Comic Review: 'The Infinity Gauntlet' (1991)

Just in time for the much ballyhooed Avengers movie, The Internet Is In America reflects on one of the most important crossover events in comic book history

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

In just a few days Infinity War is going to be released, and odds are it'll shatter all-time Hollywood box office records. Indeed, the over/under right now is actually plus a good $100-$200 million that it will break the all-time record for highest-grossing film in Hollywood history. Indeed, if the movie doesn't hit at least $2 billion in global ticket sales it would be considered a huge surprise.

You don't need me to add any more fuel to the conflagration of hype. By now, we all know the story of how the suits at Disney brilliantly turned their standalone movies into one gigantic, interconnected uber-franchise the likes of which filmdom has never seen before, and for better or for worse, Infinity War represents the endpoint of what started ten years ago with Iron Man. This is the carefully laid out culmination of ten years' worth of behind-the-scenes planning and you better believe Disney is throwing out everything they've got on this one. They've probably spent a billion dollars making and marketing this motherfucker, and they fully expect to recoup their investments and then some. Everything Justice League wasn't, this sumbitch is going to be — needless to say, it's going to be a long time before we see a Hollywood production with THIS much hullabaloo heading into its release.

Now, while the movie is called Infinity War, from what I've gathered the flick isn't really based upon the comic of the same name, but its predecessor from 1991, The Infinity Gauntlet, which even now remains one of the most revered and celebrated crossover spectacles in comic book history.

Now THAT is how you make a
crossover feel like a truly special
event.

And for good reason. While Marvel characters had teamed up many teams before in earlier comics (The Secret Wars being perhaps the most noteworthy example), The Infinity Gauntlet upped the ante by increasing the scale to cosmological levels. This wasn't just Spider-Man and Thor teaming up to fight Dr. Doom, this was goddamn everybody in the Marvel Universe coming together to take on a dude who had godlike powers and was on a suicide mission to literally kill every living thing in the universe. Not only did you have heavies like Dr. Strange, The Hulk and Galactus getting in on the action, you even had the rarely seen Celestial characters like Eternity and The Living Tribunal entering the fray to mix shit up. Nobody had really tried doing a crossover event that big before, and to be frank, I don't think anybody has done it as well ever since.

Written by Jim Starlin (the guy who pretty much single-handedly created the "space opera" side of the Marvel universe through his work on Silver Silver and Captain Marvel) and drawn by George (The New motherfuckin' Teen Titans, ya'll) Perez — with utterly fantastic inking from Josef Rubinstein and Tom Christopher — there's no denying Infinity Gauntlet is a worthwhile read, if just for the trippy-as-fuck, hyper-colorful artwork.

But in case you haven't read the thing before heading into the big Avengers movie ... and for some stupid ass-reason you can't find the fucker online ... old Jimbo is here for you to fill in the blanks. Grab yourselves a nice, cold cola and prop up your legs, folks — here's the Internet Is In America-approved CliffsNotes version of the epic mini-series.

Alright, issue one. Mephisto (that's Marvel's pseudo-family-safe way of saying "Satan") is sucking up to Thanos. To pay tribute to his divine powers, Mephisto makes a giant space rock statue saying "God" — which Thanos immediately crumbles into dust using his Infinity Gauntlet powers.

We cut to Doctor Strange, who detects someone is trying to break into his mansion. As it turns out, it's a half-dead Silver Surfer who just crashed through his roof, warning him of Thanos' plans to take over Earth. Surfer gives us the backstory on Thanos; the living embodiment of Death was a little miffed that there were more people alive than who had ever died on the planet, so she decided to resurrect Thanos from the dead and give him godlike powers to "balance out the equation."

Then we cut to a trio of hoods (Jake Miller, Ralph Bunker and Bambi Long) knocking off a liquor store, killing the clerk and accidentally driving their car off a cliff and killing themselves. Huh. That seems like a really, really random thing to include. Surely, we won't be revisiting this seeming aside a little later in the series, will we?

Surfer continues to recount his ass kicking from Thanos to Strange. He says he and Drax the Destroyer LITERALLY had their souls stolen by Thanos and banished to "the metaphysical world of the soul gem." Apparently, Adam Warlock is the President of Soul-World and returned Surfer and the Destroyer to their corporeal existences. Surfer also implies that Mephisto TOLD him that Thanos was coming, which I guess makes him a turncoat. Anyhoo, Thanos goes to Death-World and asks Lady Death if she's forgiven him for stealing the Infinity Gems and she just walks off and he looks all forlorn and Mephisto says he doesn't deserve to be treated any such a way.

OK, back to some guy smoking a cigar talking about the car crash from earlier. Well, SOME kind of celestial intervention resurrected the trio from the dead, and that Jake guy apparently has the ability to control matter now. That Ralph guy is all mutated and burned up like that one dude in Robocop, while that one chick is literally turning green.

Meanwhile, Mephisto keeps sucking up to Thanos and it seems like he's cooking up some plan to cajole him out of his powers at some point. Meanwhile, Thanos is still severely pussy-whipped over Death, who doesn't love him back even though he's the supreme being of the universe. As one of Death's servants so eloquently puts it: "you love is bondage," to which Thanos retorts "my love is worship!" So Thanos builds this giant crystal space temple and asks Death to be his co-pilot in dealing destruction throughout the cosmos, but she still rejects him. Then Mephisto gets in his ear and tells him if he REALLY wants to impress her, he's got to REALLY up the body count. And, of course, he is MORE than willing to oblige. But first, he tries to impress her by showing the zombified remains of his granddaughter, Nebula, whom Thanos describes as a "tribute to the blasphemy of life and the glorious promise of death." That STILL doesn't impress Death, though, so Thanos gets pissed and causes one of her servants to explode. Then Thanos remembers "hey, wait a minute, the whole reason she brought me back was to kill half the universe, so I better get to killing half the universe then." To which Mephisto replies: "He's really going to do it" with a GREAT "oh shit" look on his face.

Hmm ... two black people, being rescued while one of Trump's hotels gets decimated in a tidal wave. I wonder if Starlin and Perez knew what kind of connotation the future political landscape in America would give this one in hindsight?

Thanos snaps his fingers and we cut to Spider-Man looking down on Times Square. All of a sudden, half the people on the city streets vanish, just like the biblical Rapture, and everybody starts freaking out. Then Spider-Man starts freaking out thinking about Mary Jane, and that's our cue to take a tour of the expanded Marvel Universe, and we get to see frenzied reaction shots from Captain America, Nick Fury (back when he was still white) and The Incredible Hulk, among others. We also learn that half the animal life on the planet has disappeared, too, which I guess would wreak havoc on the going rate for prime rib. But I digress, and wildly.

Then we cut to the Titans (and no, not the ones from Tennessee, either), who fittingly enough, live on Saturn's moon, Titan. For those not in the know, they're kind of like an Outer Space Thanos-monitoring service. And, uh, they're watching ALF, for whatever reason. We learn that mysterious disappearances are happening on alien worlds too, and then that one fat dude who got killed in a car wreck and resurrected walks into his partner's hotel room and now he's in a giant beehive. Uh ... the fuck. Naturally, that's our cliffhanger transition to issue two.

