Haunted Hobbled Horses Having Happened
Okay so it took a little while for the numbness to wear off, but here we go again - the martial arts opus, GYMKATA.
The faster you read this review, the fewer times you will lose the game while reading it. "The Game" is a semi-central plot point in this flick and it's going to come up repeatedly, so just become accustomed to this fact.
When I last stumbled away from this wretched film to find enough beer and Excedrin Migraine to begin the process of coping, our jerkass hero was listening to the Kong of Parmistan say that he would like to do things, such as announce his daughter's wedding to that dickhead Zamir and welcome people to his merry medieval country of deformed psychotics. It occurred to me that I wouldn't trust this pinwheeling pinhead Cabot to properly phrase his one wish. I mean, a satellite installation in Parmistan may or may not kill nations or save millions, but assuming that it doesn't yet exist, we'd have to build the damn thing and bring in highly trained technicians to run it. People who would not, on average, stand a chance in hell of surviving the idiotic immigration procedures of Parmistan...
Anyway, having told Cabot that his father, Colonel Clencher, was a great athlete who should have been a winner but wasn't, the Khan gets everyone to applaud and wish Cabot great fortune. This is slightly morbid. Mostly I just hate this movie.
After this rousing ovation, Cabot begins asking about the village of the damned. What I really want to know is what, precisely, makes these "criminally insane" any different from the other assholes in this country. I mean, their national sport is killing people in a footrace. When your national pastime is, say, baseball, then it's easy to spot the criminally insane - they are the ones who go to baseball games with the express purpose of beating someone to death with a giant novelty foam finger which they have cunningly reinforced with steel. When your national pastime is stuffing firecrackers into the urethra of visiting foreign nationals, it is harder to tell that the guy who occasionally hollows out children to wear as sombreros that protect him from mind control is having some serious problems. It might be that they are cannibals. As a species, we can handle nationally funded death sports a lot better than we can eating long pig.
One of the other competitors says something that sounds like "First step in a turkey farm, huh?" to Cabot. I have no idea what the fuck he could possibly mean by that, and then a guy who I think has his voice dubbed in tries to intimidate Cabot by taking a huge wet munch out of an apple. I might have mentioned that this is a really fucking weak way to throw up 'bows, but it bears repeating.
The wedding is announced in a way that makes no sense - why does the Kong stand up and flap his cake hole at random intervals like that? - and it is clear that the Princess is not thrilled by the prospect of spending the rest of her life supplying eggs for Zamir to fertilize, as she refuses to hold his hand. She probably has developed some sort of emotional attachment to Cabot, since they fucked for no reason, he puts up with her ambush knifeplay fetish, and they have nearly been killed at approximately the same time on more than once occasion.
It's remarkable how, if you mentally replace the Ye Olde Renn Faire goblets the crowd holds and jumps up and down with Solo cups of Bud, the celebrating natives look a tremendous amount like the crowd at a Toby Keith concert, minus the cowboy hats. Huh.
At this point, a stupid looking but quite large white man in a dragon-emblazoned Asian Gift Shop robe and giant crimson headband enters, accompanied by a determinedly unattractive woman in a pink kimono type thing. Hindu Kushites, being neither Hindus nor Kushites, think this look is the bee's motherfuckin' knees, apparently. At first, he actually looks like Dane Cook with a mullet and a blank expression as he wades through the Ape House princess-waving at the crowd. My immediate assumption was that either this guy won the Game previously, or else he was the court magician.
Slim isn't the court magician, and I don't think he won the Game. He's somebody that Cabot admires and/or knows personally, since he has followed him since Munich (I think that's what he said, the crowd very realistically drowns out a lot of the dialog) and while his name sounds like either Borg, Board, or Gourd, I'm pretty sure it's Thorg. Dealer's choice though. He also kind of looks like Toby Keith. For some reason he has a big metal triangle on his bandanna.
Zamir (who is one seriously dopey looking son of a bitch, by the way, and he has one of those fucking Young Obi-wan Rat-tails) is getting annoyed at Cabot and Rubali very obviously making eyes at each other throughout the party up until this point. To make his feelings clear in the stupidest way possible, he strips off his robe, whips out a pair of sai (they are these Japanese pronged knife things, the Ninja Turtle Raphael used them) and begins twirling them around with that annoying fucking WHOOSH WHOOSH WHISH WHOOSH noise that the kama made earlier. Then he throws them at Cabot, who doesn't flinch (the film does though, there's a little jump when the sai suddenly strike the wall next to his head) - even if I were a bad ass recently-minted gymnastics-ninja, I'd flinch at this. Sai are not especially aerodynamic and aren't very well balanced for throwing. I'd be concerned that one might tumble and stick in my forehead rather than very improbably sticking into the wall mere centimeters apart from each other.
Thorg puts his hands together and bows, or else was saying grace over his food. Zamir saunters over to tug his pointy things out of the wall and tries to flex menacingly.
"You must understand... she's mine."
Cabot comes back with "It's not over yet, so put your hardware back in your pants." While this is not a weak comeback comparatively, I'm just not sure why they're grunting and flexing over a girl who could probably kick both their asses as long as the plot lets her do so.
Later, that bug-eyed abomination Mannish Thing prances into Cabot's room with disturbing enthusiasm - the sort that usually denotes "Imma get me some!" - only to be taken hostage by Cabot with A Huge Fucking Knife. Cabot demands from the comically overacting Thing that he be taken to Princesh Rubaleh. I think he was clenching his teeth and that's why he sounds drunk, since he was sipping at his wine like a pussy earlier and couldn't possibly be drunk yet. I guess this habit runs in the family.
With Mannish Thing as a hostage, Cabot noisily avoids roaming Parm ninjas (I don't know what you call someone from Parmistan. A person from Afghanistan is called an Afghan. A person from Pakistan is called a Pakistani. A person from Uzbekistan is called a Russian. Who knows!) until he reaches Rubali's room. At this point, he thrusts A Huge Fucking Knife into Thing's face and tells her (I am thinking it's a she but can't be sure) not to be afraid and to tell the Princess to meet him in the garden.
I might not have mentioned it before, but Mannish Thing has no tongue and cannot fucking speak. Why he dragged the poor demented hideous creature through the whole fucking castle at knife point, only to hand mute Thing the shank with a message to pass on to Rubali is completely fucking beyond me. Why didn't he just fucking tell Thing to tell the Princess to meet him? Oh wait. I know why.
Because he's a goddamn simpleton.
By the way, in his sneaky black costume and with his just-shy-of-mullet hairdo, Cabot looks like a second-string Luke Skywalker. Just an observation.
Rubali meets her hero in her stealthiest bright fucking white night gown and explains it is a political marriage and also a traditional one, and the Kong is already having trouble enough without breaking tradition to let her marry a complete outsider because he hasn't been punishing The Twenties, who are young people who want Permistan to join the 20th Century. If you lived in a 10th World Country that was permanently stuck in the 10th Century, you would want this as well. If your last major scientific and cultural advances (outside of importing fucking NINJAS) was around the same time reindeer became extinct in fucking Scotland, you would be hankering for a change too.
She also notes that Zamir is the leader of the faction trying to overthrow Dipshithis Khan, Kong of Parmistan, and that this part of a diabolic scheme that blah blah blah boring. I fast forwarded a bit here. I ain't gonna lie. (The Kong is going to try and bring his wretched piece of shit mountain nation into the modern world by combining the "best of the old and the new." Since the old consists of murdering people in The Game, squalor, inbreeding and psychosis I am not sure what the exact ratio of old:new is going to be here.)
When Helmet Ninjas (some of the ninjas wear red helmets over their ninja masks with stupid plumes on them) pursue Rubali who has forgotten how not to run like a fucking girl with her arms out, Cabot somehow kicks their asses by doing a series of backflips right into them which knocks both down. Somehow. I hate gymkata.
