The Weirdest 'Freddy vs. Jason' Script EVER!

There were a lot of weird Freddy vs. Jason scripts floating around in Hollywood in the mid-1990s, but none of 'em were as brass-balled out there as the one penned by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore which saw Jason go on trial for mega-homicide and Freddy mass murder an entire shopping mall full of children. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Even now I'm not sure if 2003's Freddy vs. Jason was a rousing success or a dismal failure. At the time, I thought it was a goddamn hoot, but then again, me and my pals had also spent an hour in the parking lot before the movie started drinking Dr. Pepper and vodka and listening to Soundgarden, so there may have been some chemical influence on our perspectives. My second (and first sober) screening of the movie when it hit the DVD rounds, I wasn't anywhere near as impressed, and by the third time I watched it, I was wholeheartedly disappointed. I mean, shit, we've been waiting on this movie for more than a decade - that was a LOT of hype, and I don't think anybody, even the people who actually made the movie, would say that it came anywhere close to living up to its sky-high expectations.

Watching the movie now, though, I'm kinda' on the fence. There were some cool elements, but as a whole, it really didn't add up to anything truly transcendent. I can appreciate the writers' reluctance to fuck with the series chronology of each respective franchise, but considering how long people have been waiting for the flick, you sorta' expected them to hit us with some big go-home point that wedded the two brands together, like revealing Freddy was Jason's dad or that Michael Myers was the Kruegers' next door neighbor or something. Still, the fact that Ronny Yu's movie came complete with a coherent (even rational) plot can't be considered anything other than a minor miracle - especially considering how clusterfucky some of the proposed FvJ scripts were. 

You may not think the 2003 movie was the bee's knees, but compared to what we could've ended up with, it was a fucking cinematic triumph. One proposed script had a teenage cult resurrect Freddy so he could rape a retarded elementary schooler and bring about the Apocalypse. Another one had Freddy and Jason literally fighting each other in a boxing ring in hell, with Ted Bundy as the special guest referee. And in yet another, there's a scene where a character gets sucked inside Freddy's nostril and has to do battle with a giant talking wad of CGI snot. Actually, that's a lie on my part - that wasn't three different plots, those are all taken from a single script, which was THE ONE screenplay New Line Cinema almost produced (indeed, that it put the brakes on that turd of a concept might be literally the only good thing to come out of the Columbine massacre.)

I'm not quite sure just how many Freddy vs. Jason scripts were floating around in Hollywood - a great new book, Slash of the Titans, examines at least ten different ones - but of the ones that have made it to the Internet, in my humblest o' opinions the absolute weirdest one had to be the treatment penned by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore titled simply Jason vs. Freddy.

Now Braga and Moore (whose co-writing credits include the second Mission: Impossible movie, among many others) are no Johnny-Come-Latelies. Around the time of the script, Braga (who has since picked up a couple of awards for his work on Terra Nova and the Cosmos reboot and written a few 24 episodes), had already penned a pretty good number of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. His partner Moore (who later wrote the Battlestar Galactica reboot and is currently writing Outlander) also had a fair amount of writing experience, not just on TNG, but also on a few full-length Star Trek movies, including Generations. Now, considering their sci-fi pedigrees, you'd expect their FvJ treatment to be more in line with Jason X than Yu's movie, but hold your horses: instead of making the crossover slasher movie a straight-up monster kung-fu movie, their treatment was effectively a courtroom drama.

Yep, you heard right - they literally turned Freddy v. Jason into, well, Freddy v. Jason. OK, so maybe it's not a full-length John Grisham legal potboiler, but it's certainly unlike anything we've ever seen in a Friday the 13th or Elm Street movie before or after. The full script isn't too hard to find with a little bit of Googlin', but for those of you who would prefer the CliffsNotes version, I've taken the time and the effort to sum up the whole dang thing for you below. Enjoy it, kids - it's some way out there shit.

We begin with these two land developers at Crystal Lake. They make jokes about Jason and get lost in the woods and take refuge in a dilapidated old house. The male developer talks with a realtor on his cell phone. The house is glutted with knifes, machetes, chainsaws and, of course, hockey masks. His female companion sees some odd newspaper clippings on the wall. Then her partner goes missing. She prowls around the house for a bit and finds him hanging on a meat hook, deader than the prospects of a Prodigy comeback. She grabs a knife and finds Jason just sitting in a recliner in the living room. She throws it at him, he grabs it in midair and in one fell swoop, throws it right back at her and through her skull.

Then an FBI assault team swarms the house. Meanwhile, Ruby Jarvis gets a phone call at three in the morning letting her know she's going to be the public defender in the capital murder trial of one Jason Voorhees.

Ruby discusses the case with federal prosecutor Keith Harding. She says the warrant was signed by a local judge and therefore remains in her jurisdiction. She visits Jason at the county jail and reads him his rights. He stares at the floor the entire time. She freaks out when he scratches his hand.

Ruby then speaks with her assistant, your stereotypical Asian sidekick Kwan. She says she wants a change of venue and the jurors sequestered. She thinks copping an insanity plea might be the best defense moving forward.

They go to video store and check out the horror section. She says slasher moves have made America prejudiced against her client. Kwan then picks up a copy of Friday the 13th, then Zombie Sluts From Beyond the Grave. So it looks like we're living in a diagetic world where Jason exists, but all of the previous F13 movies were also fictitious. Keep that in the back of your head for later on.

Ruby goes home and watches Friday the 13th Part 10: Jason's Greatest Hits and Chops for research. She mocks the movie and gets a phone call from the local sheriff, letting her know Jason has escaped. She hears a mysterious sound and fog starts rolling into her living room. She's soon attacked by Jack the Ripper, then Charles Manson tries to give her a swastika tattoo. She finds a severed head in a kitchen pot, then gets sneak-attacked by Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Then Jason approaches her. He slowly takes off his mask and it's Freddy! Of course, she wakes up right before he claws her.

It's a media circus at the Crystal Lake courthouse the next day. Some protesters have signs reading "Jason needs to die," others have signs reading "free Jason". Ruby speaks with a psychologist ("he's fucking nuts," he says, "and interestingly, it appears he doesn't sleep, ever.") Jason is literally wheeled into court with chains all over him. Harding mocks Ruby's outfit and literally takes all day to read all of Jason's charges. Ruby enters a not guilty plea at the arraignment and everybody freaks out. Then a guy who said Jason killed his sister runs into the courthouse and shoots him six times.

So Jason is taken to the hospital (He has Type O Negative blood and a resting heart rate of 180, in case you've ever wondered such) and shot full of barbiturates and gassed. He finally falls asleep and starts dreaming. He's a boy being chased though the woods, having flashbacks to pre-burnt Freddy K. having sex with his mama. He grabs a doctor during some x-rays but gets needled again and falls back asleep. Still a kid in the dream, Jason tries to escape Freddy in a metal canoe. Freddy attacks him in the middle of a lake, then a nurse sees what appears to be a metal glove on the X-ray monitor, swiping at his chest. Jason goes into violent convulsions. He wakes up, but remains deathly still on the table the second he regains consciousness. The public defender can't believe he made a full recovery.