Thor, She-Hulk and the Vision are trying to keep planes from falling out of the sky and Quasar is ... umm, doing whatever Quasar is supposed to do, I guess. Meanwhile, the Skrulls think the Krees are responsible for the disappearances, so they're both gearing up for a huge outer space war. Meanwhile, Adam Warlock tries to take over Doctor Strange's soul, and Dr. Doom is all shades of pissed that somebody is actually outdoing him in the whole giga-death thing.

Then Thanos abducts his brother Eros and makes his mouth disappear, just because he can. 

Captain America gives us an update on the disappearing heroes, and the list includes such five-star F-listers as Makkari, Marvel Boy, Night Thrasher and Windshear. Meanwhile, Thor kvetches about the rest of the group finding out he's not the "real" Thor, but I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about there. Meanwhile, Odin calls a council of "the Sky Fathers" — including Osiris, Zeus and Nuada — and they all decide to join forces to resist Thanos' invasion.

Fuck, man, can't we get Perez to draw
everything Marvel related from now on?

Quasar is still flying around the cosmos looking for something, and we learn that short, fat cigar-smoking dude from earlier is actually Pip the Troll and, what do you know, he's watching ALF, too. Goodness gracious, what was it with Jim Starlin and ALF, anyway?

Dr. Doom breaks into Strange's house and subdues the owner before blasting the Surfer. Then ADAM WARLOCK shows up and that gets everybody's attention and then we cut back to Thanos in his outer space death ship. Eros thinks aloud that maybe all of that limitless power has driven Thanos insane, thus earning him the "No Shit, Sherlock" award of all-time ever in history.

Adam Warlock proposes he, Doom, Strange and the Surfer form an alliance as "the forces of reason" and Thanos gets so pissed Death won't smile at him that he makes a fucking red giant explode. Which kind of pisses off Galactus because he was about to eat it, but even *he* knows not to fuck with Thanos when he's this powerful. 

We cut to Cloak bemoaning how lost he is without Dagger by his side (by the way, I strongly encourage you to listen to Retro-Synth.com while reading this ... the mood it establishes is almost too perfect.) Elsewhere, Wolverine saves a woman from being crushed by a falling building and Iron Man watches the ENTIRE West Coast of the U.S. crumble into the ocean.

Then Namorita saves a young black couple in Atlantic City from a mile high tsunami, and of course, one of Trump's hotels gets swept away in the tidal wave. And Thor flies over what remains of Japan ... which is fucking nothing whatsoever. The "Fantastic Four" of Strange, Doom, Surfer and Warlock step outside and the entire neighborhood is destroyed. Pip says something must have really tee'd off the gods and Warlock responds by saying something to the effect of "exactly." 

Issue three begins. Thanos STILL isn't getting no Death pussy and a scientist tells Fury that the Earth has been knocked off its orbit and is slowly drifting away from the sun. Then Warlock and company teleport into Avengers' headquarters and starts assembling a superhero mega-team to go toe-to-toe with Thanos. We've got 'em all joining the fray: Wolverine, Drax the Destroyer (who, instead of being autistic like he is in the movies, is just canonically stupid), Firelord, Spider-Man and ... Nova. One of these, clearly, is not like the other.

If you don't want this is a four-foot-wide poster in your bedroom, you are the definition of soy.

We cut to Moon Night, of all fucking people, watching the Brooklyn Bridge burning to the ground. Then Surfer and Warlock head out into the vastness of the cosmos to assemble the rest of their team, which includes the Watcher, the Stranger, the physical embodiment of Love and Hate, Galactus and even The Living Tribunal himself, who is canonically the most powerful being in the Marvel universe, to the point he pretty much could be considered the "God" of Marvel-dom. Alas, the Tribunal, Eternity and the Watcher all tell Warlock they're not going to participate in the big battle, and Galactus tries to zap Warlock but he no-sells it.

Meanwhile Iron Man almost gets into it with Dr. Doom but Captain America breaks up the scuffle, then the Watcher just hoovers over Thanos' compound staring at him in what WOULD'VE been one of the greatest scenes in movie history had the MCU taken a more direct approach to its cinematic source material. 

Warlock tells Hulk and Wolverine to "sanction" Thanos because all of the other superheroes are too pussy to try to kill him, then Thanos summons Terraxia the Terrible to make out with him in front of Death to make her jealous, but she doesn't even bat an eye and that makes Thanos even more furious than ever.

Then the siege on Thanos' compound begins and Warlock tells Surfer he KNOWS they're all going to die but he led them into their demises on purpose so it would buy him a distraction. 

Cue issue four (which features a great cover of Thanos standing in the middle of the emptiness of space, saying "Come and Get Me!" like he has the biggest damn dick in the universe.)

BTW, Ron Lim is doing some pencils on this one. 

I honestly have no clue what's
supposed to be going on, but man,
does it look awesome.

"What good is godhood if you have no audience to flaunt it before," Eros describes Thanos' mentality. Then Mephisto gets in Thanos' ear and tells him to use his godlike abilities to allow the heroes a .05 percent chance of victory to make himself look braver in Death's eyes. So basically, he's still all-powerful, but he doesn't know his enemies' next attack for the big battle.

Hulk and Drax double team Thanos and send him reeling with a sneak attack (this part HAS to be in the movie.)

Thanos kills Namor and She-Hulk with some sort of outer space fungus cocoon. Then Thanos liquifies Wolverine's bones with a bear hug. Scarlet Witch gets vaporized. He suffocates Cyclops by making a giant glass box materialize over his head and he yanks the circuitry right out of The Vision's chest. And Thor reverts back to human form and suffocates in the cold, blackness of the universe. Oh, by the way, the heroes have 60 minutes to finish off Thanos or else they'll lose their ability to breathe in space. So, the clock, it doth continue to tick.

Cloak sucks Thanos into the nightmare dimension in his chest, but he quickly explodes his way out. Meanwile, Terraxia yanks Iron Man's head off. Thanos sends Firelord and Drax back to the prehistoric ages through a time portal and Thor finally gets his hammer back, thus resurrecting him. Alas, before he can land the death blow, Thanos turns him into glass, Spider-Man calls Terraxia a bimbo and Nova gets turned into a pile of Lego (no, for real.) Then Thanos shatters Thor and makes Quasar's hands explode. That leaves Captain America as the sole survivor against Thanos. Right before Thanos delivers the death strike, Silver Surfer and Warlock rush in to make the save.

Unfortunately, the Surfer misses yanking off Thanos' gauntlet by >>>this much<<< and Thanos drops Cap dead with one mighty bitch slap. And that's when Warlock calls in the infantry — a whole fucking cadre of Celestials, including Eternity and Galactus!

Time for issue five. Ron Lim has taken over full penciling details from George Perez, by the way.

Personally, I always liked Drax the Destroyer when he looked like the Green Goblin on HGH instead of Kratos' autistic nephew.

So Doctor Strange is playing armchair general in some far away galaxy while Annihilus invades an iced over Earth. Meanwhile, Death saves Eros from getting sucked into a black hole and the Surfer and Warlock have to outrun the universe literally collapsing. Chronos tries to bury Thanos UNDER time, but since one of his gems gives him mastery of time itself, the narrator (The Watcher?) says "it be like striving to drown an ocean."

