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The $5.88 Bin
The Wal-Mart $5.88 bin is truly a mystical place. At first glance, the bin is filled with nothing but complete garbage that you can't imagine anyone watching but that doesn't stop you from digging through it anyways.
Sometimes you'll walk away with nothing and have your opinion that the bin sucks reinforced. Other times...magic happens. You'll be nonchalantly digging through the pile when all of a sudden you'll happen upon a movie you saw ten years ago on WGN late at night and had completely forgotten about.
You will not have a choice as to whether or not to purchase it - you WILL buy it. After all, it's only $5.88. That's when you'll realize that the bin isn't filled with crap; it's filled with tons of movies that only hold significance to a select few.
While the movies will appear to be complete and udder shit to everyone else who sees them, each DVD in the bin will eventually find the person it was meant to be with, the person who saw the movie ten years ago and has a soft spot for it.
I'm sure many people have had similar experiences with the $5.88 bin and understand what I'm talking about, but just in case you've never ventured into a Wal-Mart to check out the fabled bin, I'd like to give you a glance at what awesome titles you're missing out on.
The Lawnmower Man
According to this movie, by 2001 everyone will have access to be jacked into the virtual reality matrix where access to information is limitless and we can do awesome stuff like cruise the information networks on a sled and have cybersex.
It's 2004 and all I'm doing is slowly navigating the same old news sites on a spyware infested internet landscape while taking the time to download BBW mature porn off of file sharing networks.
What a glorious technological utopia it turned out to be. Thanks a lot, Lawnmower Man. Take your fancy cyber power glove and virtual reality body stocking and get the hell out of here.
While obsessing over how much this was going to change everything, no one managed to point out how stupid virtual reality looked. Eventually the whole concept went away and the closest thing we ever got to virtual reality was Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which actually wasn't a virtual reality device (although the headgear was the same), but it did let you play a mean game of golf....IN 3D!
The producers of The Lawnmower Man decided to cash in on the whole hoopla while it was still hot, so they bought the rights to a Stephen King short story called The Lawnmower Man, threw out everything except the title of the story, and then made a horrible movie with "cutting-edge" special effects that used the words "cyber" and "virtual" a lot.
It was so bad that Stephen King sued them to get his name taken off of it, and if you've seen a fair share of Stephen King movies that he left his name on, you can imagine how bad this one must be for him to take it off.
As a result of the experiments, the lawnmower man (Jobe) becomes a deadly super genius who eventually gains telekinetic abilities that he uses to wreak havoc. In one of the most ridiculous (and as a result, hilarious) scenes, Jobe gets revenge on a former tormenter by looking making a cyber version of himself with a lawnmower for a mouth mow the guy's brain and then proclaiming "The lawnmower man is inside you now."
At one point he also makes a virtual head of himself appear outside and turn two guys into swirling vortexes of balls. Virtual reality sure is scary! Jobe eventually decides to abandon his body and transfers himself fully into the cybernetic world.
Instead of doing something logical and just blowing up the system he's in, the brilliant scientist sets a bomb in the facility and gives it an extremely long timer which results in Jobe escaping through a maintenance line and worming his way into every system in the world. To celebrate, Jobe utters his "birthing cry" - he makes every phone on the planet ring at once. Ooooh! Terrifying!
The computer effects are the same reason I checked out this movie, but in today's age it was because I wanted to see how bad they are. They're moderately better than the jaw dropping effects in the "Money for Nothing" music video.
The Lawnmower Man is a horrible, horrible film, but if you're one of those types of people who gets a kick out of seeing old predictions about the future that turned out to be completely wrong, then The Lawnmower Man is the feel good comedy of the summer.
The Wraith
Featuring Charlie Sheen when no one knew who he was and Randy Quaid when he was still semi-relevant, The Wraith is a gripping story about a gang of hoodlums who force unsuspecting passer-by to take part in street races against them. You lose the race, you lose your car.