Ruby, Kwan and the psychiatrist go to the hospital basement to read Jason's old medical records from when he was a (human) kid. They learn his mom died from ovarian cancer in 1969 and his dad was named Elias (so, uh, I guess it's sticking to the official Friday canon, I suppose.) Ruby says that although a string of murders did happen in the 1980s, all those damn Friday the 13th movies have confused the realities of Jason's life to the general public. The records suggest Jason has insomnelence, an extreme form of insomnia where he goes without sleep for three months at a time. Ruby says that could explain his violent behavior and potentially get him off by reason of insanity.

What - you thought I was making this shit up?

They hook Jason up to a brain scanning EEG machine and dope him up on 47 ccs (did you know that stands for cubic centimeters?) of Valium. "If we're lucky, maybe he'll fart in his sleep” one tech remarks. Two hours later, Jason finally hits R.E.M. sleep. He dreams about being a kid again and walks in on human Freddy fucking the shit out of his mom (again.) Then Freddy in his more recognizable burnt form chases him and says he ain't getting away this time but when he hits him with his glove, a hockey mask magically materializes over his face. Jason becomes full grown, grabs an ax and dismembers Freddy, Evil Dead style. But Freddy (with green blood!) reassembles himself. Jason IRL starts convulsing. Freddy's arm pops out of Jason's chest and slices the jugulars of Kwan and a cop on standby. Freddy's thrashing hand catches Kwan's ponytail and drags him into Jason's chest and thusly, the dream world. Ruby and pals try to yank him out but accidentally inject Jason with more hypno-juice. Freddy fucks up Kwan's face something fierce with his claw and spits his corpse out into the real world. Then Jason wakes up - of course, right before Freddy can escape from the dream world.

Ruby is grilled by Harding about the murders. She is adamant Jason didn't do it and the razor hand she saw was real, dabnabbit. She goes home and scans a police sketch of the glove into a federal murder weapons database. Sure enough, it pulls up a file on Freddy, who was supposedly burned alive in the late sixties. Then, she finds a report on the 1984 Springwood child murders ….

Then Ruby visits the psychiatrist (they just call him by his last name, Dr. Sena) and tells him the classic Freddy backstory. Apparently, Springwood is just eight miles from Crystal Lake (this, despite the official mythos of each franchise putting the series in Ohio and New Jersey, respectively, but as they say in France, "fuck continuity.") She brings up a few reports of teens saying Freddy visited them in dreams and tried to kill them. She looks at the EEG-thingy and it clearly shows two distinct brain waves while Jason was sleeping.

Next there's a big FBI dig at Jason's old place. They find 47 bodies buried on the premises. Ruby finds a fedora in Mrs. Voorhees' bedroom with the initials "F.K." written on the inside. Dr. Sena hooks Jason to to the EEG thing and sedates him again. This time, though, it's being filmed. Meanwhile, Ruby goes under Mrs. Voorhees' bed and it starts shaking violently. She gets out and sees young Jason in the house, but not unlike John Cena, he can't see her.

The EEG machine explodes and Freddy hops out of Jason's body into our real world. He mind controls four guards to blow each other's brains out and Ruby and Harding return to Crystal Lake. There are dozens of dead bodies everywhere, with a whole slew of cops getting blown away by invisible bullets. Ruby finds a newswoman's camera. She rewinds the footage of an invisible jail break, in which 50 dream men attack the cops in a bloody shootout. Then the newswoman gets ghost raped by some sort of unseen presence, and Freddy pops up on camera at the very last frame.

Ruby returns to the jail. Jason's still sleeping and Dr. Sena, surprisingly, is still alive. He says Freddy has the ability to induce mass narcosis - basically, to create walking nightmares in real life. They look under Jason's bed and hey, young Jason has apparently crossed over from dreamworld too.

Elsewhere, Harding's driving on the interstate when he sees a couple of girls in white dresses playing in the middle of the road. This causes a massive pile up, but Freddy manages to reassemble the cars so they are perfectly parked on the highway, but inside everybody remains mangled and decapitated with the radios and engines still humming. "Don't dream and drive," Freddy quips.

Then Ruby speaks to boy Jason. He's terrified of Freddy. At one point, four bloody claw marks show up on his forehead and Ruby wipes it off. He talks about Freddy trying to drown him in the lake, but surviving and living the rest of his life in the woods, growing angrier and angrier. Eventually boy Jason snaps and beats Dr. Sena with a billy club. Ruby hugs him and he starts crying. Adult Jason wakes up and boy Jason disappears. He grabs his hockey mask and ax, leaves the room and hits the city streets.

We enter Springwood, which is described as a city of hundreds of thousands of people. If Freddy's whole shtick is killing teens, Dr. Sena says he's probably headed to a place where there are a lot of teenagers to shish-ka-bob - the local mall. And on cue, Freddy enters the Elm Street Shopping Plaza. Ruby gets a shotgun and Dr. Sena gives her a stimulant that will keep her from dreaming, but it only lasts ten minutes. Well, that's not foreshadowing or anything.

Freddy gets on an elevator and kills two punks by making their tattoos come alive and their piercings grow Hellraiser-esque barbs and dig into their flesh. He then places an invisible gate around the mall, and says "it's time to shop till they drop."

From here, it's absolute bedlam. An invisible semi crashes through the mall and invisible Rottweilers attack little girls. Kids get sucked into a man-eating ball pit and teens popping pimples have snakes come out of their faces. Hairspray turns into flamethrowers and horny nerds are strangled by mannequins. Then the food court explodes and people have their legs eaten off by escalators (which has always been one of my greatest irrational fears, by the way.)

Ruby and Dr. Sena finally arrive. Now a "real" fire has broken out. They shoot up the stay-awake juice and free some people.  Ruby shoots at Freddy, hits a coffee machine and sprays his face with espresso. Dr. Sena gives another Freddy-reversing  injection to a girl who thinks she's being attacked by dolls. A nurse saunters on up to Dr. Sena (who is painted as a big perv earlier in the script) and she flashes him. But instead of nipples, she has gnashing teeth. Now, his anti-hallucination drugs haven't worn off, so it doesn't kill him. Then Freddy says he has to finish the job himself. Ruby shoots Freddy and he runs off into a movie theater. Inside are piles of dead ushers, complete with one guy stuffed inside the popcorn machine. Ruby sees a cardboard standee for Jason 2010 … a fictitious movie that eerily foretold the coming of Jason X in 2002. Naturally, the standee comes alive and attacks her. "The verdict is in bitch," Freddy says, "you're guilty of fucking with the wrong guy." Yeah ... his dialogue could've used some work.

And here's the part where the "real" Jason makes the save and fights robot Jason. Then Freddy makes 50 of Jason's victims appear as zombies and attack him including the two land developers from the opening scene. Jason fights them off and Freddy says they should join forces and he turns into his mom … only for Jason to grab the razor glove and stab Freddy in the throat.

Ruby yells from a dentist office. She's trapped in a chair, which has been transformed into a  torture device. Jason tries to free her (wait, what the fuck is Jason doing trying to SAVE somebody else's life?) and what do you know, it's actually Freddy and he criticizes Jason for going soft in his old age. Freddy hits Jason with some laughing gas and he starts to doze off. He tries to jump back up out of dreamland and pops out of Freddy's chest, then Ruby hits Jason with another dose of anti-sleep juice and it basically fuses Freddy and Jason into a Siamese twin freak of nature. They run around the fiery mall and Ruby fireman carries Sena to safety. Jason tells her to leave - yep, he can talk in this script - and Freddy and Jason, sharing the same body, keep fighting. Jason hits a propane tank and the mall goes kaboom. "My client is dead," Ruby remarks, "but he's a free man."