Then Lord Order and Master Chaos try to rip Thanos in two. Then Mistress Love and Sire Hate tag team him, and Mephisto FINALLY takes the initiative and tries to steal the Gauntlet from Thanos, but he's saved by Mistress Death at the last second. Then Thanos and Eternity get into it and when they start scrapping a fucking white light takes over half the universe. Warlock and Surfer teleport back to Strange's stronghold, and The Watcher waxes philosophical on tyrants: "The nature of energy is to disperse. The nature of despots is to contain. Conflicting tendencies."

Then Thanos BEATS Eternity in battle and traps all the other Celestials in a giant outer space snow globe. Per The Watcher, Thanos is now "the center of all reality in this sphere."

And then, out of nowhere, fucking Nebula yanks off Thanos' gauntlet and makes Terraxia explode. She quickly reverts back into non-zombie form and tells Thanos the one thing she wants more than anything in this universe — REVENGE on his big purple ass.

So Warlock teleports Thanos into Strange's living room and Surfer immediately goes in for the kill so Strange has to call in Hulk, Thor, Dr. Doom, Drax and Firelord to break up the scuffle.

Then Warlock tells Thanos he will help him defeat Nebula, and he has no choice because he was inside the Soul Gem while Thanos wore it and he knows everything that lurks inside his heart, and he KNOWS that Thanos feels himself unworthy and allowed himself to lose the Cosmic Cube to Captain Marvel and that he even subconsciously allowed Nebula to steal one of the Gauntlets, so he agrees to team with Warlock to retrieve the other one.

One of about 20 or so panels in the series that
should be laminated and hung in the
National Archives one day.

Anyway, Nebula traps Doom and company in this weird kind of crystal trap. Then the unlikely trifecta of Thanos, Surfer and Warlock show up, and it's time for the FINAL CONFRONTATION, motherfuckers.

Issue six. Nebula users her gauntlet powers to bring everyone back to life and she keeps Thanos trapped inside a crystal barricade. Then right when Nebula is going in for the kill shot, the cosmic beings return and literally fracture her out of reality. 

Warlock and Surfer wake up in Soul World. Galactus and the rest of the Celestials pretty much gang bang Nebula with all of their power concentrated at once. Then Warlock takes command of the universe itself and freaks Nebula out so she drops the gauntlet, then everybody makes a mad scramble for the Gauntlets, with EVERYBODY trying to make sure Thanos doesn't slip it back on. Adam Warlock winds up possessing it, and he promises to wield it responsibly and everybody just kind of looks at him like "you know, I think I'll trust this motherfucker for some reason."

To thwart being defeated, Thanos detonates a nuclear bomb timer on his belt and Thor grand slams that motherfucker halfway across the galaxy like he was Marth in that one baseball event in Super Smash Bros. Melee. So Surfer and pals question Warlock's intentions, and he says something about why are they more terrified of an orderly universe than the celestial chaos they've been living under, and then he blinks himself, Gamora and Pip the Elf off to some faraway planet, where Thanos now lives on a small farm with his old costume set up as a scarecrow in front of a field. Pip asks Warlock why he doesn't just destroy Thanos right then and there and he says something to the effect of the universal mosaic requires every piece, and as much as thy may hate it, Thanos certainly serves an important part in the grand order.

And the whole shindig concludes with Thanos lamenting his newfound status as a dirt farmer in the asshole end of the universe, reflecting on the irony that the dude who wanted NO power whatsoever ended up with the most powerful weapon in the universe. And he concludes the saga with the absolutely PERFECT set-up for a sequel  —it's a single panel shot of Thanos smirking, saying he KNOWS he got the better end of the deal than Warlock did.

Yep. At one point, comic book writers actually knew how to do subtle sequel hooks.

Which allows us to circle back to Infinity War, the movie, for a moment. You know, for a character who has been built up as fucking death incarnate for ten years, the MCU really hasn't done a lot to explain who or what Thanos is. We'll just have to wait and see how the movies present him and lay out his modus operandi, but in this particular comic, they give him one of the most ingenious origin stories of any villain I've seen.

Thanos isn't some power-hungry space Pol Pot; instead, he's a dude who is literally out to kill the whole universe because he can't get out of the friend zone. To me, that makes way more sense than some guy trying to take over the universe to satiate his ego, or bring some sort of purity to the natural order. He's just a dude who loved this one bitch so much that he was willing to become the most powerful being in the universe to impress her, but even that couldn't win her heart. So what the fuck else do you expect a heartbroken dude with no hope and godlike powers to eventually end up doing? Shit, I am convinced that's the exact same thing that happened to Hitler and Stalin. One day, they realized some broad would never love them as much as they loved her, and so, all of that emotional hurt manifest itself in an outward need to wreak as much havoc as (in)humanly possible. That's such a better M.O. than just saying the asshole is pure-D evil and wants to control everything because of a God complex; we'll see if the MCU goes that route for the big movie (probably, with Hela as a substitute for Miss Grim Reaper), but personally, I'm doubting it.

Whether or not Infinity War winds up a colossal disappointment (although it's almost certainly going to be a financial dynamo), at least we've got this outstanding six-part epic to give us what we truly want as crossover-craving comic book fans. It's long enough to give the characters plenty of pathos and room to develop, but it's not lengthy enough to drag on too long and introduce too many plot twists and deus ex machina components just to keep the thing chugging along. People tend to sleep on just how solid early 1990s Marvel was, and if you haven't caught this one before, definitely do your damnedest to give it a glance before you check out the new movie; not only will it give you a pretty good taste of what to expect in the de facto live-action adaptation, Jim Starlin's zeitgeist-defying, decidedly un-cucked approach to the space opera formula will probably be about 50 times better than whatever form the movie ultimately resembles.

And if for that reason alone, you NEED to read this motherfucker, at some point in your comic book-ing sojourns.

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Double Review: 'Kickboxer: Retaliation' / 'Mom and Dad'

In which we give you the skinny on all nine Best Picture nominees before puttin' a spotlight on two low-budget, limited-release genre movies well worth going out of your way to experience.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Alright, I might as well give you my abridged take on this year's Oscars - not that either you or me really give a shit about what those self-righteous turds in Hollywood think about anything, naturally, especially their own damned movies. Come to think of it, just why are there so many damned movie awards show, anyway? You've got the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors' Guild Awards, the MTV Movie Awards - goddamn, these people are literally spending half the year publicly fellating one another. Can you even think of another industry so utterly obsessed with in-group affirmation? 'Cause I sure as hell can't. 

Anyhoo, the nominees for this year's Best Picture are pretty much what we all expected. Now, you might be tempted to go out there and watch all nine of 'em, but trust me, you really only need to see one, maybe two of them. Let's run down the list real quick, why don't we?

Call Me By Your Name - It's literally a movie about a 30-year-old Italian fruit who has sex with a 17-year-old Jewish boy, and the filmmakers have the gall to call us "perverts" for not celebrating it as a human rights triumph. It's pretty much the same thing as Moonlight, except with far less black people in it, and as we all know, the identity politics pyramid clearly values African-American homos more than your boring, garden-variety Caucasian rectal sojourner, so there ain't no way in hell this one's gonna' win.