Our next scene dawns at dawn, with a bunch of guys playing some horns badly out of key. This is very exciting. The contestants for The Game line up at the starting line: some middle-aged guys in track suits, Cabot in his ninja turtleneck, and Thorg. Thorg is wearing his silly fucking bandanna, a baby blue sweater vest, and tinfoil bracers. The tinfoil bracers are a particular favorite of mine.
We get more closeups of the dog ugly bastard children of Parmistan who are just fucking DELIGHTED to see some more foreigners get their stupid asses killed with arrows. I bet not a single native has willingly taken part in this contest, other than the ninjas and sodden piles of jerk-ass such as Zamir. No makeup was used to make these people hideous - the missing teeth, gaping gums, mismatched eye sizes and other deformities and malaise are au naturale. That is dedication to realism right there. Also, this movie is very terrible.
Rubali shows up in a bright red cheongsam because this fucking movie does not know where the Hindu Kush or Indonesia are either, and suspects they are somewhere between Russia and China.
YATMAH!
On second thought the national cheer may be pronounced YAH-PAH! but I don't actually care so it shall remain YATMAH! in my mind. The Royal Retard makes another long stupid speech about tradition and shit. I noticed that with the exception of Cabot and Thorg - what the fuck kind of name is Thorg anyway? - the various contestants are dressed as though this were a normal cross-country run and not ritualized mass murder.
The Kong talks. They cheer. This film seems to go on long enough for a brief glimpse into what Eternal Damnation looks like.
Zamir threatens Cabot some more, who ignores him about as much as I do. Then the race rather abruptly begins. And what does our brave hero do? He promptly gets knocked over and kicked in the fucking chewer by another contestant. Ha ha, man. That's what you get for wearing fucking white pants. Douche.
Zamir ignores the Khan yelling about rules and shit and rides off in pursuit with his silent, faceless, easily recycled minions. That's why people loved using ninjas in shitty action movies. It's not because they're cool or threatening in any way. It's because you could have a cast of thousands of bad guys by only hiring about six to ten guys and putting them in identical ninja costumes. Some of them have shields and scimitars too, which are traditional weapons in nearby Pakistan and Afghanistan (in case you actually wanted to know where the fuck the Hindu Kush is) as are the sai, naginata and whatever other weapons were on sale that week at Ninja Hut.
Incidentally, if you put a pointy hat on a ninja and put him on a horse, he looks like a member of the KKK only in black, hence that bit about Klan ninjas before.
It's fun watching the various ninjas and Zamir chase Cabot through that goddamn cornfield because the horses keep running into each other and looking mighty cheesed about it, and they make as much fucking noise as possible to ensure they could not possibly sneak up on him. By fun I mean "annoying" and by annoying I mean "engendering incandescent fury."
By the way, Cabot looks REALLY silly shimmying up a rope because he holds his legs splayed and stiff on either side of the rope, so it looks like he is rubbing his crotch up the line as he scrambles up with just his arms.
The Informative Contestant from before is the first to die, catching two arrows directly in his kidneys and then falling to his death with yet another really stupid sounding scream, followed by the return of the foley artist's Looney Tunes Impact Sound. Magical.
Cabot takes 6 million forevers to climb the stupid fucking rope, but rather than just arrow him to death as well, they decide to burn the rope with a torch under him. What the fuck sense does this make? Look, rope doesn't even burn all that well unless it's hemp, which this isn't, or else it's soaked in oil. I imagine that even Cabot would notice he was about to start climbing up a giant lamp wick. Anyway, you can guess how successful this stupid fucking plan is. This is but the first of Zamir's highly moronic attempts to kill his rival for Rubali over the course of this abominable, excruciating exercise in '80s cheese. Cabot continues to pause every so many feet and look down at the fire's progress. There's another rope about two feet away. I'm not sure why he doesn't just change ropes, since Zamir is clearly too retarded to have him shot. Zamir has the nerve to act pissed off when his plan to slowly catch a rope on fire while Cabot climbs away is foiled by Cabot climbing away. Well, doieeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Another contestant dies from an overdose of spear after Cabot tries in vain to get the judges to smite Zamir for cheating. WHO DO YOU THINK THESE NINJAS ARE LOYAL TO, YOU IDIOT.
Yet another contestant dies because when he follows the others across the gorge on the ropes (the ones where the Colonel (Spoiler: didn't) die) he arrives just in time to get hit in the face with an axe, although it doesn't actually injury him in any way, and he plummets to his demise. The sound effect guys love making falling bodies sound like they're made of stone when they land on any surface harder than gelatin.
Naturally, when Zamir catches up, rather than shoot arrows at the suspended Cabot, he taunts him by wiggling the rope and then chopping it short with a gigantic two-handed falchion type sword. This is basically because Zamir's overwhelming character trait is being a dick.
I need another break, my right eye won't stop twitching violently.
...
Back, unfortunately.
Zamir's brilliant plan to dump Cabot into the grotto is foiled because he actually waited until our hero was very nearly to the other side before chopping the rope. This has the actual effect of causing Cabot to fall about a foot before he just climbs right the fuck back up and flees. Zamir is basically the second biggest idiot in this movie. Cabot punts the lurking ambusher on the other side into the grotto and slowly flees.
The next contestant to die, a Chinese guy I call Orange Pajamas, dies when his martial arts prove useless against the murderous Thorg and his Scandinavian kung fu, also known as "I'm Huge." He is strangled to death with Thorg's belt (he keeps breathing afterwards. Sigh.) and the judge does not seem to care. Thorg continues on his way. No one has explained his stupid bandanna yet nor the significance of the little metal triangle on it.
Thorg confronts Cabot next and there is a tussle. Cabot uses his honed ability to hear only axe cutting air (how the fuck should I know what Japanese-san meant by that shit?) to dodge an arrow from behind and let it hit Thorg instead. Leaving the strong man to lie around thinking about what he did, Cabot takes the lead. Or does he?
Somehow, Zamir and his Ninja Archer Brigade has gotten ahead. Zamir has trained his ninjas to mass fire their bows when he snaps, which is stupid. What is worse is how Cabot dodges the arrows.
Being a tiny guy, he darts behind a really skinny tree, one of three standing next to each other in a rough triangle. In the next instant, the ninja missiles hit. However, about five of them hit within a 1" circle behind the tree he is using for cover. The rest hit the tree next to it, and only two hit the tree in the back, nowhere near Cabot's former position. In other words, none of these arrows would have hit Cabot even if he'd just stood there, since all of the ninjas were aiming at the trees anyway.
Cabot flees, then stops short of a ninja judge and yells "GOONIES!" or, more likely, "GOMEZ!" I don't fucking know why either - apparently one of the other contestants is named Gomez. Then he looks around, and says to the blue-eyed ninja (NNNNGH) "Here we are. Cuckoo's nest, eh? Yeah. Don't waste your breath." and takes off. The ninja doesn't say anything. (Spoiler: It's his fucking dad.)
It occurs to me that either everyone in this film speaks the native language, or nearly every speaking character in Permistan is at least passably skilled in English...
Zamir notes that Cabot will never get out of the village of the crazies alive in his annoyingly nasal voice. He's wrong, of course, but then again, he's also a fucking idiot.
The village of the criminally insane is my favorite part of the movie because it is, in fact, insane and completely changes the tone of the show for the entire section, from retarded action blockbuster to schlock horror b-movie. At least... for a little while.
The first thing that is notable about this village is that as one approaches, animals begin making very weird noises. Either that or the soundtrack gets really fucked up here; there are several warped-sounding jackal barks and then suddenly a deep voiced "WUUUUUB!" noise out of nowhere as the camera stares down a narrow alley in Crazytown. A falling portcullis locks Cabot in Hannibal Heights, and so he is forced to proceed ever deeper into the fog.
He discovers a lone white goat and a well. Things look pretty quiet for now in the village. Annnnnnd then the fucking crazies come out to play. Fuck.
It begins with a weirdly modulated female wail, and then we get a close up of a guy who looks like most Permistan characters: a toothless ugly coot, except this one is cackling incoherently at nothing in particular. I suspect this is a cameo by Charles Robert Carner.