We cut to the Voorhees house getting demolished. Before cutting to black, we pan to a photo of boy Jason - only instead of looking scared, he actually looks happy. Then the wall comes down, and that's all she wrote, kids.

A computer simulation of the original ending of Freddy vs. Jason.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good treatment, even though I do have some major complaints about the way Jason is depicted. Ultimately, they made him far too sympathetic, and if there's one thing Jason should never be, it's a victim. Oddly enough, almost all of the major FvJ scripts out there had the same motif, with Freddy playing the "real" bad guy and Jason doing a Godzilla/Venom-like face turn. Really, only the one used for the 2003 film seemed to get away from that concept, and for as much shit as we give that flick, we should at least be thankful it kept Jason the emotionless psycho killer we all know and love.

The nightmare sequences, though, would've been awesome, and the grand finale kill-fest at the mall would've been a hoot and a half. It's kind of a pity nobody's attempted to translate the script into a comic book mini-series, or even better, a DCAU-like feature length animated movie. The script, as a whole, never would've worked as a full-fledged live-action movie, but it could've been pretty cool as a non-canon spin-off in a totally different medium. I mean, at the absolute least, we should've got an action figure of the Jason/Freddy Siamese twin monster, and there's no excuse for McFarlane Toys never giving it to us. 

An aside, but I've always thought it was odd New Line would just let the Friday rights lapse without giving us a proper FvJ sequel. I mean, the movie did make a ton of money, and it wouldn't have been too hard to crank out a follow-up every Halloween, Saw style, if they really wanted to. And there were certainly no shortage of novel approaches to the crossover hook, as evident by the kookiness of Braga and Moore's script. 

Who knows. Maybe one day Freddy and Jason will once again be fighting under the same corporate umbrella again, but it's a pity we didn't get more of a good thing back when Robert Englund and Kane Hooder were willing and ready to do it. Alas, each and every Friday the 13th, we can always reflect on what could've been - and as bad as a movie about Jason being put on trial for 400 counts of murder and Freddy killing people by turning their tattoos alive might have been, there's no way it could've been worse than most of the crap that passes for "horror" in this day and age ...

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B-Movie Review: 'SpaceCamp' (1986)

You know exactly what America needed right after the Challenger disaster? A movie about goofball teenagers accidentally being sent into space by a robot that hacked into the NASA mainframe. 

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo___X

If you're looking for reasons why NASA ain't doing much of shit anymore, Jan. 28, 1986 is your answer.

That morning, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all seven people on board. Strangely enough, one of the people who was originally slated to be onboard was the bitch who played Big Bird on Sesame Street, and the only reason why she wasn't was because NASA couldn't find a helmet big enough to fit her big fluffy head.

The administration didn't even bother launching anything for another three years, which coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union, pretty much ended the great Space Race. Business picked up a little in the 1990s, but when history repeated itself with the Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA more or less packed it up and hasn't tried to do anything ambitious with live crew members since.

Pictured: something no one has ever fapped to.

Now, I wasn't around back then, but to say the Challenger disaster really fucked with people back in '86 would be an understatement. For 30 years the space program had been one of the nation's greatest symbols of pride, a testament to American technology and our engineering ingenuity. When those seven people got blown the fuck out (literally), all of a sudden we had to come to grips with the fact that - maybe - we weren't the mechanical masterminds and aerospace whizzes we thought we were. Remember, this happened right around the same time Japan started to eat us alive with electronics tariffs while rice burner sales slowly began eclipsing American-made rides. For three decades we thought our superior intellect and unparalleled craftsmanship would give us an eternal leg up on our Asiatic competitors, but as soon as the panels started flying off the shuttle, all of a sudden we just knew we weren't the industrial (or aeronautical) titans we had convinced ourselves we were. 

Which, naturally, made the timing of SpaceCamp about as unfortunate as finding poison gas Pokemon Go monsters running around at Holocaust memorials. 

In the mid-1980s, Patrick Bailey and Larry Williams wrote a book about the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. (more on that in just a bit.) ABC Pictures thought the premise of kids getting accidentally launched into space and having to learn to work together to survive interstellar death was a dandy idea for a feature and groundwork on the feature film began in 1985. A June 1986 release date was targeted, with the filmmakers expecting it to be the family-comedy breakout hit of the summer.

To say the Challenger disaster put the brakes on the project is kinda' like saying the JFK assassination kinda' hurt Kennedy's chances of re-election. Since the film was almost 100 percent done at the time of the shuttle explosion, the studio felt it was too late to yank the plug on the $25 million movie, so despite the deluge of bad publicity, the film was released as planned that summer. 

Pictured: something everybody has fapped to.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the movie was a colossal box office dud, failing to earn back even $10 million. Thanks to endless repeats on Saturday afternoon cable throughout the 1990s, however, the film has since gone on to become something of a minor '80s cult classic, with enough people having seen it to garner at least one or two passing gags on Family Guy.

But does the movie have any sort of intrinsic value beyond rudimentary nostalgia? Well, how's about we fire up our old VHS cassette and see for ourselves ...

The movie opens with a little girl in a cornfield wishing on a shooting star. She says it's like John Glenn is winking at her from space and shes' destined to become an astronaut. Well, flash forward 20 years and she's all grown up and played by Kate Capshaw and married to Tom Skerrit. She's pissed because she just got turned down for an astronaut gig because she's a woman (probably) and has to operate a junior cadet space camp alongside her hubby for the summer.

The kids show up and it's your usual grab-bag of multi-ethnic teens (and LULZ a plenty when they assign the Asian kid to the yellow team.) So we get some exposition on the history of the space camp (it's a real place in Mobile, Ala.) and then we're introduced to Kathryn, this dorky girl (played by Lea Thompson) who knows everything about the lead space camp woman and kinda' idolizes her. And of course, the token black kid yells a lot, and displays several tendencies that suggest he is literally mentally retarded. We also meet Tish (played by Kelly Preston) who looks like your basic valley girl and says her dream is to become an extra-terrestrial dis jockey. Then this annoying ass white guy named Kevin (played by Tate Donovan) pretends he's the Asian guy so he can be on the same team with Tish, prolly because he wants to hump her and stuff.

The adults show off the shuttle simulator and here's where Jinx - the film's iconic robot - makes his debut. The crew refer to it as a "$27 million handyman" while the kids simply refer to it as "an extra-terrestrial midget." Then this one little kid (played by Joaquin Phoenix, back when he was trying to convince everybody to call him "Leaf" instead) starts complaining about how badly he wants to move up from the cub scout program to the teen cadets, while the  girls talk about the size of all the boys' hands (get it, because it's an allusion to their penis sizes!) Kathryn and Tish start to bond and as it turns out, Tish is actually something of a savant with an encyclopedic memory of everything, including piloting controls, for some unexplained reason. She then tries to convince Kathryn to let her give her a makeover while "Walk of Life" plays in the background.