Darkest Hour - Gary Oldman turns in a good performance as Winston Churchill, but that's pretty much all this one has going for it. I'm convinced the AMPAAS has some kind of unstated bylaw where at least one movie featuring nothing but people with British accents in it has to get nominated, and apparently this was this year's token selection.

Dunkirk - Fuck it, this was the best movie of 2017 and it wasn't even close. Alas, the Academy Awards don't select the Best Picture winner by choosing the best movie no more, only how much the directors piss and moan about being "discriminated against," so yeah, don't expect it to take the home statuette.

Get Out - The most overrated movie of the decade. You already know my thoughts on this one - as long as identity politics-obsessed black elitists are more pissy heading into the broadcast than identity politics-obsessed female elitists, it'll probably win.

Lady Bird - Holy hell, this was the most boring critically acclaimed movie I've seen since Boyhood. It's literally a glorified Lifetime movie about this lunk-headed 18-year-old girl that has no idea what she wants out of existence and she yells at her mom a lot and doesn't even get mad at her boyfriend for cheating on her with another dude because, really, aren't all gay people the real "victims" here? God, fuck this movie, hard.

Phantom Thread - This one is a huge disappointment. After There Will Be Blood, you'd think Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Thomas Anderson re-teaming would be a recipe for cinematic greatness, but this movie is just a snoozer. Basically, it's just DDL chewing the scenery as this hard-assed fashion designer back in the 1950s, and this one waitress tries to poison him with wild fungi and he starts having visions of his dead mother and then she tries to poison him again and DDL decides to eat the tainted food anyway because he kinda' likes being treated like shit. So basically, it's a two-hour long endorsement of cuckoldery, in which a woman who tries to murder her husband several times is depicted as the "hero" - all I can say is "thanks a lot, Hillary."

The Post - Long suspected pedophile Steven Spielberg brings us this heavy-handed political potboiler about the Pentagon Papers and Richard Nixon, although it's obviously trying to be some sort of allegory for Donald Trump's war on "fake news." It's physically impossible to watch more than 20 minutes of the movie before lapsing into a coma, so I'm assuming they nominated this one simply to make a social statement. 

The Shape of Water - The most nominated film of the 2018 Oscars is a ripoff of the sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon and features a sex scene between an anorexic broad with an Adam's apple and a fish monster. Yeah, I don't know why box office revenue is declining either.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Next to Dunkirk, this is the only nominated movie I'd recommend spending money to watch in an actual theater. It's about that bitch from Fargo who declares jihad on the local police chief for not doing anything about her daughter's rape and murder, and it ends with her throwing a goddamn Molotov cocktail through the sheriff's department front window and vowing to drive to Idaho to kill a guy she thinks may have raped another woman without having any substantial evidence because that's just the way people in the #MeToo era think nowadays. It ain't a great movie by any stretch, but it's still a decent rainy day, dollar theater candidate if you ain't got nothing else going on on Sundays 'cause the pro football season is over. Shit, it's better than Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, at least.

So you got nine movies nominated for Best Picture, and only one of 'em is legitimately and objectively great while the rest of 'em are mediocre or worse, but because they're driving home some sort of pro-black or pro-gay or pro-woman agenda, of COURSE the Academy was going to give 'em a nod. Unfortunately, this looks like it's going to be standard operating procedure from now on when it comes to the Oscars, to the point they might as well just rechristen the whole shindig as the Annual Affirmative Action Awards.

Let's face it, the Oscars are nothing more than a glorified circle jerk for rich white liberals and their underpaid minority pawns they befriend and support only as a means of sticking it to their ideological white rivals. The Academy doesn't know dookie about what makes a movie objectively and empirically good any more, and there's absolutely no reason whatsoever for any of us to give a damn about the overhyped festivities. So instead of watching that shameless four-hour-long cock suck-a-thon, you know what I'll be doing come Awards night? 

That's right, I'll be doing what all REAL Americans ought to be doing - watching Stand Alone TWICE, maybe even three times if I can stay awake long enough.

Surprisingly, he doesn't eat a single child throughout the entire movie.

But if you're sick and tired of Oscar bait claptrap (and you most certainly should be), boy, do I have the cure for what ails you - the finest no-budget MMA-sploitation ass-kick-a-thon to come down the pipes in years, none other than Kickboxer: Retaliation, which for those of you trying to keep count at home, is the seventh installment in the series. 

Oddly enough, the movie starts off in the LEAST manly way possible - with these two froths doing a sexy dance on a train, only for this one guy to come in there with a gun (and another dude with an ax!) to have a perfume commercial interrupting kung fu battle. Then this 120 pound Chinese chick dressed like she's in The Matrix shows up and our leading man has to ram her head into the side of the train 15 times, then they have ANOTHER karate battle on top of the train in the pouring rain, except THIS time she's wearing some kind of leather bondage gear. And then he gets yanked off the train at the last second and drowned in a lake below, and then it's time for the opening credits that let us ALL relive the highlights of Kickboxer parts one through six.

Then we cut to RENZO GRACIE calling a fake UFC match in a high school gym somewhere where this dude called Kurt Sloane finishes of Renato Sobral with his patented "hurricane armbar." And hey, it's the same guy from the opening train scene, but he's not dead after all because NOW we're finding out the first ten minutes of the movie was a dream sequence. Then some U.S. marshals show up and say they know about the time he killed this one tattooed guy in Thailand but he swears up and down it was self-defense and then the "marshals" taze him because they aren't really marshals but guys working for some international kung-fu heroin cartel or something. Then he wakes up nekkid in a cage somewhere in Cambodia with Christopher Lambert lording over him and telling him he's gotta' have ONE MORE karate death fight for his pleasure or else he's gonna' kill his girlfriend. Oh, and by the way, the guy he wants Sloane to fight is this 400 pound Australian guy that looks like Zangief from Street Fighter II, if you duck taped two of 'em together.

So Sloane winds up getting locked up in a Thai prison island where he has to pick rice 12 hours a day and spin kick Laotians in the face before they can rape him behind a bamboo hut. But that don't stop the guards from chaining him up and whipping him with a cat o' nine tails like he was Kunta Kinte, though. So Sloane beats up a couple of 'em while they're playing Candy Crush, steals their phone, calls his girlfriend to let her know he's been Shanghaied and then he gets into a nunchaku fight with this one guy for no real reason whatsoever. And that's when he runs into his new cellmate - MIKE FUCKIN' TYSON. Yes, the real one, and they immediately have the closest thing we've ever seen to a Ken vs. Balrog fight in real life and it is SUPERB.