An old man in a hat sharpens a scythe but doesn't really react initially to Cabot's presence other than to glance at him. The soundtrack presents us with the Kooksville leitmotif: warbling voices, owl hoots and "menacing" synthesizer noodling. This music is especially awful.
Cabot finds it necessary to go fuck with a door that swings shut by itself (with a cartoonish CREAAAAAAAAAAAAAK WHAM!) and narrowly avoids being impaled by a bed o' nails that swings down from above. Clever bastards: they knew he is a twat.
The soundtrack adds in weird rattling growls and ghostly cackling noises. Spooooooooky.
Cabot is suddenly ambushed by a man who makes distressed, high pitched, squealing noises and wields a sickle. He sounds like he is passing a kidney stone, and Cabot manages to shove him against the wall where he clamps his hand on a drain pipe.
Then he cuts his own fucking hand off. His severed appendage continues to hang out there on the pipe, bleeding, while the freak whines off. I can only assume that he had Gorilla Glue on his hand, and being criminally retarded, that was the only way he could think to resolve this dilemma. That, or this movie is severely stupid.
Cabot comes upon a dog who is lapping from a pool of blood (okay, he's lapping from a point slightly to the side of the pool of blood) with incredibly loud sound effects. He looks (SLURP SLURP SLURP) up to find the missing contestant (SLURP SLURP SLURP) from earlier nailed to (SLURP SLURP SLURP) a wall with various bits of hardware (SLURP SLURP SLURP) sticking out of his corpse. Cabot whispers "Gomez" (SLURP SLURP SLURP) in a sad voice, and there is a close up of the large (SLURP SLURP SLURP) pitchfork sticking out of Gomez's general face region. Um. I don't know why any of us should care about Gomez. (SLURP SLURP SLURP)
A quartet of whining/humming women in monk outfits emerges and try to rape Cabot or something. While he tries to fend them off without using gymkata, I silently plead for a freak meteorite to hit my bedroom.
One pulls out a knife but forgets which end you should hit a hero with, and then he promptly punches or elbows all of them in the face. They stand in the alley sobbing. I wish he'd fucking kill more people in this movie. Nobody would bitchfiddle Rambo or Conan like that.
Of course, when a dude in one of these birdshit-stained robes pounces upon Cabot from above, our hero beats the everlovin' shit out of him rather than just tapping him once and leaving him blubbering. (Spoiler: FUCK THIS MOVIE.)
Two more psychos jump him, but one accidentally kills the other by not looking where he scythes and then gets his daily recommended dose of beat down from Cabot. A hideous frog-troll-woman looks on from above.
Cabot opens a random door and finds behind it his prize: a bloodied, stumbling, bandanna-less Thorg! Seeing a man soaked in blood who can barely stand, Cabot flees like the five foot five inch game hen he fucking is.
I need another break and maybe some hard liquor.
...
I am so glad this fucker is nearly through!
Cabot overcomes a couple more random crazies, although he doesn't throw anything at the one who yodels at him like a low rent U2 cover band from a second story window. I would've chucked a pitchfork at that fucker for certain.
Of particular note is a genuinely creepy looking... thing... of indeterminate gender who hangs out a window making disturbing ass cawing noises at Cabot. I hate this creepshow motherfucker so much, and I've seen him six fucking times now. Five alone for this commentary. I hope she died of something truly tremendous, such as a thirty-two ounce stone in one of his organs, or somehow shit her own lower intestine in a freak medical incident.
Another actually fucking creepy denizen of this fucked up little suburb of Hell appears when a mysterious white robed figure beckons Cabot towards what he is stupid enough to think is safety. The camera zooms in on the eerily stiff, misshapen figures of a guy in the background, who turns around to reveal a deathly pale, sunken-eyed freak on the other side of his head, who is apparently wearing a manfacehat. Fffuuuuuck.
When White Robe turns around, he reveals that he is wearing nothing under his white robes. I know this because the entire back of his robe is cut out from below his shoulders to his ankles, which means he turns to open the door and displays his man-ass for the world to see. I'm gonna need a second. ...Nnnnngh.
White Robe's nethercheeks aren't enough to distract Cabot for long, and he gymkatas Manfacehat to unconsciousness or possibly death for trying to stab him with a spear. Our hero then wisely decides not to follow the guy with his buns in the breeze into his Den of Rape and takes off in the opposite direction.
He is attacked again, and flees again, from the wounded THORG. A group of mewling mongoloids stumbling forward with pitchforks forces Cabot to hide in a pig pen which is one of the top five least safe places to be. He is followed by the bleeding Thorg (yes, a man with significant injuries is cruising through pigs, I know, I said the movie was stupid) who gets kicked into the pigs (no, they don't eat him) because he can't stop fucking with Cabot even when flight would be 1000% more intelligent a course. I desperately, desperately, desperately hate the sound of pigs squealing. I really do. I devour pork products because it means one less fucking screeching pig in the world.
The pitchfork platoon makes cheese-less fondue of Thorg. No one will miss this asshole. Oh, and one of the pigs immediately starts noshing on his corpse. Delightful.
I assume the second story babbler (no not the one I want dead, the other one) is somehow directing the mobs that pursue Cabot through the village. If the rest of the film were a little more like this part (well, minus the stupid and the gymkata) this film would have been slightly more interesting, but give it a moment.
We hear more of the local crazy moon talk as they chase Cabot. This part takes a while.
The villagers of the damned chase Cabot into a courtyard. What follows is... *deep breath*
THE STUPIDEST FUCKING "MARTIAL ARTS" FIGHT OF ALL FUCKING TIME.
Worse than every single sword fight in Kill Bill! Worse than the fights in Mortal Kombat! Worse than the Flash Kick scene in Street Fighter! Worse than the even more stupid Flash Kick scene in Alone In The Dark! Why? Why is it so terrible? You wanna know why, sucker?
I have a question for you: WHY. THE. FUCK. IS. THERE. A. GOD. DAMN. POMMEL. HORSE. THERE.
Moses. Thoughts?
Yeah.
I'll be back in a minute. I need to calm the fuck down.
...
Nnnnngh... Okay, so this film is nearly over which is good because... WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A POMMEL HORSE THERE?
This scene is really hard to describe. Basically, Cabot sprints into this courtyard, and there's this... random piece of fucking gymnastics equipment just sitting there, like it belongs, like it makes any sense whatsoever that this thing is there. Up until now, Cabot has basically been doing karate with unnecessary flips and handsprings. In one scene he made use of an overhead pole in a really retarded fashion to kick some guys in the face, including a hapless guy on a bicycle. Every now and then he launches himself off a wall or something. But now there is this goddamn pommel horse in the middle of Albert Fish Memorial Park, and there is absolutely no reason for its existence. It's just there.
Kurt Thomas was a hell of an athlete at the time this so-called movie was made. He took home two gold, three silver and a bronze from the the 1979 games, including a silver for pommel horse. He is extremely good at spinning legs around like a goddamn dervish on this device, which exists in this film for no other reason than to play to this retarded "gymkata" concept.
However.
Watching a man whizz around flailing his legs on a pommel horse while hordes of howling, armed madmen RUN RIGHT INTO HIS FEET SO THEY CAN BE KICKED THE FUCK OUT has been one of the most painfully stupid movie moments of my life. There are about 60 lunatics in this scene, most of whom brandish European-style scythes which are mounted on ten foot wooden poles. There are also pitchforks, huge butcher's knives and sickles present. Not only that but there is a HORDE of these guys. Yet we are forced to watch a scene in which they repeatedly charge one at a time, unarmed, towards Cabot to be kicked in the face with cheesy martial arts movie sound effects, which sound like a foley artist smacking a wall with a ping pong paddle. In fact, they probably are just that exactly.
Not only that, but even someone with the observational abilities of a five year old child who regularly derives most of his daily nutrition from sucking on things he picks out of his shoe treads will realize that he beats up the same four or five guys over and over in this scene before they finally send in new dudes. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME.