Holy shit, the black kid says his big plan is to open the first outer space McDonalds. Then Kevin tells him "not to take any of this shit seriously," because this is an edgy family-friendly adventure-comedy, that's why.

And it's still not as high as his brother River was in 1986.

The little kid hides Jinx in the closet and the older kids start bullying him. Then he hears somebody say "shit" and the robot starts talking about solid waste disposal. The kids quickly realize Jinx literally does anything you tell it to and after a series of contradictory orders, it malfunctions. So, yeah, I guess that makes it the world's first autism-bot. The little kid repairs Jinx, so now it says "yo, man" as a greeting, then calls all the older kids "jerk-offs" and "monkey-glutes" for messing with him. He attempts to convince the robot to not take things so literally, but since it's a robot, it clearly don't give a fuck what some eight-year-old thinks.

Time for a montage of cadets testing out equipment. Man, those blue tee shirts are bitchin'!

Kathryn the nerd girl can't figure out how the gyroscope stabilization thing works (you know, that giant, spinning hamster ball thing from The Lawnmower Man) and feels bad. Kevin tries to reassure her and gives her a ride out to the lake in his jeep to look at the stars. His pick-up line: "so, you're really into this space stuff, huh?" She talks about watching the sky as a kid and how she couldn't wait to grow up. The romantic tension is so taut, even my fucking TV is sweating right now.

Jinx tells the adults the two kids snuck out and they catch Kathryn and Kevin making out by the waterfront. Kate Capshaw gives 'em a stern talking to and says she sees a lot of herself in Kathryn and that she has a lot of potential and she better not screw this up. Then the little kid starts crying, because he wishes he was in space instead of on Earth. Goddamn at the angst, eh? So Jinx takes over the control room and starts talking with NASA's mainframe. He LITERALLY puts the kid in the astronaut database, because he takes everything literally, remember?

Later, the kids go through a mechanical spacewalk simulator and rush through a power failure drill. Kevin does a Cheech and Chong impersonation when the adults tell him to take over. And he keeps telling more bad jokes while they simulate crashing and burning. 

Naturally, Kate chews the kids out for not taking all this make-believe space shit serious enough. Meanwhile, Jinx is still finagling with the NASA super computer to put an eight-year-old aboard the next shuttle. And OOPS! Jinx unwittingly manages to convince the computer to LAUNCH while the kids are doing a test run inside it! Despite the fact it just sentenced half a dozen tenth graders to certain death, Jinx rationalizes his actions by declaring he and the little kid are "friends forever" and that by causing a thermal curtain failure, he's actually giving the kid everything he's ever dreamed of. 

Thankfully, Kate's character remains aboard, so naturally, she screams "we're going to explode!" when the shuttle starts taking off, because that sure as sugar won't scare the dookie out of a bunch of 14-year-olds already crying their eyes out. So, to avoid a very Challenger-esque mishap, ground control has no choice but to send Kate and the kids into orbit. 

After some stock footage plays, the kids continue to panic and say very adult words like "shit" and "goddamn." Still, they can't help but "ooo" and "aww" when the window panels open and the see the curvature of the Earth. And just like that, the pants-pissing horror of literally two minutes ago is supplanted by joy and mirth as the kids point out Africa and the Swiss Alps.

Huh. Who'd thunk the people who made Mega Man would've had a direct line to NASA headquarters?

Back on terra forma, Tom Skeritt says the president wouldn't believe him if he told them they just launched his wife and five kids into space, so NASA - rather realistically - decides to keep this one mum. Now, as to how D.O.D. radar, civilian aerospace monitoring systems, Soviet detection modules and everybody within a 50 mile radius of the goddamn launch site wouldn't realize a shuttle just took off with no explanation nor warning, of course, is never diegetically addressed. In orbit, the kids realize they have 12 hours worth of air, but oh shit, they're going to need at least 13 to survive re-entry. So they decide to hook up with a space station that's conveniently right beside them to get more oxygen. And of course, Kevin the comedian is still making jokes about 7-11, despite the fact there's a 99.999999 percent chance he'll be dead as shit in half a day's time.

The kids eat some tube food and come up with this convoluted plan to communicate with ground control by Morse Code. Kate puts on a space suit and seals up a loose hatch. Then she does a full suit space walk and is absolutely awestruck looking at the Earth. As in, it literally sounds like she's orgasming while looking at it. Unfortunatley, she doesn't have a jetpack and can't reach this satellite thingy she's trying to get to. So - naturally - they put the little kid in a space suit to save her. Of course, he starts freaking out once he's out there, but then Kevin starts doing an Obi-Wan Kenobi impersonation and that inspires the little twat to rescue his adult supervisor "using the force."

I ain't bullshitting you when I tell you the rescue sequence goes on for about 20 minutes. The kid eventually lets go of a sandbag anchor and goes flying off into space and Kate isn't even that concerned at first. Shockingly, the greenscreen effects aren't that bad for a mid-80s production. Of course, she manages to save him, because the idea of leaving a child to suffocate all alone in the vacant nothingness of space is probably too much for a PG-13 movie. 

The black kid is tasked with connecting the oxygen tubes to the shuttle. Kate lets him know if they connect the wrong tubes, the whole thing is going to explode. He and Kathryn bicker back and forth whether the red wire or the yellow wire is the right one. Anyhoo, the black kid was right, which means that if the nerdy white girl had the final say, she would've been responsible for a sextuple fatality space explosion. The moral of the story? Never trust women with math.

God damn it, now Kate gets hit by the runaway sandbag and the little kid has to rescue her. A bunch of dudes smoking cigarettes at NASA headquarters tell them to get out of there, but the crew says "fuck that" and do a manual override to open the cargo doors. Kevin takes the lead as shit gets real and he pulls her back into the pod. Now the nerdy girl is kvetching to Kevin about not being as good a captain as he is - you know, right in the middle of a life or death struggle for space survival. Kate, who is still passed out from spinning around in space for so long, is wrapped in duck tape to keep from floating around the shuttle bumping into things and the kids decide to land in the middle of the desert because ... well, I don't know why, to be honest.

Now Jinx relays the Morse Code back to NASA (remember that plot point from like 45 minutes ago?) and Tom says he is going to "treat him to a can of oil" for his good work (even though the entire situation is solely the result of his up-fuckery.) He then lets them know about an alternate landing site in the desert, then Annie wakes up. The kids prepare for re-entry. The nerdy girl takes the controls and has to stabilize the craft. Hey, just like that exercise she couldn't do in the movie's first act! She has a flashback of Annie's pep talk from earlier, and re-entry begins. Unfortunately, it's too little too late and they all crash and die. Nah, just bullshitting 'ya, they survive unscratched. Everybody celebrates not getting blown to smithereens and that, kiddos, is all she wrote ... no Goonies-esque post-climax character resolutions or  resolved subplots or nothing, just the shuttle hitting the tarmac and the credits a-scrollin'. 

The most advanced artificial intelligence lifeform ever designed, and the government is using it as a janitor at a kids' summer camp. Welcome to Reagan's America.

You know, I always wanted to see a sequel with everybody at NASA losing their jobs for child endangerment and Jinx being declared an enemy of the state for hijacking federal I.T. Alas, fortune never smiled upon us, and regrettably (well, no, not really) we never got ourselves a SpaceCamp 2: Space Harder. 