Then Sloane's wife shows up and talks to the three or four police in Bangkok who aren't corrupt, and then Sloane and Mike bond after getting dual lashings and he shows him how to make Fentanyl out of some green beans growing in the prison yard. And then Sloane finds JEAN-CLAUDE VAN DAMME hanging out next to a picnic table and he tells him about how Lambert blowtorched his eyeballs off and he's not even that mad about being blind now. So JCVD teaches him how to fight by smell, but it's taking him a while to get the hang of it. And just when you think this movie can't get anymore awesome, goddamn ROY NELSON shows up and teaches Sloane how to bust cinder blocks with his forehead like Super Mario. Then JCVD and Mike Tyson START to have a karate battle, but Sloane breaks it up before things start getting really good. Then we learn the guy Lambert wants Sloane to fight is actually a HALF RHINO GENETICALLY MODIFIED STEROID MONSTER and JCVD offers to fight him instead but Sloane keeps practicing for the fight by having Ronaldinho (yes, that Ronaldinho) kick soccer balls at him. Then they sneak out of prison so Sloane can have a tune-up fight against this one guy who looks JUST like Sloane, except a little bit more 'roided up. Then JCVD calls up his hitherto unacknowledged son to help them kidnap a Yakuza boss' nephew or something like that and that's our cue for a donnybrook at the local fish market, complete with a ninja getting his face melted off by hot grease while "Wipeout" plays in the background. And then Sloane chases the dude on top of a train (just like in his premonition at the beginning of the movie) and they both jump off it at the same time and Sloane punches the dude once and that's it.

Then Sloane makes it to Lambert's high-rise and he has to fight these two Cambodian chicks wearing neon orange lipstick in a hall of mirrors and after a while he gets bored so he just kicks a wall on top of 'em and then this one guy starts stalking him with a handgun but the rest of the crew bails him out and Sloane kicks a knife into a dude's throat and rescues his wife but then that giant steroid monster shows up, kicks his ass, and punches his wife so hard she immediately has a heart attack and falls into a coma. So now Sloane HAS to fight the steroid monster for the sweetest nectar of all, REVENGE. And if you're wondering whether or not the climactic showdown lives up to the hype, I assure you it most certainly DOES. Not only does it go on for HALF AN HOUR, it's got just about every kind of "fu" in it you can think of, from scimitar fu to throwing star fu to metal chain fu to the oft-spoken-about-but-rarely-seen "one fighter's been declared legally dead but then gets resurrected by a dose of nuclear adrenaline zombie Muay Thai while blindfolded just for the hell of it fu." Needless to say, if we see a cinematic brawl more awesome than this in 2018, we're DEFINITELY in store for a banner year at the multiplex.

We've got nine dead bodies. Zero breasts. Two exposed buttocks (both male, in case you were wondering.) 12 kung fu sequences, including the grand finale that takes about 30 minutes. One MMA fight. Four sword fights. One bicycle chase. One strangulation. One attempted drowning. Shiv to the kidneys. Gratuitous slow mo effects. Gratuitous "Wipeout." Gratuitous prisoner whippings. Gratuitous Wanderlei Silva cameos (complete with him swinging an ax - get it?) Fire extinguisher fu. Potted plant fu. Grease trap fu. Adrenaline needle fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some serious Dr. Scholls fu.

Starring Alan Moussi, the world's greatest Gabonese Savate expert cum stunt coordinator as Kurt Sloane; Christopher Lambert as Thomas Moore, the evil fight promoter who says "you have such a great spirit - I'd hate to waste it"; the inimitable Mike Tyson as Briggs, who stops to sip tea during a prison fight and says "you're interrupting my meditation"; Jean-Claude Van Damme as Master Durand, the blind kickboxing guru who says "you mention Mongkut one more time and I'll smash your big face"; and Icelandic basketball player/Game of Thrones star Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson as Mongkut, the seven-foot-tall, 400-pound steroid monster with a surprisingly weak chin.

Written and directed by Dimitri Logothetis, quite possibly the greatest Greek kung fu exploitation movie kingpin of the 2010s, who gets all the props in the world for setting up one of the best sequel hooks in recent memory - if the post-credits stinger ain't misleading us, apparently, Kickboxer 8 is going to feature SHOGUN RUA as the lead villain.

All I can say is hot damn, is this one entertaining as all hell. After watching so many damn movies TRY to imitate the karate B-movies of the 1980s, finally somebody came along and made the first TRULY great SINCERE karate B-movie of our generation. I have no problem giving a flick this unpretentiously fun three and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, and if it don't make you want to jumping roundhouse kick the usher on the way out of the theater, you better check your damned pulse.

If you think that's bad, you ought to see what he did to the foosball table!

But just you wait - we've got another great holdover from 2017 finally making its way around postage-stamp sized indie theaters near you called Mom and Dad that you DEFINITELY need to check out if you're afforded the opportunity.

The flick doesn't waste any time at all getting into the good stuff, with this one MILF parking her SUV on the middle of a train track and letting a locomotive cream it while her kids are still trapped in the backseat within the first three minutes of the movie. Then after this 1970s-inspired intro (complete with a song that sounds like it was an unused holdover from The Stepford Wives or The Demon Seed), we cut to Selma Blair and Nic Cage eating fried eggs prepared by their Chinese maid while their teen daughter chides them for being racist because they don't want her fucking her black boyfriend.

Then Nic Cage - looking more and more like Al Bundy every movie - has a tickle fight with his son then he has flashbacks to when he was in his 20s and used to cut donuts in a Trans-Am while some random skank shoved her titties in his face. Then the high school econ teacher starts talking about "planned obsolesce" and the teenage daughter and her best friend vape in the bathroom and buy Molly from an angry goth chick and then a HORDE of angry parents show up outside the school, apparently trying to yank their kids out of class at the exact same time. Then a freshman gets pulled over the gate and his momma stabs him to death with a set of car keys, and from there, the teenage shish-ka-bob festival is an all-go. We've got dads smothering their daughters with trash bags, cops ground and pounding soccer moms like Brock Lesnar did to Frank Mir that one time and 300 pound dads grabbing first down markers and trying to poke their neighbor's lower intestines out, and it is GLORIOUS.

Then the black kid - who looks like he's played by a 31-year-old actor - goes home and his daddy backhands him for no reason whatsoever and then he breaks a bottle of Jim Beam over the coffee table but accidentally winds up severing his own jugular. Then the two teen girls smoke weed and flip it over to CNN and learn that parents across the country have all of a sudden gone psycho and started killing their own children en masse. And then, of all people, DR. OZ makes a cameo to explain to the viewer what "savaging" is and then Selma Blair's kid's best friend gets strangled to death with a pair of nylon socks by her own momma. Then we have a TREMENDOUS scene where a mother gives birth at the hospital and all of a sudden she gets parental psychosis and she tries to stab her newborn to death with a scalpel while "It Must Have Been Love" by Roxette plays in the background. Then we cut to Nic Cage, who has fallen asleep at work watching Latina shemale porn. Then a whole bunch of parents start standing outside the nursery like they're eyeing a Golden Corral buffet. Then the teen girl and her black 31-year-old boyfriend find out her maid murdered her own child and has been mopping up her blood in the kitchen for the last two hours. Then Nic Cage comes home and yells at his daughter's black boyfriend about anal beads and then he beats him unconscious and we cut to a flashback from several weeks ago of Cage building his own pool table and his wife yelling at him for spending so much money on a man-cave so he grabs a sledgehammer and DESTROYS it while singing "The Hokey Pokey."