Sometimes when Cabot kicks someone, his leg makes a jet-propelled whooshing noise, and that goddamn KERTHUD noise comes back, this time when someone falls all of five feet. Cabot smacks some people with a huge stick he takes from a lunatic (which makes the same noises his legs do) and manages to knock down like 20 or so with one swing before bailing (which requires an unnecessary fucking backflip) and fleeing from the safety of his pommel horse before he can be overwhelmed and tickled by the poorly-understood troop of howler monkeys.
Just to make sure we can't forget what stupid fucking era this was filmed in, as the horde pursues Cabot and begins to close in on him, they resort to a moderate slow motion speed, with the sound echoing over and over itself with high pitched distortion. A side effect of this is that some of the insane villagers actually bark like seals as they close in, and one just makes a "WHHEEEE-URRRRRRR-URRRRRRR-URRRRRR!" noise as he gracefully flails down the street with a meat cleaver. I made a similar noise while watching this scene.
Then the lunatics release a couple of dogs who are super excited to be in this film. You see, dogs, being essentially genial retards, are rarely aware that they are in an excruciatingly long bout of celluloid diarrhea. This running scene goes on a really really long time, too.
Finally, Cabot darts down a side alley (he looks REALLY funny running in slow motion) and performs a chimney ascension up the very narrow end. Then we get to watch him climb agonizingly in SLO MO while he makes noises a bit like a girl trying to poop a watermelon. The meteor still has not come at this point.
Then he tries to pull the bars out of a window while the crowd continues to make distorted echoing noises. Now Cabot kind of sounds like a girl engaged in a completely different activity than pooping. I hate this movie.
Cabot makes a stupid face at the camera a bit like a sucker fish as a Parmistani ninja approaches with INCREDIBLY LOUD footsteps, like a man stomping on cobble stones in hard-soled dress shoes. His shoes don't look like they have hard soles, but the only sound effects in this scene are the muted echoes of the distort-o-riot, Cabot's feminine wheezing and his CLIP. CLOP. CLOP. footsteps.
The ninja helps Cabot on to the roof. But why would one of Zamir's ninjas help Cabot? Can you guess?
"Dad! MY GOD."
Yeah, I know, you're fucking shocked. I was too. Okay not really. We cut from their escape from HELLVILLE to Rubali (remember her?) trying to convince her jovial toolbox of a father that Zamir is shadier than the Mirkwood. He doesn't buy it but we're already aware that he's mentally on par with toast, so I prefer to spend this scene admiring Rubali's really fucking awesome red dress. It's sort of a cheongsam as I mentioned before but the long skirt of it flares out a bit. I'm a bit jealous of it, really.
Now, I'm sure a lot of you would have been spending this scene wondering how the fuck Colonel Clenched Teeth managed to survive an arrow in the fucking long and a 500 foot plunge into a rocky ravine. If this sort of thing would bother you, congratulations. You've got better genes that the shitpies who made this blister.
After pointing out to Papa Dirtbrain, Kong of All Parmistan, that he let Zamir build a personal army of ninjas right under his nose, she announces that the American is their only hope (All together now: Nnnnnngh.) and promptly whips off her bright red dress to reveal a sparkly black cat suit underneath. This is about the most interesting thing in the entire movie, I assure you, and Rubali is only modestly hot. (She's better looking than Cabot, anyway.)
I've seen fucking Westerns with fewer scenes of bad guys on horseback, but we get to see Zamir trooping uselessly across the countryside some more, because we'd nearly forgotten the plot of the damn film with that disturbing sidetrip into the stupid/insane.
Daddy-o explains that some trees (there aren't any in the ravine that I can recall) broke his fall and left him with a useless arm. He was going to be used as diplomatic bait (whatever that means) but he escaped and no one cares.
Cabot embraces his father as Zamir and his ninjas lurk ever closer. Cabot says "I REALLY MISSED YOU DAD YOU'LL NEVERR REALLY KNOW" in a really strange, tooth-clenched way. Maybe manly hugs freak him out?
Usually the nice thing about Zamir is that you can basically count on him to say or do something stupid in every scene he's in. However, in this case, he is nice enough to shoot Dad in the back with a fucking arrow. Like right in the goddamn spine. "Win, Janny." Stop clenching your teeth, you old fucker. With that he basically expires in Cabot's arms. (Spoiler: NO HE FUCKING DOESN'T. HE SOMEHOW SURVIVES THIS TOO.)
Cabot runs down a ninja on foot, does another one of his trademark needless stunts - a triple axle jump in this case - and beats the shit out of him, and horsejacks his ride. Super, now he's got legs! Zamir announces that this is it, and takes off in pursuit with his ninjas. This movie never ends. We have to sit through a riveting (not really) horseback chase scene. Cabot jumps a ditch with his horse, Zamir encourages his fools to do the same but they are too chicken to do so, leaving the gripping flight to Cabot and Zamir.
Cabot's horse makes a piggy snorting noise, I presume because he pulled on the reins too hard. But what do I know from horses? Zamir and Cabot both get off their steeds and proceed to have a terrible fight. It starts out being Zamir wielding a shamsir (which is a lot like a scimitar) and Cabot wielding, um, a stick. This part ends with Cabot on the ground sans stick, at which point Zamir says "Die, you bezturd!" and throws his sword at the prone gymnast/ninja. He misses Cabot's head by about six inches because Zamir is an idiot.
I don't know a lot about physics, but I suspect that if you throw a heavily curved sword at a man's head who is lying on the ground and miss, the sword will not fly like a lawn dart and stick flawlessly upright in the earth.
Cabot attempts to pull the sword free from his prone position, but demonstrates that he is worthless instead. So they stand up to have a little kung fu versus gymkata fight. Much of this fight (which has the same goddamn stupid Conan music playing as has been for the last half hour) consists of Cabot getting the taste slapped out of his mouth and other parts of his anatomy. And then running away. He does this so often I am no longer surprised. In this case, he's probably looking for some convenient piece of improvised gymnastics equipment since he has the worst fighting style in the world.
Instead, however, when he realizes that he can't get away from Zamir, Cabot begins to kick the shit out of him with a series of cartwheels, handsprings and flying leaps. Kurt won most of his gold medals in floor routine, in case you were wondering. Then he abruptly leapfrogs on to Zamir's shoulders and drags them both to the ground with that goddamn. fucking. Wile. E. Coyote. fucking. thud.
Then after some homoerotic flailing, Zamir's neck does the twist and a fucking tool of a villain departs the screen. Whoo hoo.
Then we cut to the Princess and Cod/King/Kong/Kahn/Shah/Headtard as they flee down the stairs. Rubali says "Get out of my way" to an approaching ninja, then immediately applies her foot to his grubhole. This is pretty sound tactics. Apparently someone let Lord Hobo Hat have a fucking sword, which is... less sound to my way of thinking, but he does okay. Then he bursts out of the palace to find a milling crowd of his inbred asshole subjects. He yells at them in his usual fashion and they subdue the ninjas who are also milling around for no reason.
Then the whole crowd, including Rubali and the Kong but not including the ninjas, runs off to cheer enthusiastically as two horses approach. That's right, two, because in case you're not paying attention, Colonel Teethspeak is still fucking alive somehow. I hate the triumphant music in this scene almost as much as the overly dramatic Watching Gymnastics theme from the beginning of the movie.
We get a snapshot of Rubali and Cabot on their horse as he approaches the finish line, with a text blurb telling us that he didn't wish for the girl, or whatever, he wished for the fucking stupid Star Wars installation which apparently did not exist. Schrodinger's Satellite Station.
This is followed by a final look at Cabot on the parallel bars, and the movie informs us it was based on the novel "THE TERRIBLE GAME" by DAN TYLER MOORE. I imagine "loosely" based, or else Moore is a fucking asshole too. And... that's it? What.
The Events, Characters, And Firms Depicted In This Photoplay Are Fictitious. Any Similarity To Actual Persons, Living Or Dead, Or To Actual Events Or Firms, Is Purely Coincidental, And You'd Have To Be Seriously High Or Badly Brain-Damaged Not To Work That Out On Your Own.