If you're looking for the definition of "a mediocre movie," I think SpaceCamp is the perfect bellwether. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just kinda' there. About half the movies you'll watch in your lifetime will be better than this, and about half the movies you'll watch in your lifetime will be worse. It's the most average movie I've ever seen - one sans any notable qualities, nor any notable defects. It exists in an impenetrable sac of absolute, total and perfect unremarkableness ... being asked to give an opinion on the overall objective quality of the movie is akin to being asked to write an essay on how water tastes.

I don't hate SpaceCamp, I don't love SpaceCamp, I can't find anything to praise SpaceCamp for and I can't find anything to condemn SpaceCamp for. It's a movie forever vacuum-sealed in its own meager existence, and in that, assigning it any kind of value judgement is pointless. Some of you may really, really like the flick and some of you may really, really dislike it, but being the peculiar jumble of particles and protoplasm I am, I just can't muster enough psychological energy to describe the film as anything other than "meh."

Really, all I can tell you is that the name of the guy who directed it was "Harry Winer," which is really, really phonetically close to sounding like "hairy wiener." And according to the iMDb, the original ending had the kids being rescued by a Russian shuttle, which ... hold on to your panties, M. Night ... was manned by a bunch of Soviet children. And, perhaps most importantly of all, that I still would like to fuck Kelly Preston, preferably missionary style. 

And in a nutshell, that's all I've got to say about SpaceCamp ... and just as a general rule of life, be wary of anybody who's got any more to say about it than that. 

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MOVIES THAT MAY NOT HAVE SUCKED: 'Predator 2'

The Internet Is In America reminisces on the nearly three-decade old sequel. Audiences were pretty ambivalent about it back in 1990, but has Father Time treated Predator 2 a little bit kindlier?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Growing up, we all had our favorite movie. For some, it may have been a random Disney offering, or perhaps some other family-friendly action-adventure romp, a'la The Goonies or E.T. Alas, my favorite movie as a kid wasn't Beauty and the Beast or Rookie of the Year or even Jurassic Park - rather, mine was that all-time classic of children's cinema, Predator. 

Oh yes, Predator. I'm not sure how old I was when I first saw it, but I couldn't have been older than six or seven. Even now I'm not entirely sure how I heard about the movie, or how I wound up seeing it for the first time. Maybe it was something my mom rented, maybe it was something that came on late-at-night on WATL-36 or maybe it was something I saw at a friend's house. Regardless, I absolutely fell in love with the movie and had to have seen it - no joke - at least 20 or 30 times before I graduated from elementary school. 

Considering how much I loved this movie as a kid, I'm beginning to wonder why I never wanted to become some sort of elite U.S. commando as an adult (with the ulterior motive of fist fighting aliens in the jungles of Mexico, naturally.) There was just something so manly about this fucking movie, from Jesse Ventura chewing on Redman and calling everybody "slack jawed faggots" to that fuckin' epic handshake between Ah-nold and Apollo Creed to that climactic kung-fu battle in the jungle. It was just an expertly paced and scripted movie, and even now, it stands out as one of the very best action movies of the 1980s. There's not a whole lot of movies out there I'd say are worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Aliens and Robocop, but Predator certainly deserves such a prestigious distinction.

As great as Predator was, I suppose its 1990 sequel was destined to disappoint. For one thing, Ah-nold didn't reprise his role, and really, having a movie about the fuckin' Predator without Dutch Schaefer running around is like an Alien movie without Sigourney Weaver, or a Death Wish flick without Chuck Bronson in it or a Halloween movie without Donald Pleasance chewing up the scenery and screaming "I shot him nine times!" to anybody and everybody on the set. Secondly, the sequel wasn't going to have the same awesome ensemble cast. To be fair, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Bill Paxton and the dude who played Petey in Mo Better Blues all being in the same movie is pretty awesome, but it's nowhere close to being an all-time awesome line-up like the Terminator, the Body and both Action motherfuckin' Jackson and the police chief from Action motherfuckin' Jackson  (although I would love to see that four on four match, WWF Survivor Series style, somewhere down the line.) And thirdly, there was the general concept of the movie, which proved once and for all just how full of shit we all are as film-goers. You ever notice how people bitch and moan and complain when Hollywood makes a sequel that follows the plot of the original movie and call it stuff like "generic" and "formulaic" and "half-assed?" Well, the people who scripted Predator 2 came up with a wildly unique idea(*) for a follow-up, and sure enough, one of the biggest complaints about the flick from the general movie-going public was that it was - you guessed it - too different from the original. And if that wasn't enough, you even had eggheads like Roger Ebert ripping the movie for being subliminally prejudiced. "All they can give us in the way of an alien is a street mugger with intestines for a face, pincers around his mouth and an Afro-style braided hairdo," the rotund film critic condemned the flick. "The creature in this movie is a work of subtle racism. Subliminal clues are slipped in to encourage us to subconsciously connect the menace with black males."

(*) And yeah, I know the script for Predator 2 was prolly based on the 1989 Dark Horse Comics series Predator: Concrete Jungle, which is something I should prolly review in-depth at some point. And no, that series isn't the same thing as the Ps2/Xbox game Predator: Concrete Jungle, either ... although it was apparently greatly influenced by the second movie, which was greatly influenced by the aforementioned comic series, so then again, maybe it is. 

Yet sadly, not once does he get to say his trademark line about "pablum pukin' liberals."

OK, so Predator 2 ain't anywhere near as good as the first movie. That, we can all agree on. That said, while it's a movie with a LOT of problems, I still think it's a pretty enjoyable little creature feature that deserves slightly more respect and appreciation than it gets today. The good definitely outweighs the bad here, and had a few tweaks been made here and there, it really could have been a superior, standout sequel a'la Halloween II or Batman Returns. Of course it never could have been on the same page as Terminator 2 or anything like that, but as far as early 1990s sci-fi gore-fests go, this thing certainly used up more of its potential than squandered it. Let's dissect the ins and outs of the movie a little bit further, why don't we? 

The movie starts off with a pretty brilliant transition/callback from the first movie. The camera zooms over a swath of what looks like the rain forest, but what do you know, it's actually the shrubs on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Its the year 1997, and the local S.W.A.T. team is engaged in a bloody shootout with Colombian drug dealers and MORTON FUCKIN' DOWNEY JR. is on the street giving us live play-by-play (as far as loud mouth conservative trash TV talk show cameos go, this one definitely outdoes the brief audio appearance from Wally George in the fifth Elm Street flick - which, incidentally, was directed by the same guy who directed THIS movie, the Jamaican-born honky Stephen Hopkins.) So cops Danny Glover and Maria Conchita Alonso show up and then the Colombians (who I'm pretty sure Downey calls "Caribbeans" in the opening sequence) go to their top secret armory to snort mounds of cocaine and pull out military-grade weaponry. Naturally, that's our cue for the Predator to show up in invisible space jelly camouflage mode, and a whole hell of a bunch of drug runners soon find themselves getting their skin peeled off like the flaky golden crust on a KFC drumstick. Then Bill "Game over man, game over!" Paxton shows up as the other cop and here comes Gary Busey from the feds, saying the local P.D. needs to keep their noses out of this one because it's a matter of national security. 