The gang isn't very scrupulous and commonly cheats to win but that's what being in a gang is all about. The leader of the gang also has an unhealthy obsession with a certain girl and takes it upon himself to make her his prisoner, even going as far as to kill her old boyfriend.
Unfortunately for him and the gang, a mysterious being in an outer worldly get-up has appeared on the scene with a bizarre car and begins challenging the members of the gangs to street races that end with the gang members dead and with their eyeballs sucked out of their heads.
It doesn't take a genius to guess who the ghost in the car is and why he's offing the gang members but that's not what The Wraith is about.
The new Dodge Interceptor - Fueled by demonic energy!
With every gang member killed, one of the shackles on the Wraith's body falls off and disappears. It's a powerful metaphor for the chains on his soul!
This movie seems to appeal to some car nuts out there, if only because The Wraith's vehicle is a Dodge concept car model that was only used for PPG racing and is pretty unique (Writing this is just asking for some insane person to e-mail me and tell me the exact details on the car. Please don't do this as I don't care).
It's a cool looking car, but its existence makes the movie pretty amusing as Dodge wanted their logo to be easily visible. The result is a supernatural car from hell that has a Dodge logo prominently displayed on it.
Another Hollywood pretty boy.
Clint is supposed to be the "smart guy" of the film which means he's the only one who figures out that the same guy with the ghost car killing all his friends is the same guy that the gang killed. He even gets the titular line when he describes the ghost as a wraith; a synonym for ghost that we all know is used very frequently in casual conversations.
The oddest thing about The Wraith is that there's no real conflict in it at all. There's never any doubt that the wraith is going to kill each and every one of the gang members and there's absolutely nothing that can stop him. I guess no one cares about the lack of conflict in a movie when it's just about seeing all the bad guys get brutally slaughtered. It works for me at least.
The Eraserhead look was all the rage in the 80s
Stay Tuned
One Jeffrey Jones is never enough.
1992 was the break-out year for Jones, as he starred in both Stay Tuned and his magnum opus, Mom and Dad Save the World. It was truly an epic year for Jones and both films will be remembered for generations to come.
Unfortunately for us all, Mom and Dad Save the World hasn't made its way to DVD yet but we can enjoy Stay Tuned in the meantime. In Stay Tuned, Jones plays Spike, Satan's right hand man, and is in charge of HTV (Hell TV, very clever), Hell's newest scheme in harvesting souls.
Spike goes on Earth and gives satellite dishes to unsuspecting couples who are then sucked straight into HTV. If they can survive for 24 hours, then their souls are free (a stipulation forced upon HTV by heaven, just to be fair I guess).
If they're killed in any channel during that time frame, then hell gets another soul. No one has ever escaped from HTV under Spike's watch, but now he has to deal with Roy (John Ritter) and Helen Knable (Pam Dawber) who aren't going down without a fight.
Periodically other shows on HTV are shown in commercials, such as Different Strokes in which old men have strokes and then die. These quick commercials are a lot more enjoyable than the lengthier programs Roy and Helen are involved in, mostly because many of the HTV programs are just based on puns created by changing a regular show's title to something more evil, such as Dwayne's Underworld and Northern Overexposure.
This results in gags that are pretty simple and one note, which means they quickly grow tiresome when Roy and Helen are in them for more than a few minutes. The end of the movie features a dance and music number by Salt N' Pepper, who I guess didn't the fact that their appearance implies that Salt N' Pepper videos are regular viewing in HELL. What a compliment!
Stuff like a ten minute animated cartoon segment about mice fighting a robotic cat just doesn't fit in at all and drags the whole movie down. Stay Tuned could have been something really great if the filmmakers had embraced the dark comedy potential of a television network fronted by Hell and gone all out with the amount of dark humor you could drag out of that concept. Instead Stay Tuned is a slightly amusing but ultimately mediocre collection of hit and miss parodies.
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