Then it's time for mom to come home, and for the next 30 minutes they try to break into the basement so they can chew on their children's brains. Except it's the first time they've really had time to BOND with one another as husband and wife in years so they're actually SAVING THEIR MARRIAGE by working in tandem to commit pedocide. And without giving away the rest of the movie, let's just say the conclusion involves ALL of the following: the black kid getting a coathanger shoved through his face, Selma Blair swinging a meat mallet around like Leatherface in too much lipgloss and Nicolas Cage getting set on fire, only to emerge 15 minutes later with Froot Loops matted in his burn wounds and looking to tear his kids' spleen out with a tree trimmer.

And just when you think things can't get any better - that's when Nic's MOM AND DAD show up to try and kill him with pepper spray and meat cleavers. Trust me - watching Nic Cag and Lance Henriksen have a knife fight is something you NEVER knew you needed in your life until you actually see it with your own two eyes.

Granted, the ending is a bit of a letdown, but good golly, is it a fun ride getting there. This *MIGHT* just be the best zombie movie since the original [REC] from 2007, even if it IS a total and complete ripoff of the Stephen King novel "Cell" (needless to say, this is STILL a much better adaptation than the official tie-in movie we got back in 2016, though.)

We've got nine dead bodies. Two breasts. One dead billiards table. One dead Trans-Am. Car keys to the eyeball. Mace to the face. Throat slitting. Attempted fetus mutilating. Mother-in-law head crushing. One exploding booby trap. Gratuitous yoga workouts. Gratuitous on-screen text messaging (boy, is that an overused and trite special effect?) Gratuitous close-ups of Selma Blair's crows' feet. Gratuitous middle-aged woman beating. Gratuitous Grant Morrison cameos (yep, that Grant Morrison.) Sledgehammer fu. Power saw fu. Meat tenderizer fu. Shovel fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some serious generation gap fu.

Starring Nic Cage as Brent, the father figure going through a particularly nasty case of mid-life crisis who says "I was gonna' grab the world by the balls and SQUEEZE 'em, man"; Selma Blair as Kendall, the MILF-tastic mom with bangs like Zooey Deschanel who cries because her ex-boyfriend from 15 years ago won't give her a job at his graphic design company and winds up karate chopping her daughter's boyfriend over a banister to his death; Anne Winters as Carly, the teenage daughter who watches her best friend get strangled with a pair of Spanx and has surprisingly deep knowledge of how to turn a heating vent into a makeshift flamethrower; Robert T. Cunningham as Damon, the high school junior boyfriend who looks like he's 35; and Lance Henriksen, who doesn't show up until the last ten minutes of the movie, which is still just enough time to call his son a pussy and try to knife him to death in a knock-down, drag-down kung fu battle. 

Written and directed by Brian Taylor, the same guy who gave us the Crank movies and the second Ghost Rider flick. Yeah, it blows my mind knowing there's two of those fucking things, too. 

All you Academy clods sucking Get Out's dick ought to give this one a gander - this is how you do sociocultural subtext in a horror movie RIGHT. I give it three and a half stars out of four - Jimbo says check it out, and not just because Nic Cage desperately and direly needs the money to pay off his back taxes, neither.

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Double Review: 'Blade of the Immortal' / 'Killing Gunther'

What better way to wrap up the cinematic year that was than with a double shot of Takashi Miike and Arnold Schwarzenegger? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I've been thinking about this for quite some time, but after some tempered debate, I've decided to go on ahead and publicize my formal view on the matter:

I think it's time we rounded up every marijuana user in America and summarily executed them.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Gee, Jimbo, doesn't that sound a little harsh, not to mention despotic?" Well, right then and there I know you've never had the luxury of cohabitating alongside marijuana users, because if you have you'd know that there's really nothing of value to be lost here.

Marijuana users, point blank, are the WORST human beings on the planet, and by proxy, the worst kinda' drug addicts. My parents were rampaging alcoholics and serial drunk drivers, but by golly, at least they were functional rampaging alcoholics and serial drunk drivers. You can be drunk as shit and still turn in a full eight hour work day and halfway decent work - hell, my granddaddy missed just three days of work over a 45-year career working at the local chemical plant and I guarantee you his B.A.C. was at the point-two range for at least 44 of 'em - but people high on weed can't do fuckin' anything for at least three days after their last bong hit. 

What do people high on weed do? They just lay on the couch and laugh at everything on TV and keep farting and eat all the good cereal, then they fall asleep with their remote control wedged halfway up their buttholes so you can't even move the channel off Rick and Morty. People who smoke weed have the worst taste in everything. They listen to the shittiest kinda of music and watch the shittiest kinda TV shows and they even play the shittiest kinda video games. You ever seen some dude strung out on kush spend seven hours playing Dynasty Warriors before? Well, I have, and I can guarn-damn-tee you it's the greatest endorsement of straight edge living you'll ever encounter.

At least people who shoot up heroin are mostly quiet about it. People who smoke weed are roughly as loud as a turbo jet the whole time they're high, and if their ear-splitting cackling doesn't drive you to attempted manslaughter, they fact that they ALWAYS play musical instruments while stoned will. Long story short, if somebody owns an acoustic guitar, I can tell you right now they're a bunch of weed-heads, and they WILL be playing that shit at 3 in the morning when you have a job interview you've gotta' leave for at 6:30. Weed smokers have no concerns for the well-being of others, and I think it's only fair that we as a collective society show them an equivalent amount of existential concern and compassion - which, obviously, is fuckin' none.

But the WORST thing about living around weed smokers is the smell. I would rather smell ANYTHING besides marijuana - shit, dead animals, dead animal shit, you name it. That is legitimately the most disgusting scent in the world, and the fact that it lingers in the drywall for a solid week afterwards makes even the most spacious abodes unlivable. Have you ever tried to get the smell of weed out of the curtains before? Or even block the shit from seeping in under your bedroom door and making your entire wardrobe smell like a goddamn Phish concert? Well, if you have, then you'd know full well why I think these assholes need to be exterminated en masse. Fuck, at least crack heads and meth addicts have the decency to use life-destroying chemicals with only minimal stenches. 

Of course, somebody's gonna' chime in and say "hey there Jimbo, not all marijuana users are like that," or try to turn this shit around and say "well, if weed is so bad, then how come (insert famous person here) used it?" Well, that doesn't change the equation - if somebody uses weed, they ARE an asshole. Yeah, I admire the works of George Carlin and Bill Hicks, but there's no denying they'd be a pain in the ass to live with and it'd only be a matter of time before I was having to crack 'em upside the head with a mini-fire extinguisher for leaving the oven on at two in the morning again. Not all assholes are marijuana users, but all marijuana users are undoubtedly assholes of the widest, stretchiest and stinkiest caliber.

Oh, and I almost left out the best part - when these stupid fucks try to convince themselves that what they're doing to their bodies isn't destructive and stupid, but "mindful" and even by God "healthy." I can't tell you how many times I've heard weed-heads tell me "well, if marijuana is so bad, then how come nobody's ever overdosed on it before?" To which I always reply, "well, nobody's ever overdosed on cigarettes before, either, but they still kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, don't they?" Just talking to a habitual weed-user for five minutes is enough to tell you the shit is detrimental to one's health and mental well-being. Just fucking look at what people who've smoked weed for 30 years look and sound like - you either turn into some Bart Simpson-looking bull-dyke or a wall-eyed space alien that looks like a cross between that deformed baby from Eraserhead, a three piece KFC original meal and an old flea market rug. And of course, there are reams and reams of scientific research outlining how chronic weed use destroys a user's lungs, heart and brain, but I'll let you flip through those on you own time (and do feel free to email 'em to your nearest and dearest weed-smokin' chums - surely, they'll appreciate your concerns.)

