Another movie review: Zapped!

So, last time I wrote a movie review it was for that new James Bond movie. I didn't care for it, though some of my commenters clearly thought I was too harsh, or possibly that I lack the advanced cinematic sophistication necessary to see its true brilliance.

I will now endeavor to prove two things:

1. My commenters are wrong, and I in fact have the best taste in the world when it comes to movies.
2. I am not, in fact, an anhedonist who just hates everything.

In order to prove these things, I will now review a movie I just watched over the weekend. A movie I love.

In case you couldn't figure it out from the title of this post, the movie in question is the 1982 Scott Baio / Willie Aames classic "Zapped!"

Let me just get this out of the way at the outset: this is the best movie ever made. Period.

I first saw this movie many years ago on some cable channel, and it has stuck in my head ever since. So much so that when I discovered that Netflix didn't have it available for rental I wrote them an email demanding that they get it. Apparently they listened, because that's how I rented it this past weekend.

It was everything I remembered, and more.

Here's a plot summary from the IMDB page:

Peyton and Barney are fun loving high school students working on a science project with white mice. When one of the mice begins to move food toward itself with out [Sic] touching it, Barney finds he has accidently [Sic] discovered a formula for telekinetic powers. Now, how much trouble can a high school boy who can move things with just his mind get into?

How much trouble? None, actually. There are no ramifications for anything in this movie, and that's part of what makes it awesome!

That's actually a pretty lame plot summary. Peyton (Aames) is definitely fun-loving, but Barney (Baio) might be on the fence about fun.

Also, the mice are a relatively minor subplot (and aren't all white, despite what the racist summary-giver suggests). Mostly they feature in the beginning, when Barney's crazy-ass experiment involves getting them drunk and/or high on marijuana and making them go scuba diving in a fish tank. His reasons for doing this are vague, but who cares? Mice in little scuba suits are adorable!

Indeed, one mouse does become telekinetic after Coach Dexter (played by the incredibly awesome Scatman Crothers) spills some super-plant-growth-formula into the concentrated extract of marijuana and then Peyton adds beer for some reason. Scientist Barney doesn't even know about these people messing with his experiment. Bad controls!

Then things go crazy and Barney gets telekinetic too.

Now, allow me to explain the brilliance of this movie. If you were going to make a movie in which someone gets superpowers, you'd probably want to make them the anomaly in a world of normals. Everyone else would just be your average boring citizen, while super-Barney has this awesome power.

Zapped! does not do things that way, lame-ass!

Instead of Barney being a superhero in a normal world, the whole world he exists in is a big pile of crazy. Peyton is some sort of sociopath photographer guy who is mostly a bad influence on Barney, but is actually really harmless for a sociopath. Yes, he's totally self-centered and lies a lot, but he's actually pretty nice most of the time. Also, he's bizarrely popular with the ladies (mostly through the power of lies).

In fact, everyone in the entire movie is just sort of a dick the whole time. For instance, at one point Dexter turns to the principal and calls him ugly for absolutely no reason. Then he goes chasing after a barely-clothed teenage girl even though his shrew of a wife is standing right next to him. Oh, Dexter!

Another common theme you might see in a superpower movie like this would be the hero having all sorts of annoying reservations about using/abusing his power. Or else he'd just abuse his power and become some sort of tormented supervillian, or a whiny Spiderman clone.

Barney doesn't care for your movie-making conventions or questions about power and responsibility!

He gleefully abuses his power in petty and meaningless ways. Like harassing radio-controlled plane enthusiasts for no reason. Or making some guy on a carnival ride spin extra fast so he gets sick. All done with totally no remorse or ethical concerns.

I bet you can guess what happened right after this shot!

(Maybe this?)
Eventually Barney does get pissed off that Peyton is using him to cheat at roulette, but even this is more because Barney's new girlfriend (not the pink girl above, a bookish moral type) wanted to mess around with him that night and got pissed because he's hanging out with the future Bibleman and abusing his powers instead of smooching her.

So does Barney do the moral thing and refuse to cheat at roulette with his goofy friend? Does he let the ball fall where it may? Just stop using his powers for evil?

Hell no! Instead of just saying "Hey dude, I'm done. Going to go kiss my frigid girlfriend instead. Later." He uses his telekinesis to wreck the fucking roulette table. Awesome!

He later goes to the prom where he reconciles with bookish girl. All is well, right? He's learned a valuable lesson about not ignoring his crush-object and not using his powers for evil, right?

Not in this world, buster!

Instead, he somehow gets hit in the head with a watermelon (I am unclear as to exactly how this happened). This sends him into a crazy telekinetic orgy of insanity in which he proceeds to strip pretty much everyone at the prom naked and send their clothes flying around. Bookish girlfriend seems to be fine with this for some reason.

I should point out that this is also the one and only scene that causes the movie to lose points. Mrs. Unicow pointed out that there was a gender equality issue here (I would have noticed this myself, but got distracted by all the boobies).