Up next, this Colombian drug kingpin is fucking the shit out of his gal pal, but OOPS! Here comes the Jamaican Voodoo Posse (yep, that IS their canonical name in the movie) to interrupt his intercourse, string him upside down from the ceiling and carve his torso open like a blow-trafficking birthday cake. Of course, Predator is lurking in the shadows and he (it is a he, ain't it?) then gets a chance to show off all of his cool new toys, including a trident, a spear and even this razor sharp spider-net thingy that peels people's skin down to their skeleton. The cops show up, the lone survivor says the devil himself killed everybody and the feds take one gander at the 19 de-skinned Rastafarians hanging from the roof and go "yeah, we think we're going to seal this little parameter off for a while, so vamoose, ya'll."

At this point, we're nearly 45 minutes into the movie. The pace here is really, really tight and the build-up - thus far, at least - has been quite effective. Now Glover's other, other partner (he's the guy who played Carlos in Safe House, but he's probably even more famous for being this Panamanian salsa singer that's recorded a good 50 albums) decides to snoop around the crime scene and gets killed by Predator, than Glover yells some curse words at Gary Busey and there is this HILARIOUS scene that had to have been ad-libbed where Glover holds out his fist in front of Busey's face and slaps it to let him know he's really pissed about all this federal investigative meddling. Glover and the gang take a Predator artifact to a lab and the scientist woman says this shit isn't made out of anything on the periodic table and then Glover hops in the Jamaican gang's ZEBRA-colored dope smoke party car and he talks to their leader in the slums and he tells him he knows what the Predator is and after Danny leaves, sure enough, Predator shows up and it and the Jamaican drug lord have a sword fight and there's this half-great/half-lazy transition scene where you hear the drug kingpin scream and then there's a quick cut to Predator holding his severed head. Yeah, it' a bit ghetto, but it DOES lead to a scene where the Predator breaks out his alien skull polishing kit, and for some reason I just LOVE watching intergalactic killing machines buffing things. 

Don't you just hate it when you're smoking a joint in a rolled-up tampon and then some buzz-killing space alien warrior has to show up and blast your sternum out your asshole with a laser cannon?

Now here is where the movie kinda' starts to go off course. The whole thing is about an hour and forty minutes, and we've damn near hit the sixty-minute mark and our main man Danny hasn't even encountered the Predator up-close yet. That means we've got to blow through the final thirty minutes and skip out on a lot of character development and plot exposition just outta' time constraints. Or, to put it another way, Predator 2 is like a goalie that plays really, really well in the first two periods of a hockey game, but just starts letting everything pass through the net beginning in the third.

So Danny first encounters the Predator in translucent jellyfish mode when he's visiting his old partner's grave. Then the Predator decides to hi-jack a subway train (yeah, people always forget about L.A. having a subway system, don't they?) where EVERYBODY is packing heat but since all the killing is done in strobe light mode, you really can't see anything at all happening (I guess that was done to thwart the scissors-happy M.P.A.A., but it just don't work either in concept or execution.) Anyhoo, Bill Paxton gets killed (but not before throwing a golf ball at the Predator, in what has to be the movie's stupidest scene) and then Alonso gets killed but not before Predator's heat-vision lets us know she's pregnant (which has to be prolly the movie's gutsiest and most disturbing moment - and one I am SHOCKED the suits at Fox allowed to remain in the flick.) The problem, however, is that we have NO time to mourn the characters' deaths; in fact, I'm not even entirely sure Glover is AWARE his partners are dead, because he's too busy racing against the clock to finish this movie.

So we have this weird scene were the Predator stands atop a building during a thunderstorm and gets electrocuted by lightning (of course, instead of frying his gizzards, all it appears to do is re-energize his space monster batteries), and Danny starts chasing after him but his car is side-swiped by a pick-up truck and he's carried into Gary Busey's Predator-monitoring van and we FINALLY get some exposition to link this movie to part one. So apparently, the feds are well aware of what happened in the original movie, in particular the ending scene where the Predator blows himself up and created a giant smoking hole in the rain forest the size of 300 city blocks. Apparently, Gary and pals have figured out that the alien warrior is attracted to heat and armed conflict (he name drops places like Iwo Jima and Cambodia, which automatically makes me want to see a movie about the Predator fighting kamikaze pilots and the Khmer Rogue) and also, we learn that the Predator is a pretty big fan of eating raw beef (a weird thing, I know, but I always wondered what the Predator normally eats) so they decided to stake out a local meat locker and send in the Predator capturing death squad. They THINK they know how to take advantage of his heat vision weakness (how Busey knows this, however, is never really explained) but LOLOOPS! The Predator can apparently use all kinds of different light spectrums to see shit, and it's not too long before he's picking off gubberment storm troopers left and right. Oddly enough, Danny manages to wound the Predator pretty good in an ensuing gunfight, only for Busey to come in before he can head shot that crag-faced motherfucker and attempt to freeze it for "science." Predator responds as you'd assume he'd respond - by pulling out a giant saw blade and bifurcating Gary right at the pelvis. Bonus points for the callback to the original, when the Danny finally sees the Predator unmasked and the Predator calls himself "one ugly motherfucker." Actually, that's kind of an annoying plot device throughout the movie, with the Predator just randomly saying things he's heard other people throughout the film utter. I mean, does anyone think it is eerie or intimidating to hear a giant crab monster with dreadlocks sputter "shit happens?" or "want some candy?" before ripping a dude's spinal cord out?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they just borrowed a few corpses off the set of Hellraiser II and expected none of us to be the wiser.

And now we've hit our 20-minute footrace to the finale, and yeah, the movie REALLY falls apart here. So Glover calls Predator "pussy face" and they fight on top of a roof and the Predator tries to turn on his arm detonator so Danny grabs a Predator razor-disc and hacks his hand off. Then he chases him through an apartment complex, where the Predator makes Jell-O healing paste out of stucco and he makes a woman holding a broom and watching Jeopardy! piss her undergarments and she tells Glover "I don't think he gives a shit" when he reveals himself to be a cop. Yeah ... the "humor" in this one needed some work. 

The climactic battle inside the Predator's subterranean spaceship is a pretty big disappointment. It's cool getting to look at all of the trophy skulls all over the place (shit, watching Glover look legitimately confused by the xenomorph and dinosaur bones all over the place might just be the best scene in the entire movie), but the final battle between Danny and the Predator is just woefully uneventful. Watching all of the other Predators teleport in to retrieve their fallen comrade is a nice touch, but that whole subplot about the gun from 1715 is just WAY too enigmatic to allot for a satisfying conclusion. Oh, and in case you're wondering what all that shit is about, apparently, it's a gun that belonged to a pirate a Predator once fought in a comic book. Yeah, what a bang-up job they did explaining that one, eh?

And so, the spaceship flies off and Danny emerges covered in soot from the underground chambers. His police chief yells at him, and he doesn't really say anything because fuck, who would believe him, right? And that's precisely how the movie ends - no sequel hook, no callback to the original, nothing. It's just one cop getting chewed out by another cop in the dirt - basically, the shittiest way to end a movie like this imaginable.

