." This film is 2 hours long. It takes 40 minutes just to start it's main plot. 80% of the remaining time is spent dawdling around hopelessly long and pretentious dialogue. It's all a major drag to get through.

To be honest, I came to see Richard Mulligan's performance after seeing a clip of one of his character's many crazed monologues. I can appreciate most of his performance as Felix Farmer-- Mulligan is good at playing hysterics. But that's really where my praise for this movie ends.

The rest of the cast is dull. Everyone is a sexist, raging sex-maniac, hooked on every poison available to them. I see what they were going for with that, and it's played for laughs, but honestly, it gets old quickly, and it's delivered so poorly that it becomes torture to watch these guys operate. It feels like they were going for style points with their dialogue and behavior, too, which only adds to how painful it is to watch. Those moments feel like they were made for creepy 50 year old men at the time to enjoy and relate to and nobody else.

There were so many points in this movie that had me pause and say "God, this feels like it was written by an obnoxious prick". If you're going to make a movie criticizing the film industry, at least be a good writer first! My God, this guy does not know how to write! Like I said, every scene babbles on with irrelevant nonsense and the characters' motives are vague. At one point, they kidnap Felix Farmer's dead body from the morgue. I thought I missed something, because I had no idea why they were doing this. But no, after they have his body in their living room, one of the cronies asks "Well, what do we do now? What do we do with the body?" They have no clue what their motives are either.

I thought they were going to end the film when Felix Farmer died. With him gone, the movie had no anchor. I was genuinely surprised when the credits didn't start rolling and the movie kept dragging on for another good 30-40 minutes.

Once again, this film becomes more ironic as it's poking fun at the film industry exploiting its talent for money, when honestly, I get the sense that they used Julie Andrews having nude scenes for the same reasons. Pair that with terrible pacing, weird jump-cuts, toilet humor of all things, and all that I've previously mentioned and you've got a pretty damn bad film. Even Henry Mancini couldn't help this one, his score is unfortunately also horrible, which I'm sorry to say, because I love Mancini's music.

All in all I was disappointed with this film when I probably should have expected all this from the get-go.

Listen. Objectively, this film is sludge. I don't think anyone can deny that. But the colorful villains keep bringing me back to this damn film!!

David Gale's crazed performance as Carter Brown, even if it makes up just 1/10th of the screen time, is fun as all hell to watch. And his dubious little associate Paula Gorski (even if Riva's performance comes off even hammier than David's at times) is pretty fun as well.

The protagonists aren't memorable. But the wild combination of cartoonishly large laser guns, giant lizard men, unstable rabbit-masked killers, 90's vaporwave aesthetics, finger-licking, military satire, 80's power suits, and general tomfoolery just keep bringing. Me. Back. To. This. Atrocious. Film. Hell, both Carter and Paula have lines where they say "Balls". Who wrote this?? I just want to talk.