MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE THE SKULLS

It's taken two years but I can finally say I have joined the blogosphere. I wanted to do add a blog not long after we actually got the site up and running but we weren't able to due to compatibility issues with our old servers. Just one of the many reasons why we moved on to greener, blacker, yellower, and purpler pastures. After even more annoying complications with blog software, I finally said "Screw it!" and simply bought a Live Journal account. It's taken about another month to get things going but my blog has finally arrived. Since my B-WARE 2005 article proved to be a hugely popular piece of infotainment, I decided to make it the basis for my blog. Hence the blog's title B-WARE THE BLOG! (which is also a play on the title of a very bad BLOB sequel). As you'll see right now, the blog is still in its infancy and looking a bit plain as of now, but I believe you'll find some keen info already posted. I plan to update it regularly (at least once a week, more if warranted) with info on forthcoming b-movies, links to some of the news and reviews I do for Dread Central, and all sorts of skews on whatever tickles my fancy that day. In the meantime...

Few things in this world convey a true sense of horror quite like the sight of naked animated Alan Hale Jr.

 

STEALTH BOMB

 

Against my better judgment, I went to see STEALTH on opening night. Believe it or not, I didn't go see it just out of hopes of lambasting it in a review. I know, hard to believe, huh? I actually went to see the movie because I was genuinely hoping against hope that it might turn out to be enjoyable. Even if it had all the markings of a video game movie, I was still hoping for a cool futuristic aerial combat flick, something that hasn't come along in a long, long time. Alas, hope was lost less than a half hour into the film's bloated two-hour running time when the sheer lameness of the production washed over me like a Southeast Asian tsunami. I was very tempted to walkout at times but my interest in seeing what improbable story turn it would take next kept me in my seat. The story would take several improbable turns. Too bad they never took me anyplace entertaining.

The plot to STEALTH goes in many different directions but instead of feeling like a fleshed out story with lots of twists and turns, it comes across more like a script written by someone with a short attention span that couldn't make up his mind what kind of movie he wanted to write so he tried to cram them all in. This is especially surprising considering STEALTH was written by W.D. Richter, the same man that wrote the 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the 1979 Frank Langella version of DRACULA, and one of my all-time faves BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, and he directed THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION. I don't know if the studio butchered his original script for STEALTH or if it was just a total misfire from the start but something definitely experienced a major malfunction on the writing end.

Uwe Boll's XEVIOUS: THE MOTION PICTURE

Set in the unspecified near future, STEALTH starts out as a sort of TOP GUN (cocky Navy fighter pilots protecting America) meets FIREFOX (super high tech but not overly sci-fi fighter planes) before morphing into every malfunctioning computer with a mind of its own movie you've ever seen. Actually, most of the other movies you've probably seen like this give the computer a less ambiguous agenda than this film did.

After blowing up a building filled with non-descript America hating terrorists in a manner just a little too reminiscent of the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11, the super fighter jet of tomorrow gets zapped by some good, old fashioned lightning and experiences technical difficulties, i.e. transforming itself into Napster. A technician says it tapped into the internet and downloaded every MP3 online. Oh, if only this lead to an aerial dogfight with Lars Ulrich.

The three hot shot Navy pilots of tomorrow (HULK explodee Josh Lucas, collagen enhanced uber babe Jessica Biel, and Oscar winner Jamie Foxx in a role that he won't end up thanking his late grandmother for) celebrate by going on vacation to Thailand where the producers strain to find a reason, any reason, to get Jessica Biel in a bikini. They succeed, and a part of me does thank them for doing so, but soon duty calls and they're all back to playing G.I Joe.

Browsing the high tech sex toy expo, every part of Jessica's body began tingling uncontrollably the moment she was asked if she wanted to test the "Sybian of the Future"

More importantly, despite still clearly malfunctioning, even exhibiting unexplainable synaptic behavior, the conniving Captain in charge of the project (There's always got to be a human villain of some sort in movies like this, right?) orders E.D.I. - the name of the computerized fighter plane that I believe stood for "Exceptionally Dopey Idea" - back into the air despite the strenuous objections of every rational human being on the planet. Sure enough, E.D.I. just up and decides that its not going to be bossed around anymore and sees no problem causing collateral damage or potentially starting World War III just as long as it can say mindless drivel about doing what it was programmed to do in a voice that sounds like the effeminate younger brother of HAL 9000. Unable to use Tic-Tac-Doe as a metaphor against warfare, the three hotshot pilots are left with no other option than to spend an eternity playing cat and mouse with Herbie, The Dr. Strangelove Bug over most of Southeast Asia and Russia.

The lone highlight of this stretch of the film is the blowing up of a dirigible refueling station that looks like something straight out of SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW. I wasn't aware that the U.S. military had these unmanned gargantuan floating fuel depots going around in circles at random spots throughout our stratosphere or would even design such things to begin with but it was there for E.D.I. to damage just enough to cause fuel to spray everywhere and, thankfully, the thing was so full of jet fuel that it could spray gallons of it in the atmosphere for nearly 10 minutes before finally getting blown up in an explosion visualized as being only slightly smaller than the DEEP IMPACT comet slamming into the Earth.

The sudden surprise appearance of a giant flying Dalek was just one of the many inexplicable plot twists that occured throughout STEALTH.