AGHGHGHLOAHGOSGHOIAOGHAKLHG!
I will never watch this movie again. I will, God willing, not think about it for at least twelve hours. This movie is so unrelentingly mediocre that it makes my BALLS CLENCH every time I see it. That fucking pommel horse haunts my dreams.
I hate most of the universe right now.
Ugh.
Next film up? Probably EQUALIZER 2000. Probably.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
fuck YOU, gymkata.
The faster you read this review, the fewer times you will lose the game while reading it. "The Game" is a semi-central plot point in this flick and it's going to come up repeatedly, so just become accustomed to this fact.
When I last stumbled away from this wretched film to find enough beer and Excedrin Migraine to begin the process of coping, our jerkass hero was listening to the Kong of Parmistan say that he would like to do things, such as announce his daughter's wedding to that dickhead Zamir and welcome people to his merry medieval country of deformed psychotics. It occurred to me that I wouldn't trust this pinwheeling pinhead Cabot to properly phrase his one wish. I mean, a satellite installation in Parmistan may or may not kill nations or save millions, but assuming that it doesn't yet exist, we'd have to build the damn thing and bring in highly trained technicians to run it. People who would not, on average, stand a chance in hell of surviving the idiotic immigration procedures of Parmistan...
Anyway, having told Cabot that his father, Colonel Clencher, was a great athlete who should have been a winner but wasn't, the Khan gets everyone to applaud and wish Cabot great fortune. This is slightly morbid. Mostly I just hate this movie.
After this rousing ovation, Cabot begins asking about the village of the damned. What I really want to know is what, precisely, makes these "criminally insane" any different from the other assholes in this country. I mean, their national sport is killing people in a footrace. When your national pastime is, say, baseball, then it's easy to spot the criminally insane - they are the ones who go to baseball games with the express purpose of beating someone to death with a giant novelty foam finger which they have cunningly reinforced with steel. When your national pastime is stuffing firecrackers into the urethra of visiting foreign nationals, it is harder to tell that the guy who occasionally hollows out children to wear as sombreros that protect him from mind control is having some serious problems. It might be that they are cannibals. As a species, we can handle nationally funded death sports a lot better than we can eating long pig.
One of the other competitors says something that sounds like "First step in a turkey farm, huh?" to Cabot. I have no idea what the fuck he could possibly mean by that, and then a guy who I think has his voice dubbed in tries to intimidate Cabot by taking a huge wet munch out of an apple. I might have mentioned that this is a really fucking weak way to throw up 'bows, but it bears repeating.
The wedding is announced in a way that makes no sense - why does the Kong stand up and flap his cake hole at random intervals like that? - and it is clear that the Princess is not thrilled by the prospect of spending the rest of her life supplying eggs for Zamir to fertilize, as she refuses to hold his hand. She probably has developed some sort of emotional attachment to Cabot, since they fucked for no reason, he puts up with her ambush knifeplay fetish, and they have nearly been killed at approximately the same time on more than once occasion.
It's remarkable how, if you mentally replace the Ye Olde Renn Faire goblets the crowd holds and jumps up and down with Solo cups of Bud, the celebrating natives look a tremendous amount like the crowd at a Toby Keith concert, minus the cowboy hats. Huh.
At this point, a stupid looking but quite large white man in a dragon-emblazoned Asian Gift Shop robe and giant crimson headband enters, accompanied by a determinedly unattractive woman in a pink kimono type thing. Hindu Kushites, being neither Hindus nor Kushites, think this look is the bee's motherfuckin' knees, apparently. At first, he actually looks like Dane Cook with a mullet and a blank expression as he wades through the Ape House princess-waving at the crowd. My immediate assumption was that either this guy won the Game previously, or else he was the court magician.
Slim isn't the court magician, and I don't think he won the Game. He's somebody that Cabot admires and/or knows personally, since he has followed him since Munich (I think that's what he said, the crowd very realistically drowns out a lot of the dialog) and while his name sounds like either Borg, Board, or Gourd, I'm pretty sure it's Thorg. Dealer's choice though. He also kind of looks like Toby Keith. For some reason he has a big metal triangle on his bandanna.
Zamir (who is one seriously dopey looking son of a bitch, by the way, and he has one of those fucking Young Obi-wan Rat-tails) is getting annoyed at Cabot and Rubali very obviously making eyes at each other throughout the party up until this point. To make his feelings clear in the stupidest way possible, he strips off his robe, whips out a pair of sai (they are these Japanese pronged knife things, the Ninja Turtle Raphael used them) and begins twirling them around with that annoying fucking WHOOSH WHOOSH WHISH WHOOSH noise that the kama made earlier. Then he throws them at Cabot, who doesn't flinch (the film does though, there's a little jump when the sai suddenly strike the wall next to his head) - even if I were a bad ass recently-minted gymnastics-ninja, I'd flinch at this. Sai are not especially aerodynamic and aren't very well balanced for throwing. I'd be concerned that one might tumble and stick in my forehead rather than very improbably sticking into the wall mere centimeters apart from each other.
Thorg puts his hands together and bows, or else was saying grace over his food. Zamir saunters over to tug his pointy things out of the wall and tries to flex menacingly.
"You must understand... she's mine."
Cabot comes back with "It's not over yet, so put your hardware back in your pants." While this is not a weak comeback comparatively, I'm just not sure why they're grunting and flexing over a girl who could probably kick both their asses as long as the plot lets her do so.
Later, that bug-eyed abomination Mannish Thing prances into Cabot's room with disturbing enthusiasm - the sort that usually denotes "Imma get me some!" - only to be taken hostage by Cabot with A Huge Fucking Knife. Cabot demands from the comically overacting Thing that he be taken to Princesh Rubaleh. I think he was clenching his teeth and that's why he sounds drunk, since he was sipping at his wine like a pussy earlier and couldn't possibly be drunk yet. I guess this habit runs in the family.
With Mannish Thing as a hostage, Cabot noisily avoids roaming Parm ninjas (I don't know what you call someone from Parmistan. A person from Afghanistan is called an Afghan. A person from Pakistan is called a Pakistani. A person from Uzbekistan is called a Russian. Who knows!) until he reaches Rubali's room. At this point, he thrusts A Huge Fucking Knife into Thing's face and tells her (I am thinking it's a she but can't be sure) not to be afraid and to tell the Princess to meet him in the garden.
I might not have mentioned it before, but Mannish Thing has no tongue and cannot fucking speak. Why he dragged the poor demented hideous creature through the whole fucking castle at knife point, only to hand mute Thing the shank with a message to pass on to Rubali is completely fucking beyond me. Why didn't he just fucking tell Thing to tell the Princess to meet him? Oh wait. I know why.
Because he's a goddamn simpleton.
By the way, in his sneaky black costume and with his just-shy-of-mullet hairdo, Cabot looks like a second-string Luke Skywalker. Just an observation.
Rubali meets her hero in her stealthiest bright fucking white night gown and explains it is a political marriage and also a traditional one, and the Kong is already having trouble enough without breaking tradition to let her marry a complete outsider because he hasn't been punishing The Twenties, who are young people who want Permistan to join the 20th Century. If you lived in a 10th World Country that was permanently stuck in the 10th Century, you would want this as well. If your last major scientific and cultural advances (outside of importing fucking NINJAS) was around the same time reindeer became extinct in fucking Scotland, you would be hankering for a change too.
She also notes that Zamir is the leader of the faction trying to overthrow Dipshithis Khan, Kong of Parmistan, and that this part of a diabolic scheme that blah blah blah boring. I fast forwarded a bit here. I ain't gonna lie. (The Kong is going to try and bring his wretched piece of shit mountain nation into the modern world by combining the "best of the old and the new." Since the old consists of murdering people in The Game, squalor, inbreeding and psychosis I am not sure what the exact ratio of old:new is going to be here.)