Get it? Because Jamaicans have dreadlocks and the Predator has dreadlocks, too? Golly gee, these Hollywood writer types sure are insightful.

In that, there's no mystery why people tend to look back on Predator 2 as a disappointment. After all, the movie's third act is so rushed and underwhelming that you kinda' forget about how good the first two acts were. So basically, you have a movie that does a REALLY good job of building up the story and characters for the first hour, and then the thing hops the train tracks in the last thirty minutes when it comes time to turn all that mounting tension into kinetic energy. 

I think the suits at 20th Century Fox really misjudged the audience for this one. I reckon they THOUGHT people wanted a grim and gritty, Robocop-esque blood and guts-filled action comedy, but what people who loved the first Predator really wanted was some exposition on the monster mythos. Just where do the Predators come from and what's their motivation for yanking dudes' heads off? How old do they live and how LONG have they been in contact with humanity? Are they planning some sort of alien invasion of Earth at some point, or are they just the intergalactic equivalent of big game hunters? What's general Predator society like? Clearly, they are an advanced life-form, considering their technology, so why do they just cruise around the galaxy trying to pick fights with military musclemen and cops that say the "f-word" a lot? Does Predator World have hospitals and schools and grocery stores? We all know what kind of tech they created for killing shit, but what does their day-to-day technology resemble? 

Y'see, Fox created a really, really intriguing monster with the Predator, which unlike something like the bugs from Aliens or Jason Voorhees, actually has some sort of high-grade intellectual quality. Since they've mastered intergalactic transportation, clearly, they're much, much smarter than us as a species. Well, audiences want to know how they got so smart, and really, exploring the Predator civilization would've have lent itself to a more enjoyable cinematic romp than what was tantamount to "Predator Meets The Black Dude from Lethal Weapon." Now, I haven't seen Predators yet, so maybe that kinda leans more in that direction; as is, though, Predator 2's greatest flaw is giving us all the questions we don't care about with absolutely none of the answers long plaguing us since the first flick came out. 

Now, all of that said, I still think Predator 2 is a pretty fun and moderately underrated movie. Like Robocop 2, it's one of those movies that resides in that weird pop cultural vacuum that's not quite the 1980s but not really the 1990s, either. The cinematography is really good, the ensemble cast is decent (or, as decent as they had to be) and the special effects were rather memorable, especially all of that high-tech Predator weaponry designed to kill people by getting as much blood out of 'em in two seconds as humanly possible. It's a far, far cry from the intrinsic greatness of the first movie, but for what it's worth, it isn't a bad little side story spun off from the main series arc. And lest you haters forget: it WAS responsible for inspiring a pretty awesome isometric Sega Genesis game, which in my eyes, MORE than justifies the totality of the film's existence.

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The Live-Action ‘90s Sonic Movie REVEALED!

A world exclusive look at the “Sonic the Hedgehog” flick that ALMOST got made back in the late 1990s!

We here at the Internet is in America never really set out to break any earth-shattering news. Alas, it looks like we’re the ones that are going to drop a colossal bombshell today, as we’ve gotten our grubby little paws on the top-secret script for a “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie that’s been under lock and key for almost two decades.

Yes, you heard that right. Way, way back in 1997, there were actually tentative plans for a LIVE-ACTION “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie. Of course, the Internet was still a fledgling thing back then, but I am shocked that even then, rumors about the movie never got out there. The even stranger thing? It was actually going to be a live-action “Sonic” movie produced by Sony!

Under strict confidentiality, we received not only a full working script for the film from an anonymous source, but even got a few promotional materials to go along with it. We’re talking top-line, executive level marketing blueprints, the kind of stuff we’d probably go to jail for publishing. Rest assured, however, that in the gargantuan 401 page document, there was PLENTY to discuss.

According to the documents, the film was going to begin production in 1997, with a targeted summer 1998 theatrical release. The suits at Sony Pictures were prepared to put a LOT of money into the flick, with estimates for the budget hovering between $70 to $90 million. Now, as to how Sony wound up with the film rights, you may be wondering? Well, according to the materials we received, Sega actually struck a licensing deal with Sony Pictures back in 1989, right after “The Wizard” was released. Evidently, the suits at Sega of America were hoping for some kind of similar, product placement strewn flick to herald the arrival of the Genesis in North America, but nothing looked to have come out of it. However, the deal did give Sony a 10 year exclusive deal with Sega, meaning that if any film based on a Sega property were to come to fruition, the suits at Sony would be the ones handling it. It sounds strange, to be sure, but remember: back in 1989, the term “Playstation” wasn’t even a zygote of a germ of an idea, and as the clear cut “number two” of the gaming world, a partnership with Sega seemed pretty darn reasonable, from a marketing standpoint.

Prototype fast food tie-in premiums sketches were also included. in the
leaked materials.

It’s pretty easy to put two and two together. Although Sega and Sony were indeed competing brands in
1997, Sony Pictures, by default, were to hold onto the Sega film rights for another two years. With the license about to expire, the suits at Sony decided to go ahead and film a movie before the rights reverted back to Sega, who could probably have sold off their licensing rights at a much higher price than that paid by Sony back in ‘89.

After spending the better part of the year poring over the materials e-mailed to us, I’ve determined that the documents have to be authentic. There’s just so much nuance and depth, with the highly detailed materials spelling out things to a tee. Oh yes, there was a script and marketing strategies included, but there was so much more, including a good 40 pages of executive notes on who the studio wanted to direct the film and who would star in it.

As for the script itself, it is … well, not really what you would expect out of a “Sonic the Hedgehog” movie. As many liberties as the filmmakers behind the “Super Mario Brothers” flick took, the “Sonic” screenwriter seemingly went as far as he possibly could to deviate from the established series mythos. I mean, the characters are there, but as to how they are portrayed in the film … well, you’ll see.

The script was written by someone named “J.R. Duff,” which has to be a pseudonym. According to the IMDB, no such person has any major screenwriting credits, and since Sony was willing to bankroll so much money into the production (with advertising costs factored in, well over $100 million in pre-Lewinksy dollars!) it seems almost implausible that the suits would place the fate of the picture in the hands of a first-timer. Alas, considering the strange similarities the script shares with some MIGHTY popular films a few years down the line, I have my guesses as to who the mysterious penman actually was.

As far as the production team, however, Sony were really dead-set on a specific crew. The only directorial name attached to the feature in the associated memos was Stephen Hopkins, the same guy that directed “Blown Away” and “Predator 2.” He had just wrapped up “The Ghost and the Darkness,” and at the time at least, seemed poised to be one of the next big Hollywood filmmakers.

As for the cast, it was pretty damn stacked. Playing Sonic was none other than Keanu Reeves, who was still a hot item following the surprise success of “Speed” a few years earlier. Portraying Dr. Robotnik was Danny Devito, which in hindsight, is pretty much the ideal casting choice, something as obvious as asking Patrick Stewart to play Professor X. And rounding out the supporting cast, we had Steve Buscemi as Tails and emerging Hollywood leading man Vin Diesel, taking on the role of Knuckles. Unfortunately, those are the only characters in the film that actually exist in the canonical “Sonic” world we all know and love, although there are a few additional characters in the script who seem to be oblique nods to other supporting Sonic characters.