Of course, I'm not saying I would vote, necessarily, for a candidate who said he was going to round up every weed smoker in the country and - irony of ironies - light them up like doobies in the killing fields of the Great Plains, but I would be more likely to attentively listen to him than other candidates. And if somebody pulled a page out of the last Kingsman movie and tainted the country's weed supply with a lethal poison, I prolly wouldn't shed too many tears. And it's pretty hard to deny that we wouldn't have a better overall country with all of the weed users factored out of the gene pool. Shit, just the fact we'd get rid of Widespread Panic and Ben and Jerry's in one fell swoop almost justifies the whole pogrom alone.

But then again, I guess it is a little inhumane to round up millions upon millions of drug users and systematically slaughter them. But you've got to think long term here - it'd be a lot of money as an upfront investment, but just imagine the dividends ten years down the road. Within a decade, nobody will have any recollections that Dave Matthews Band or Adult Swim even existed. 

And isn't a world that beautiful worth it, no matter the dire costs?

From now on, Miike oughta' be the only person making live action movies based on Japanese cartoons. Shit - just imagine him directing Gigantor!

Speaking of things that'll blow the back of your skull off, if you haven't already you DEFINITELY need to check out Blade of the Immortal, the latest flick from Takashi Miike, which - as fate would have it - just so happens to be his 100th movie. 

Yep, that's right - 100th. Miike is the anti-James Cameron; instead of waiting 15 years in between movies, Miike cranks 'em out like an assembly line. He's already made 17 movies this decade, which is actually a substantial step down from his rate in the aughties, when he directed damn near 40 movies, plus a couple of TV shows and even a few stage productions. But here's the thing; considering the dude is averaging three to four movies a year, you'd expect his oeuvre to be underwhelming, but no way, Jose - not only is Miike putting out a staggering number of great movies each and every year, he's also putting out a diverse slate of great movies across every genre you can think of. Slashers. Giant robot movies. Weird family comedies. Yakuza movies. Movies based on video games, comic books and old Japanese cartoons. 

But the one genre he's REALLY carved out a niche for himself is the neo-samurai movie, as evident by the rousing success of flicks like Sukiyaki Western Django, 13 Assassins and Hara-Kari: Death of a Samurai, which I'd easily consider one of the greatest remakes of anything ever. Now, we all know by now that Miike is my favorite living director and, by default, that makes me a shameless, biased as hell fanboy. But hear me out, this Blade of the Immortal truly is one of the best movies you'll see in 2017, and you need to go out of your way to see it pronto.

The flick starts off like your average Miike movie, with some samurai in a kimona named Manji slicing and dicing motherfuckers left and right while his sister plays with horse turds in a stable. Then a Hare Krishna punk rocker samurai hacks her up so Manji has to pick up his sword and massacre 40 people while dudes in the woods shoot at him with bows and arrows. The he gets his hand whacked off and has to have a one-handed sword fight against some mohawked dude in a dress, which ends with Manji stabbing that mofo right in the spleen. But you see, Manji is mortally wounded in the fight, until this 800-year-old ghost woman cuts his chest open and puts devil worms in his wound and it makes his hand re-attach itself, so now he's pretty much unkillable. Hence ... the name of the movie.

So 50 years later, there's this guy in light blue pajamas named Master Anotsu roaming around the countryside, wrecking dojos just for fun so he can cleave the senseis in half and rebuild the villages in his own graven image. Then the ghost woman visits a 10-year-old samurai girl after Blue Pajamas rapes her mama and murders her daddy and tells her to find the one guy in town who can't die and hire him as a bodyguard. Sure enough, he's living in a shack on the outskirts of town with scars the size of Earl Campbell's Hot Dog links on his face, eating deep fried squirrel guts on a stick. Then a 50-year-old dude with a fake mustache wearing a Shredder costume tries to rape her, but not before showing her her mama's severed possessed head. And that's our cue for Manji to spring to action - and if you've ever wondered what it would look like if Raphael from Ninja Turtles split a dude's head open with his sais, wonder no more.

Then Manji goes out into the woods and fights this ninja guy with huge ass anime hair who is really good at blocking and likes to give unsolicited details of his childhood while hacking away at people. Then Manji pulls out a big ass dagger shaped like The Artist Formerly Known As Prince symbol and pokes him right in the kidney. Then a monk wearing a basket on his head tells him where to find Anotsu. But apparently they have a misunderstanding and have to kung fu fight a little before it's revealed that the monk is ALSO immortal. Then the monk kidnaps the little girl and forces her to lick the bloody worms out of his palm (cue Ernest face ... ewwww) as a prank. Then Manji bursts through the wall like a samurai Kool-Aid Man and it's time for round two and they literally turn each other into human pincushions before the monk lets Manji know there's a poison that CAN kill his blood worms and by proxy himself. So naturally, they kung fu one more time with the death juice all over their swords and Manji finishes off the monk for real this time - by dissecting him limb from limb, Evil Dead-style. 

Then Manji has to karate fight this girl wielding a pair of tree-trimmers on nunchucks. But she won't go down easy and keeps dropping bamboo poles on his head so he has to pick up a spear and a pair of sais and chase her around like Tenchu for a while. But then she cuts his hand off and starts monologuing about whether or not she's made the best life decisions then the little girl hops in at the last second to keep him from getting torn to shreds. After that the movie starts slowing down a little, with Manji visiting his sister's grave and being all wishy-washy about being too old to karate people's heads off anymore, then the little girl stumbles upon Anotsu. Anyway, this cues up a flashback to their grandfathers killing each other 50 years earlier. But he won't kill her, because it's just too dadgum easy.

Then the little girl decides to go on a suicide mission to kill Anotsu, knowing full well he'd rip her guts out in five seconds. Then Blue Pajamas gets set up, but that doesn't stop him from slaying about 40 samurais all by his lonesome. Then Maji fights three dudes at once and he's about to die and then the ghost woman shows up and taunts him and he calls her "a stupid cow" 'cause he can't die yet and has to save that girl. Then all of the remaining samurai in Japan show up to kill off Anotsu for good, then Manji shows up and now HE has to fight all of the remaining samurai left in Japan. So it's basically two against, I don't know, 600 or 700 in our paint-the-countryside-red HALF HOUR long katana fu grand finale.

And if you think they can't POSSIBLY top the part where a dude sharpens his own bones into stabbing weapons, just WAIT until Anotsu and Maji finally go at it one-on-one. This thing is already a candidate for best movie fight in history, and if absolutely nothing else, it definitely sets a new indoor record for the most number of times two dudes stab each other over a ten minute period in any kind of medium. 

Let's run down the highlights, why don't we? We've got 334 dead bodies. Zero breasts. Seventeen sword fights. Multiple rapes. One seppuka. One mass poisoning. One exploding body. Hands roll. Arms roll. Legs roll. Intestines roll. More impalements than dialogue. Throwing star fu. Throwing dagger fu. Axe fu. Sai fu. Two-pronged saber fu. Unkillable worm fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place - some SERIOUS katana wax fu.