When Helmet Ninjas (some of the ninjas wear red helmets over their ninja masks with stupid plumes on them) pursue Rubali who has forgotten how not to run like a fucking girl with her arms out, Cabot somehow kicks their asses by doing a series of backflips right into them which knocks both down. Somehow. I hate gymkata.
Our next scene dawns at dawn, with a bunch of guys playing some horns badly out of key. This is very exciting. The contestants for The Game line up at the starting line: some middle-aged guys in track suits, Cabot in his ninja turtleneck, and Thorg. Thorg is wearing his silly fucking bandanna, a baby blue sweater vest, and tinfoil bracers. The tinfoil bracers are a particular favorite of mine.
We get more closeups of the dog ugly bastard children of Parmistan who are just fucking DELIGHTED to see some more foreigners get their stupid asses killed with arrows. I bet not a single native has willingly taken part in this contest, other than the ninjas and sodden piles of jerk-ass such as Zamir. No makeup was used to make these people hideous - the missing teeth, gaping gums, mismatched eye sizes and other deformities and malaise are au naturale. That is dedication to realism right there. Also, this movie is very terrible.
Rubali shows up in a bright red cheongsam because this fucking movie does not know where the Hindu Kush or Indonesia are either, and suspects they are somewhere between Russia and China.
YATMAH!
On second thought the national cheer may be pronounced YAH-PAH! but I don't actually care so it shall remain YATMAH! in my mind. The Royal Retard makes another long stupid speech about tradition and shit. I noticed that with the exception of Cabot and Thorg - what the fuck kind of name is Thorg anyway? - the various contestants are dressed as though this were a normal cross-country run and not ritualized mass murder.
The Kong talks. They cheer. This film seems to go on long enough for a brief glimpse into what Eternal Damnation looks like.
Zamir threatens Cabot some more, who ignores him about as much as I do. Then the race rather abruptly begins. And what does our brave hero do? He promptly gets knocked over and kicked in the fucking chewer by another contestant. Ha ha, man. That's what you get for wearing fucking white pants. Douche.
Zamir ignores the Khan yelling about rules and shit and rides off in pursuit with his silent, faceless, easily recycled minions. That's why people loved using ninjas in shitty action movies. It's not because they're cool or threatening in any way. It's because you could have a cast of thousands of bad guys by only hiring about six to ten guys and putting them in identical ninja costumes. Some of them have shields and scimitars too, which are traditional weapons in nearby Pakistan and Afghanistan (in case you actually wanted to know where the fuck the Hindu Kush is) as are the sai, naginata and whatever other weapons were on sale that week at Ninja Hut.
Incidentally, if you put a pointy hat on a ninja and put him on a horse, he looks like a member of the KKK only in black, hence that bit about Klan ninjas before.
It's fun watching the various ninjas and Zamir chase Cabot through that goddamn cornfield because the horses keep running into each other and looking mighty cheesed about it, and they make as much fucking noise as possible to ensure they could not possibly sneak up on him. By fun I mean "annoying" and by annoying I mean "engendering incandescent fury."
By the way, Cabot looks REALLY silly shimmying up a rope because he holds his legs splayed and stiff on either side of the rope, so it looks like he is rubbing his crotch up the line as he scrambles up with just his arms.
The Informative Contestant from before is the first to die, catching two arrows directly in his kidneys and then falling to his death with yet another really stupid sounding scream, followed by the return of the foley artist's Looney Tunes Impact Sound. Magical.
Cabot takes 6 million forevers to climb the stupid fucking rope, but rather than just arrow him to death as well, they decide to burn the rope with a torch under him. What the fuck sense does this make? Look, rope doesn't even burn all that well unless it's hemp, which this isn't, or else it's soaked in oil. I imagine that even Cabot would notice he was about to start climbing up a giant lamp wick. Anyway, you can guess how successful this stupid fucking plan is. This is but the first of Zamir's highly moronic attempts to kill his rival for Rubali over the course of this abominable, excruciating exercise in '80s cheese. Cabot continues to pause every so many feet and look down at the fire's progress. There's another rope about two feet away. I'm not sure why he doesn't just change ropes, since Zamir is clearly too retarded to have him shot. Zamir has the nerve to act pissed off when his plan to slowly catch a rope on fire while Cabot climbs away is foiled by Cabot climbing away. Well, doieeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Another contestant dies from an overdose of spear after Cabot tries in vain to get the judges to smite Zamir for cheating. WHO DO YOU THINK THESE NINJAS ARE LOYAL TO, YOU IDIOT.
Yet another contestant dies because when he follows the others across the gorge on the ropes (the ones where the Colonel (Spoiler: didn't) die) he arrives just in time to get hit in the face with an axe, although it doesn't actually injury him in any way, and he plummets to his demise. The sound effect guys love making falling bodies sound like they're made of stone when they land on any surface harder than gelatin.
Naturally, when Zamir catches up, rather than shoot arrows at the suspended Cabot, he taunts him by wiggling the rope and then chopping it short with a gigantic two-handed falchion type sword. This is basically because Zamir's overwhelming character trait is being a dick.
I need another break, my right eye won't stop twitching violently.
...
Back, unfortunately.
Zamir's brilliant plan to dump Cabot into the grotto is foiled because he actually waited until our hero was very nearly to the other side before chopping the rope. This has the actual effect of causing Cabot to fall about a foot before he just climbs right the fuck back up and flees. Zamir is basically the second biggest idiot in this movie. Cabot punts the lurking ambusher on the other side into the grotto and slowly flees.
The next contestant to die, a Chinese guy I call Orange Pajamas, dies when his martial arts prove useless against the murderous Thorg and his Scandinavian kung fu, also known as "I'm Huge." He is strangled to death with Thorg's belt (he keeps breathing afterwards. Sigh.) and the judge does not seem to care. Thorg continues on his way. No one has explained his stupid bandanna yet nor the significance of the little metal triangle on it.
Thorg confronts Cabot next and there is a tussle. Cabot uses his honed ability to hear only axe cutting air (how the fuck should I know what Japanese-san meant by that shit?) to dodge an arrow from behind and let it hit Thorg instead. Leaving the strong man to lie around thinking about what he did, Cabot takes the lead. Or does he?
Somehow, Zamir and his Ninja Archer Brigade has gotten ahead. Zamir has trained his ninjas to mass fire their bows when he snaps, which is stupid. What is worse is how Cabot dodges the arrows.
Being a tiny guy, he darts behind a really skinny tree, one of three standing next to each other in a rough triangle. In the next instant, the ninja missiles hit. However, about five of them hit within a 1" circle behind the tree he is using for cover. The rest hit the tree next to it, and only two hit the tree in the back, nowhere near Cabot's former position. In other words, none of these arrows would have hit Cabot even if he'd just stood there, since all of the ninjas were aiming at the trees anyway.
Cabot flees, then stops short of a ninja judge and yells "GOONIES!" or, more likely, "GOMEZ!" I don't fucking know why either - apparently one of the other contestants is named Gomez. Then he looks around, and says to the blue-eyed ninja (NNNNGH) "Here we are. Cuckoo's nest, eh? Yeah. Don't waste your breath." and takes off. The ninja doesn't say anything. (Spoiler: It's his fucking dad.)
It occurs to me that either everyone in this film speaks the native language, or nearly every speaking character in Permistan is at least passably skilled in English...
Zamir notes that Cabot will never get out of the village of the crazies alive in his annoyingly nasal voice. He's wrong, of course, but then again, he's also a fucking idiot.
The village of the criminally insane is my favorite part of the movie because it is, in fact, insane and completely changes the tone of the show for the entire section, from retarded action blockbuster to schlock horror b-movie. At least... for a little while.
The first thing that is notable about this village is that as one approaches, animals begin making very weird noises. Either that or the soundtrack gets really fucked up here; there are several warped-sounding jackal barks and then suddenly a deep voiced "WUUUUUB!" noise out of nowhere as the camera stares down a narrow alley in Crazytown. A falling portcullis locks Cabot in Hannibal Heights, and so he is forced to proceed ever deeper into the fog.