Now, as for the script itself, it’s absolutely bizarre, owing more to “Stargate” than “Sonic and Knuckles.” It also has a general plotline that seems almost impossibly similar to “Avatar,” with more than a few “The Matrix”-like themes chunked in there.

In the screenplay, Sonic isn’t actually a hedgehog. In fact, he’s a flesh and blood human character, named Steve “Sonic” Harris, who is some sort of experimental fighter jet pilot. The initial setting of the movie, if you can believe it, is Area 51, where the U.S. government is hard at work on some sort of extra-dimensional portal (the script explicitly refers to it as a “teleportation platform” but that’s not exactly what it technically does, you see.)

In the script, the product placement for Franco American was especially
pronounced.

Harris is the top pilot in the air force’s top squadron. He’s flanked on ground control by Tom “Tails” Proctor, a former top-tier fighter pilot that lost the use of his legs in an experimental aircraft crash. Overseeing the program is Dr. Ivan Robotnik, a Russian immigrant who is on the verge of a huge extra-dimensional travel breakthrough.

And here’s where things get a little complicated. The script never explicitly tells us where this extra-dimensional plane is, so it could be some kind of alternate reality world or a faraway alien planet or even some kind of computer-generated nether-realm. Wherever it is, it’s a very jungle-like place, where humans apparently evolved from shrews instead of apes. The world, which is never explicitly named, is also home to an abundant resource called RING, which stands for “radioactive isotope neutralizing grain.” For the shrew-people inhabitants, it’s the most common source of nutrition, but in OUR world, it also has incredible nuclear energy capabilities. At about the 30 minute mark, the portal to this other world is opened, and Steve/Sonic enters it.

From here, the movie kind of turns into “Planet of the Apes,” with Steve (who is wearing an absolutely bizarre metal suit, complete with razor sharp spikes on his back) is captured by shrew-people. In an underground cavern, he meets their leader, a red echidna named “Knuckles” who, for some reason knows English. Instead of killing him, he helps him find a portal back to our world, although he advises him to never, ever return.

After that, there’s a lengthy bit about Robotnik “shutting down” the portal experiment for safety reasons. However, Sonic decides to snoop in on one of Robotnik’s late night sessions, and he uncovers a horrible secret: the army is actually sending armored platoons into the shrew-world to collect RING, completely razing their world in the process!  If that wasn’t enough, Robotnik is actually a Soviet turncoat, who plans on giving RING to the former USSR military so they can use it as a weapon against the Western World!

After some convincing, Sonic manages to convince Tails and two other site officials -- a love interest named Melissa and a 300 pound soldier named simply Biggsy -- to don the experimental armor and hop into the other world so he can prove once and for all that Robotnik is a no good sonofabitch. It takes some goading, but eventually they all make it into the shrew planet and, sure enough, the thing is in rubble. Robotnik -- who we learn left hundreds of similar portals throughout Russia -- has pretty much taken over the entire planet, appointing himself ruler of the land. The shrew people are enslaved and forced to mine for RING, and he oversees the realm aboard a gigantic flying device. The good guys are spotted by Robotnik’s troops, and they end up having a massive lazer gun(!) battle; eventually, the four heroes get sucked into an underground cavern, where they are rescued by Knuckles.

The amount of transphobic content in the screenplay,  however, is quite
surprising. 

While the robo army makes their way underground, Knuckles explains to Sonic what the fabled “Chaos Emeralds” are. Apparently, they are some sort of crystals containing the spirits of all of the great shrew planet warriors of yore. Harkening back to the Arthurian legend, he tells Sonic then when the planet needs them the most, they will select an “alien warrior” to save the entire race. This leads to another underground clash, with Knuckles getting killed. In his dying breath, he gives Sonic a red emerald, which he said will help guide him to the “Chamber of the Immortals.”

Thankfully, said chamber is really close by, and Sonic comes face to face with five warrior ghosts, who say he his been selected by the shrew gods to save them from Robotnik. The five gems start circling around him, and he turns a radioactive orange color -- “A Super-Sonic state,” the script describes it.

This leads to the grand finale, in which Super-Sonic and Dr. Robotnik (who is commanding an 80 foot tall mech) duke it out. Using his super speed abilities, Sonic ultimately shreds Robotnik in two, finding a hand-dandy time-reversal nearby that completely disrupts the space and time fabric and leaves shrew world just the way it was before Robotnik started meddling with it.

Back on the base, nobody except Steve/Sonic has any recollection of the transdimensional portal or the war, and apparently, the finale zonked Dr. Robotnik completely out of existence. Now, there’s a new lead researcher onsite, a mustachioed German physicist named -- and I shit you not -- DR. MAGNUM WILY. Of course, he’s a no-good sonofabitch that’s working on the same device Robotnik was, only this time, we learn he’s secretly planning on using the portal to start the Fourth Reich!

The film ends on an upbeat note, with Steve and Melissa snogging and Biggsy and Tails making fun of them. And then, in the film’s final scene, Steve asks his pals how they want to spend the rest of the evening, to which Tails responds “I don’t know. Want to go play some Sega?”

You don't really need me to tell you that the script, for lack of a better term, was really, REALLY out there. It may have taken some EXTREME liberties with the license, but at the end of the day, in the hands of a capable production crew, it probably wouldn't have been half bad. After reading through the script a second time, the almost hard sci-fi bent actually seemed to grow on me -- if nothing else, it certainly would have been worlds better than utter garbage like "Street Fighter" and the second "Mortal Kombat" movie.

It's mere conjecture on my part, but I am almost certain the screenwriter was Akiva Goldsman. The dialogue and description of the costumes seems almost uncannily similar to the 1998 "Lost in Space" movie, which I am pretty sure is what the script was eventually recycled into. That, and the rodent-people behave in a fashion similar to the zombies in "I Am Legend," and the vehicles, in hindsight, sound an awful lot like the rides in "I, Robot." And yes, a few bits of "Batman and Robin"-level, groan-worthy camp dialogue makes it in there, as well.

As for the ultimate fate of the picture, I'm not entirely sure what happened. There was a TON of promotional plans included (the packet e-mailed to me largely consisted of advertising plans and prototypes for tie-in products, like fast food premiums) so something really major had to have happened with the Sony brass for the project to be abandoned. I can't confirm anything, but it may have had something to do with the console wars heating up -- after all, why pimp your number two largest competitor, even if you take in most of the money from the flick? Ironically enough, with Sega exiting the hardware arena, talks of another Sonic live-action film have been bandied about, with Sony yet again set to produce it.

Much like the ill-fated Burton "Superman" flick and the version of "Elm Street 3" where Freddy turns into grandma monsters and says semi-racist things while eating black children, I reckon this here '90s "Sonic" is something we'll just have to imagine in the multiplex of our heads. More than anything, I am just shocked that project was kept under wraps for as long as it was -- apparently, Sony's electronic security was WAY better during the Clinton years than it is today.

It may not have been the "Sonic" movie we all dreamed of, but for what it was (and wasn't) I don't think it would have panned out that horribly, either. I mean, it was a movie starring Danny Devito as an evil Ruskie fighting mutant echidnas and Neo in a cyborg battle suit -- at the very least, it would have been as good as "Wild, Wild West," wouldn't it?

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