See, Barney was making everyone's clothes fly off, but the movie really only showed the dirty bits of the naked women. So I'm docking points for not showing more male genitalia.

That is the first time I've ever written that sentence.

That's about where it ends. Giant naked prom. No lessons learned, no morals. Just crazy shit for 90 minutes. It's brilliant.

Perhaps you're still a doubter. Maybe you have trouble believing that this is really the best movie of all time. Maybe you need more convincing.

I present as my final piece of evidence this dream/stoned sequence. If you can watch this and still not believe this movie is wonderful, you're a lost cause.



I hope that puts to rest any lingering suspicions that you may have that this movie is anything less than brilliant. Go watch it now or you suck.

Score: 4.99 Salami Bazookas out of 5

A movie review!

Now that my month of posting every day has ended, I have become lazy. Politics can get tiring, after all. Sure, I've got a half-written post about how Karl Rove is a whiny little baby and how anyone who thinks he's some kind of political genius is deeply wrong, but I couldn't even bring myself to finish it.

But I did see a movie over the weekend, and I'm going to review it. Note that there may be spoilers. You're forewarned.

Specifically, I saw the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace.

This nonsensically-titled movie is the second with the new, "gritty" James Bond, played by gorilla-human hybrid Daniel Craig.


I am told that many heterosexual women (and presumably some gay men) find this mass of steroid-addled flesh attractive. They will be pleased to know that he spends some time shirtless in the new movie. So they should be happy, as long as they don't think about his shriveled testicles.

As you can probably guess, I am not a fan of this bulky, surly, totally humorless, and pretty-much braindead Bond.

It's not that Craig is even a bad actor, it's just that the new James Bond is just another braindead action hero. The exact same movie could have been made calling him "Bruce Meatpuncher" and nobody would ever suspect it was intended to be a James Bond movie.

Sadly, the thing that made the James Bond movies enjoyable (to me, anyway) was all the stuff that they've done away with in this gritty, post-9/11, tedious new world of Bond.

Bond isn't charming, he's boorish. He's not clever, he's heavily-muscled. He doesn't have sneaky ways of doing things, he just beats guys up. He doesn't have interesting technology, he just has a gun. And he sure as hell doesn't have anything resembling a sense of humor.

Yeah, a lot of those qualities of the old Bond got overdone, and a lot of the old movies were ridiculous. But so what? They weren't meant to be realistic, they were basically a comic book superhero version of Bond. Which was okay, because comic book superheroes are fun to watch! Just because they got out of hand and went too far with the gimmickry before is no reason to abandon absolutely everything that made Bond endearing in the first place.

About the only thing left of the old Bond is that the new Bond also has a way with attractive women.


Even then, I don't recall the woman above ever having sex with Bond, which is something I would have possibly enjoyed watching. They might have made out at some point though.

He instead had sex with some forgettable redhead whose role in the movie was ill-defined. It's probably better that this one didn't have sex with him. Bond looks like a giant chlamydia factory to me.

The "villain" is similarly lame. Some smarmy businessman whose evil master plan is to destabilize the Bolivian government and overcharge for utilities? How exciting! That's way more interesting than someone building a weather-control device or awesome space-based laser or something!

Loser.
It doesn't really matter, though, because the plot is just an excuse for blowing shit up. Which they do reasonably well. Lots of shit blows up.

Hell, at one point an entire giant building blows up because someone backs a car into a wall. That's exciting!

Apparently that super-high-tech building (powered by hydrogen fuel cells!) was built without even the most rudimentary fire suppression technology. That seems like a major oversight on the part of the contractor, especially if you're going to have big tanks labeled "hydrogen" scattered about everywhere. Live and learn, I guess.

I think the fight scenes might have been well done, but since the director decided to use the shakiest camera in the world and cut to a new angle every 0.3 seconds or so, I couldn't really tell. It might have been Bond and his nemesis sitting around drinking tea very loudly.

There was some running around too, jumping on rooftops and stuff. It prompted Mrs. Unicow to wonder how Bond's ankles did not end up broken. I postulate that he had some fancy high-top loafers with excellent ankle support.

There were also cars and planes and stuff, which was more interesting than most of the other parts of the movie. Though the car chase suffered from the same "hey let's change the angle every fucking millisecond so nobody can see what's going on" disease. The plane part was pretty decent, at least.

The plot also apparently had some continuity with the plot of Casino Royale. I did see that movie, but that helped me not at all. Casino Royale didn't make any sense to me at the time, and they didn't bother to provide any further explanation in this movie. If you're going to try to have an ongoing plot element, it would help if it were actually memorable.

One thing I will give this movie, though. It was better than "Live Free or Die Hard," which I just saw recently and which was so profoundly stupid it nearly put me into a coma. But this wasn't much better.

Score: 4 "This movie sucked"s out of 5