He discovers a lone white goat and a well. Things look pretty quiet for now in the village. Annnnnnd then the fucking crazies come out to play. Fuck.
It begins with a weirdly modulated female wail, and then we get a close up of a guy who looks like most Permistan characters: a toothless ugly coot, except this one is cackling incoherently at nothing in particular. I suspect this is a cameo by Charles Robert Carner.
An old man in a hat sharpens a scythe but doesn't really react initially to Cabot's presence other than to glance at him. The soundtrack presents us with the Kooksville leitmotif: warbling voices, owl hoots and "menacing" synthesizer noodling. This music is especially awful.
Cabot finds it necessary to go fuck with a door that swings shut by itself (with a cartoonish CREAAAAAAAAAAAAAK WHAM!) and narrowly avoids being impaled by a bed o' nails that swings down from above. Clever bastards: they knew he is a twat.
The soundtrack adds in weird rattling growls and ghostly cackling noises. Spooooooooky.
Cabot is suddenly ambushed by a man who makes distressed, high pitched, squealing noises and wields a sickle. He sounds like he is passing a kidney stone, and Cabot manages to shove him against the wall where he clamps his hand on a drain pipe.
Then he cuts his own fucking hand off. His severed appendage continues to hang out there on the pipe, bleeding, while the freak whines off. I can only assume that he had Gorilla Glue on his hand, and being criminally retarded, that was the only way he could think to resolve this dilemma. That, or this movie is severely stupid.
Cabot comes upon a dog who is lapping from a pool of blood (okay, he's lapping from a point slightly to the side of the pool of blood) with incredibly loud sound effects. He looks (SLURP SLURP SLURP) up to find the missing contestant (SLURP SLURP SLURP) from earlier nailed to (SLURP SLURP SLURP) a wall with various bits of hardware (SLURP SLURP SLURP) sticking out of his corpse. Cabot whispers "Gomez" (SLURP SLURP SLURP) in a sad voice, and there is a close up of the large (SLURP SLURP SLURP) pitchfork sticking out of Gomez's general face region. Um. I don't know why any of us should care about Gomez. (SLURP SLURP SLURP)
A quartet of whining/humming women in monk outfits emerges and try to rape Cabot or something. While he tries to fend them off without using gymkata, I silently plead for a freak meteorite to hit my bedroom.
One pulls out a knife but forgets which end you should hit a hero with, and then he promptly punches or elbows all of them in the face. They stand in the alley sobbing. I wish he'd fucking kill more people in this movie. Nobody would bitchfiddle Rambo or Conan like that.
Of course, when a dude in one of these birdshit-stained robes pounces upon Cabot from above, our hero beats the everlovin' shit out of him rather than just tapping him once and leaving him blubbering. (Spoiler: FUCK THIS MOVIE.)
Two more psychos jump him, but one accidentally kills the other by not looking where he scythes and then gets his daily recommended dose of beat down from Cabot. A hideous frog-troll-woman looks on from above.
Cabot opens a random door and finds behind it his prize: a bloodied, stumbling, bandanna-less Thorg! Seeing a man soaked in blood who can barely stand, Cabot flees like the five foot five inch game hen he fucking is.
I need another break and maybe some hard liquor.
...
I am so glad this fucker is nearly through!
Cabot overcomes a couple more random crazies, although he doesn't throw anything at the one who yodels at him like a low rent U2 cover band from a second story window. I would've chucked a pitchfork at that fucker for certain.
Of particular note is a genuinely creepy looking... thing... of indeterminate gender who hangs out a window making disturbing ass cawing noises at Cabot. I hate this creepshow motherfucker so much, and I've seen him six fucking times now. Five alone for this commentary. I hope she died of something truly tremendous, such as a thirty-two ounce stone in one of his organs, or somehow shit her own lower intestine in a freak medical incident.
Another actually fucking creepy denizen of this fucked up little suburb of Hell appears when a mysterious white robed figure beckons Cabot towards what he is stupid enough to think is safety. The camera zooms in on the eerily stiff, misshapen figures of a guy in the background, who turns around to reveal a deathly pale, sunken-eyed freak on the other side of his head, who is apparently wearing a manfacehat. Fffuuuuuck.
When White Robe turns around, he reveals that he is wearing nothing under his white robes. I know this because the entire back of his robe is cut out from below his shoulders to his ankles, which means he turns to open the door and displays his man-ass for the world to see. I'm gonna need a second. ...Nnnnngh.
White Robe's nethercheeks aren't enough to distract Cabot for long, and he gymkatas Manfacehat to unconsciousness or possibly death for trying to stab him with a spear. Our hero then wisely decides not to follow the guy with his buns in the breeze into his Den of Rape and takes off in the opposite direction.
He is attacked again, and flees again, from the wounded THORG. A group of mewling mongoloids stumbling forward with pitchforks forces Cabot to hide in a pig pen which is one of the top five least safe places to be. He is followed by the bleeding Thorg (yes, a man with significant injuries is cruising through pigs, I know, I said the movie was stupid) who gets kicked into the pigs (no, they don't eat him) because he can't stop fucking with Cabot even when flight would be 1000% more intelligent a course. I desperately, desperately, desperately hate the sound of pigs squealing. I really do. I devour pork products because it means one less fucking screeching pig in the world.
The pitchfork platoon makes cheese-less fondue of Thorg. No one will miss this asshole. Oh, and one of the pigs immediately starts noshing on his corpse. Delightful.
I assume the second story babbler (no not the one I want dead, the other one) is somehow directing the mobs that pursue Cabot through the village. If the rest of the film were a little more like this part (well, minus the stupid and the gymkata) this film would have been slightly more interesting, but give it a moment.
We hear more of the local crazy moon talk as they chase Cabot. This part takes a while.
The villagers of the damned chase Cabot into a courtyard. What follows is... *deep breath*
THE STUPIDEST FUCKING "MARTIAL ARTS" FIGHT OF ALL FUCKING TIME.
Worse than every single sword fight in Kill Bill! Worse than the fights in Mortal Kombat! Worse than the Flash Kick scene in Street Fighter! Worse than the even more stupid Flash Kick scene in Alone In The Dark! Why? Why is it so terrible? You wanna know why, sucker?
I have a question for you: WHY. THE. FUCK. IS. THERE. A. GOD. DAMN. POMMEL. HORSE. THERE.
Moses. Thoughts?
Yeah.
I'll be back in a minute. I need to calm the fuck down.
...
Nnnnngh... Okay, so this film is nearly over which is good because... WHY THE FUCK IS THERE A POMMEL HORSE THERE?
This scene is really hard to describe. Basically, Cabot sprints into this courtyard, and there's this... random piece of fucking gymnastics equipment just sitting there, like it belongs, like it makes any sense whatsoever that this thing is there. Up until now, Cabot has basically been doing karate with unnecessary flips and handsprings. In one scene he made use of an overhead pole in a really retarded fashion to kick some guys in the face, including a hapless guy on a bicycle. Every now and then he launches himself off a wall or something. But now there is this goddamn pommel horse in the middle of Albert Fish Memorial Park, and there is absolutely no reason for its existence. It's just there.
Kurt Thomas was a hell of an athlete at the time this so-called movie was made. He took home two gold, three silver and a bronze from the the 1979 games, including a silver for pommel horse. He is extremely good at spinning legs around like a goddamn dervish on this device, which exists in this film for no other reason than to play to this retarded "gymkata" concept.
However.
Watching a man whizz around flailing his legs on a pommel horse while hordes of howling, armed madmen RUN RIGHT INTO HIS FEET SO THEY CAN BE KICKED THE FUCK OUT has been one of the most painfully stupid movie moments of my life. There are about 60 lunatics in this scene, most of whom brandish European-style scythes which are mounted on ten foot wooden poles. There are also pitchforks, huge butcher's knives and sickles present. Not only that but there is a HORDE of these guys. Yet we are forced to watch a scene in which they repeatedly charge one at a time, unarmed, towards Cabot to be kicked in the face with cheesy martial arts movie sound effects, which sound like a foley artist smacking a wall with a ping pong paddle. In fact, they probably are just that exactly.