Starring Takuya Kimura as Manji, the all-but-invincible swordsman with zombie worms crawling through his innards who says lines like "you're lucky, you can die" and "what kind of idiot would pick a fight with a maniac?"; Hana Sugisaka as the ten-year old who hires Manji to turn everybody who killed her family into teriyaki jerky; Sota Fukushi as Anotsu, the villain who doesn't want to rule the world or unleash some sort of supernatural evil force - he just wants franchisees for his kickboxing school; and Hayato Ichihara as Anotsu's most sadistic lieutenant, who can count attempted rape of a prostitute as one of the nicer things he does in the movie.

Written by Tetsuya Oishi - the world-famous anime scribe behind Death Note, among many, many others - and directed by the man himself, Takashi Miike, who more so than any other filmmaker on the planet, knows how to make his actors say "no matter how bad the memory, sometimes just remembering gives you incredible power" and make it sound like they dadgum mean it. 

This is the movie Logan wished it could've been, right down to the plot about the dude with healing powers trying to rescue a little girl from super evildom. It's The Professional meets Highlander meets Kill Bill meets Yojimbo meets every SNK fighting game ever made, and - needless to say - you need to see it. 

This one easily gets four stars out of four from me. Jimbo says check it out, and the sooner, the better.

Just wait 'til you hear him sing the flick's closing number!

Since it's only playin' in about four or five postage stamp-sized theaters right about now, I reckoned it was worth our respective whiles to let you know that there's a new Ah-nold movie out, and while it ain't nowhere near as good as his last flick Aftermath, it's still pretty decent and maybe worth checking out, if you really don't have nothing else going on with your life (and since the college football season is over and done with, that includes pretty much all of us.)

Anyway, the name of this flick is Killing Gunther, and it's one of those "found footage" style flicks, except this one is explicitly meant to be a parody. The movie starts off in Argentina and we learn about this guy named Blake who hires a documentary crew to follow him around on his quest to knock off the world's greatest assassin. So, to finish the job, he assembles a crack team of the world's best hitmen and hitwomen.

There's this fisherman guy from Chicago who dresses just like that one guy from The Big Lebowski who's an explosives whiz. And there's this middle eastern sniper chick whose dad follows her around wearing a sweater declaring himself her number one fan. And there's also this super nerd with mega hacking skills named "The Human Computer" and - you know, it's probably a lot easier if I just make it a bulleted list, huh?

• Ashley - a poor man's Morgan Freeman who has a heart attack two minutes after being introduced as the team's secret weapon.
• Crusher - a former Islamic extremist with a robotic arm (that isn't compatible with Apple devices, by the way.)
• Pak Yong Qi - a self-avowed "master of poisons" who wants revenge on Gunther for killing his beloved pet snake.
• The Bellaklakova Twins - a brother and sister duo who killed 14,000 people in a soccer stadium fire, love McDonald's and took the job just so they could go to Hollywood and meet Scott Wolf in person.
• Max Palane - Blake's ex-partner and new de facto secret weapon - who, naturally gets shot in the head right before he can tell everybody where Gunther lives.

After all that, we get some exposition on Blake's ex-girlfriend, who stopped doing hit jobs and started her own erotic ceramics company ("I'm not killing people anymore," she says, "so I'm sleeping better.") Anyhoo, it doesn't take long for us to find out that she shacked up with Gunther, which is probably why Blake wants him dead so damned much, so he takes his comrades on a trip to Miami to buy some military-grade weapons from a dude with a mullet, but things take a turn for the worse when they get involved in a high-rise shootout and Ah-nold starts powerbombing people through all the IKEA furniture. They think they kill him with a car grenading, but even after celebrating with the worst Sister Hazel cover of all-time, they start to have their suspicions that maybe he ain't as dead as they thought he was once SOMEBODY starts picking off members of the crew one-by-one.

Around the 50 minute the movie starts hitting some serious snags. There's way too much subplot going on, with Blake trying to find a new apartment and discuss, ugh, his feelings and trying to convince the fat Chicago dude to rejoin the team after the Iranian chick's dad finds out he had sex with his daughter.

Then Blake gets piss drunk after Ashley's funeral and decides, damn it, he's gonna' off Gunther all by his lonesome (well, all by his lonesome with the documentary crew following him, if we're gonna' be sticklers for accuracy.) So he and the remaining assassins eventually find Gunther's mansion in California and he apprehends them all at gunpoint and reveals he wore a bunch of disguises earlier and that he and the documentary crew have been in cahoots the whole time. 

And that's our cue for Blake vs. Ah-nold in a knock-down drag-out brawl through the whole house, complete with the refrigerator door getting ripped off and used as a melee weapon and multiple flower vases getting cracked over multiple skulls.

Now, if the movie would've ended there, you wouldn't get too many complaints from me. The problem is we've still got about 20 minutes of post-script, with a buncha' unnecessary scenes about the fat Chicago dude and Muslim chick having a kid and Gunther retiring and moving to Austria to grow organic vegetables and coach a girl's field hockey team.

So yeah - it's about 50 minutes of a really great post-post-postmodern comedy and 30 minutes of shit that'll put you to sleep faster than a Nyquil sundae. Still, there's marginally more good than bad here, and it's probably about as close as we'll ever get to seeing a live-action No More Heroes movie (speaking of properties Takashi Miike ought to get his hands on next ...)

Anyhoo, we've got 21 dead bodies. Zero breasts. Two dead snakes. One exploding yacht. Multiple exploding cars. Gratuitous vomiting. Gratuitous The Running Man references. Gratuitous Predator quotes. Kung fu. Suicide bomber fu. Rocket launcher fu. Flash grenade fu. Karaoke fu. And the thing that really makes this flick noteworthy - for the first time in the history of cinema, a movie concludes with Ah-nold singing a country-western ballad, complete with lyrics like "I have a George Strait kind of sound, if you know what I mean" and "when she's around, I cant help myself, I want to hold on tight to her continental shelf." And no, I'm not kidding, and holy shit, is it genuinely one of the most amazing things I've ever heard in my life.

Starring, Ah-nold, who gets top billing despite only being in the movie for ten minutes and looking like he ate Carl Weathers (although he does get to drop at least one all-time classic quote - "that fuckin' cunt over there is going to get terminated."); Bobby Moynihan as the demolitions expert cosplaying as John Goodman from The Big Lebowski throughout the movie; Hannah Simone as the Iranian assassin chick (who was actually born in Canada and is half Indian); Ryan Gaul and Allison Tolman as the psycho Russian twins, the former who says "fuck you, you're not Mickey Mouse" to an arms dealer; and Cobie Smulders - yep, Maria Hill herself - as the antagonist's ex-main squeeze and hitwoman-turned-dildo-entrepreneur.

Written by and directed by Taran Killam, who also plays Blake, the movie's central "bad guy," so to speak.

Eh, it's a mixed bag of a movie, but I didn't really hate it too much at any juncture in the movie. For that, I'll give it a slightly above average two and a half stars out of four. Jimbo says check it out, but be prepared for this doldrums to hit hard.

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