After what felt like eons of this tedious, over edited afterburning that failed to elicit even the simplest of thrills, the plot suddenly, inexplicably, turns into SHORT CIRCUIT once E.D.I. magically regains its composure after sustaining some minor wing damage (They couldn't shoot the damn thing down or talk any reason into it but a flying piece of debris from a Russian fighter jet it blew up clips it and that's all she wrote?) that makes it realize its wipe Siberia off the map plan of attack it had eventually settled on wasn't viable and agrees to be escorted by Lucas to a top secret rendezvous base somewhere in Alaska that only the scheming Captain knows about. There, it begins questioning the nature of its existence and expressing emotions, mainly regret for its prior actions.

Speaking of regretting past actions, when is director Rob Cohen going to finally apologize for DAYLIGHT. I know a lot of people like to rip on Cohen as a director because of THE FAST & THE FURIOUS and XXX (Note to Mr. Cohen: You cannot "out Bay" Michael Bay. It cannot be done. It should not be done. For the sake of your audience and all that is holy, it should not even be attempted.) and how he reportedly butchered the script for DRAGONHEART, but I can't fully share in the Cohen hate because he also directed two movies I really liked, THE RAT PACK and DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, and one really bad movie that I absolutely laughed my ass off at, THE SKULLS. Still, making DAYLIGHT should earn the man a swift kick to the nuts; two if you consider he also used to direct episodes of "thirtysomething".

Back to STEALTH, there's even a brilliant computer genius responsible for building E.D.I. that gets brought in for no other reason than to provide us with scenes of his amazement at how much it has evolved and so he can argue against its destruction. No, the role is not played by Fisher Stevens. Instead, the role of Fisher Stevens is played by Richard Roxsburgh, clearly incognito following his disastrous turn as Dracula in last year's VAN HELSING. Between this film, VAN HELSING, LXG, and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II (Or as I call it, DARKMAN 4), the man really needs to fire his agent - preferably out of a cannon.

Around the same time the movie takes that baffling turn, STEALTH also takes time out for a rehash of BEHIND ENEMY LINES after Jessica Biel is forced to eject over North Korea and finds herself on the run from trigger happy soldiers. Where's Pulgasari when you need him?

The film's stultifying level of craptitude is epitomized during her ejection sequence where Biel hurdles to the earth while trying to dodge the falling wreckage from her exploding plane, unsure if she'll even be successfully capable of opening her parachute, and when she eventually does, it catches fires. Throughout this ordeal, she somehow and for some reason insists on giving us a play-by-play commentary of everything happening to her on the way down as if she were describing this entire sequence to a blind person sitting in the theater. Afterwards, she quickly finds herself in rural North Korea running for the Demilitarized Zone armed only with her cross-country track and field skills and her rather sizable sidearm that looks like the alien's gun from I COME IN PEACE. How the hell did she manage to hang onto a gun that large during that chaotic emergency ejection? For that matter, how does she even know where exactly where she is, let alone the exact direction of the DMZ?

ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT LEADER-1

Meanwhile, another inexplicable turn occurs as the film ventures into territory mined by every military conspiracy thriller you've ever seen where a commanding officer tries to have one of his subordinates killed in order to cover his own ass. Josh Lucas' character ends up getting marked for death by the evil military Captain during a chain of events that comes complete with an attempted poisoning, a brief fire fight, an exploding hangar, and the ruined Captain going into the latrine to bite the bullet, literally.

Now it's IRON EAGLE time!

Despite the fact that E.D.I. was supposedly too damaged to fly any real distance and without being given any indication that repairs were made to the damaged part of the plane, Lucas climbs into its cockpit so that he and Johnny Mach 5 can fly off to North Korea to rescue Biel even though there is absolutely, positively, without question, no possibility whatsoever that either of them should have any clue precisely where to find her. Fortunately, they decide to head straight for the North Korean side of the DMZ and arrive just in time to rescue a hobbling Biel, who, by the way, shows little effects from the really nasty bullet wound she took earlier other than making some grimaces and limping a little. Wait, limping? But she was shot right through the shoulder? Oh well, I'm sure she's just grateful that the wound cauterized itself.

This leads to an action sequence so jumbled that if you squint hard enough you might fool yourself into thinking you're watching a Michael Dudikoff flick from his Golan-Globus days. In the end, Lucas and Biel run for safe territory, sort of like Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith escaping from the Nazis in SHINING THROUGH by running across the Swiss endzone to safety, and E.D.I. does the most human thing of all as it needlessly sacrifices itself in order to save a pair of good-looking Caucasians.

STEALTH is ever so lame. It's a cheesy movie alright, but it's made from lactose-free cheese, and is clearly designed to entertain those that suffer from lactose intolerance. I like real cheese made from 100% cow or goat squeezins.

As I said before, instead of feeling like a movie with lots of twists and turns, it ended up feeling like a movie that kept turning on a dime because it couldn't make up its mind what sort of movie it wanted to be. STEALTH's plot is like four or five different plots all rolled into one, but, unfortunately, this particular fruit roll-up was left out in the sun too long and melted.

One possibly insane woman I overheard exiting the theater kept talking about how romantic she thought the Josh Lucas-Jessica Biel love story aspect of the film was. Considering how little chemistry the two of them had and how surprisingly downplayed their budding romance was handled, I really have to wonder what this woman's actual love life must be like. Does her idea of a perfect Valentine's Day consist of a lot of vacant staring, unspoken feelings, and the flying of experimental aircrafts into Communist countries to pick her up?

But wait a minute, Foy; you've gone through this whole review without saying anything about Jamie Foxx. Not only is he the biggest name in the movie, pretty much all the trailers would lead you to believe he's the star of STEALTH. So why haven't you told us anything about Jamie Foxx's character? Well...

 

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE DAYLIGHT