Not only that, but even someone with the observational abilities of a five year old child who regularly derives most of his daily nutrition from sucking on things he picks out of his shoe treads will realize that he beats up the same four or five guys over and over in this scene before they finally send in new dudes. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME.
Sometimes when Cabot kicks someone, his leg makes a jet-propelled whooshing noise, and that goddamn KERTHUD noise comes back, this time when someone falls all of five feet. Cabot smacks some people with a huge stick he takes from a lunatic (which makes the same noises his legs do) and manages to knock down like 20 or so with one swing before bailing (which requires an unnecessary fucking backflip) and fleeing from the safety of his pommel horse before he can be overwhelmed and tickled by the poorly-understood troop of howler monkeys.
Just to make sure we can't forget what stupid fucking era this was filmed in, as the horde pursues Cabot and begins to close in on him, they resort to a moderate slow motion speed, with the sound echoing over and over itself with high pitched distortion. A side effect of this is that some of the insane villagers actually bark like seals as they close in, and one just makes a "WHHEEEE-URRRRRRR-URRRRRRR-URRRRRR!" noise as he gracefully flails down the street with a meat cleaver. I made a similar noise while watching this scene.
Then the lunatics release a couple of dogs who are super excited to be in this film. You see, dogs, being essentially genial retards, are rarely aware that they are in an excruciatingly long bout of celluloid diarrhea. This running scene goes on a really really long time, too.
Finally, Cabot darts down a side alley (he looks REALLY funny running in slow motion) and performs a chimney ascension up the very narrow end. Then we get to watch him climb agonizingly in SLO MO while he makes noises a bit like a girl trying to poop a watermelon. The meteor still has not come at this point.
Then he tries to pull the bars out of a window while the crowd continues to make distorted echoing noises. Now Cabot kind of sounds like a girl engaged in a completely different activity than pooping. I hate this movie.
Cabot makes a stupid face at the camera a bit like a sucker fish as a Parmistani ninja approaches with INCREDIBLY LOUD footsteps, like a man stomping on cobble stones in hard-soled dress shoes. His shoes don't look like they have hard soles, but the only sound effects in this scene are the muted echoes of the distort-o-riot, Cabot's feminine wheezing and his CLIP. CLOP. CLOP. footsteps.
The ninja helps Cabot on to the roof. But why would one of Zamir's ninjas help Cabot? Can you guess?
"Dad! MY GOD."
Yeah, I know, you're fucking shocked. I was too. Okay not really. We cut from their escape from HELLVILLE to Rubali (remember her?) trying to convince her jovial toolbox of a father that Zamir is shadier than the Mirkwood. He doesn't buy it but we're already aware that he's mentally on par with toast, so I prefer to spend this scene admiring Rubali's really fucking awesome red dress. It's sort of a cheongsam as I mentioned before but the long skirt of it flares out a bit. I'm a bit jealous of it, really.
Now, I'm sure a lot of you would have been spending this scene wondering how the fuck Colonel Clenched Teeth managed to survive an arrow in the fucking long and a 500 foot plunge into a rocky ravine. If this sort of thing would bother you, congratulations. You've got better genes that the shitpies who made this blister.
After pointing out to Papa Dirtbrain, Kong of All Parmistan, that he let Zamir build a personal army of ninjas right under his nose, she announces that the American is their only hope (All together now: Nnnnnngh.) and promptly whips off her bright red dress to reveal a sparkly black cat suit underneath. This is about the most interesting thing in the entire movie, I assure you, and Rubali is only modestly hot. (She's better looking than Cabot, anyway.)
I've seen fucking Westerns with fewer scenes of bad guys on horseback, but we get to see Zamir trooping uselessly across the countryside some more, because we'd nearly forgotten the plot of the damn film with that disturbing sidetrip into the stupid/insane.
Daddy-o explains that some trees (there aren't any in the ravine that I can recall) broke his fall and left him with a useless arm. He was going to be used as diplomatic bait (whatever that means) but he escaped and no one cares.
Cabot embraces his father as Zamir and his ninjas lurk ever closer. Cabot says "I REALLY MISSED YOU DAD YOU'LL NEVERR REALLY KNOW" in a really strange, tooth-clenched way. Maybe manly hugs freak him out?
Usually the nice thing about Zamir is that you can basically count on him to say or do something stupid in every scene he's in. However, in this case, he is nice enough to shoot Dad in the back with a fucking arrow. Like right in the goddamn spine. "Win, Janny." Stop clenching your teeth, you old fucker. With that he basically expires in Cabot's arms. (Spoiler: NO HE FUCKING DOESN'T. HE SOMEHOW SURVIVES THIS TOO.)
Cabot runs down a ninja on foot, does another one of his trademark needless stunts - a triple axle jump in this case - and beats the shit out of him, and horsejacks his ride. Super, now he's got legs! Zamir announces that this is it, and takes off in pursuit with his ninjas. This movie never ends. We have to sit through a riveting (not really) horseback chase scene. Cabot jumps a ditch with his horse, Zamir encourages his fools to do the same but they are too chicken to do so, leaving the gripping flight to Cabot and Zamir.
Cabot's horse makes a piggy snorting noise, I presume because he pulled on the reins too hard. But what do I know from horses? Zamir and Cabot both get off their steeds and proceed to have a terrible fight. It starts out being Zamir wielding a shamsir (which is a lot like a scimitar) and Cabot wielding, um, a stick. This part ends with Cabot on the ground sans stick, at which point Zamir says "Die, you bezturd!" and throws his sword at the prone gymnast/ninja. He misses Cabot's head by about six inches because Zamir is an idiot.
I don't know a lot about physics, but I suspect that if you throw a heavily curved sword at a man's head who is lying on the ground and miss, the sword will not fly like a lawn dart and stick flawlessly upright in the earth.
Cabot attempts to pull the sword free from his prone position, but demonstrates that he is worthless instead. So they stand up to have a little kung fu versus gymkata fight. Much of this fight (which has the same goddamn stupid Conan music playing as has been for the last half hour) consists of Cabot getting the taste slapped out of his mouth and other parts of his anatomy. And then running away. He does this so often I am no longer surprised. In this case, he's probably looking for some convenient piece of improvised gymnastics equipment since he has the worst fighting style in the world.
Instead, however, when he realizes that he can't get away from Zamir, Cabot begins to kick the shit out of him with a series of cartwheels, handsprings and flying leaps. Kurt won most of his gold medals in floor routine, in case you were wondering. Then he abruptly leapfrogs on to Zamir's shoulders and drags them both to the ground with that goddamn. fucking. Wile. E. Coyote. fucking. thud.
Then after some homoerotic flailing, Zamir's neck does the twist and a fucking tool of a villain departs the screen. Whoo hoo.
Then we cut to the Princess and Cod/King/Kong/Kahn/Shah/Headtard as they flee down the stairs. Rubali says "Get out of my way" to an approaching ninja, then immediately applies her foot to his grubhole. This is pretty sound tactics. Apparently someone let Lord Hobo Hat have a fucking sword, which is... less sound to my way of thinking, but he does okay. Then he bursts out of the palace to find a milling crowd of his inbred asshole subjects. He yells at them in his usual fashion and they subdue the ninjas who are also milling around for no reason.
Then the whole crowd, including Rubali and the Kong but not including the ninjas, runs off to cheer enthusiastically as two horses approach. That's right, two, because in case you're not paying attention, Colonel Teethspeak is still fucking alive somehow. I hate the triumphant music in this scene almost as much as the overly dramatic Watching Gymnastics theme from the beginning of the movie.
We get a snapshot of Rubali and Cabot on their horse as he approaches the finish line, with a text blurb telling us that he didn't wish for the girl, or whatever, he wished for the fucking stupid Star Wars installation which apparently did not exist. Schrodinger's Satellite Station.
This is followed by a final look at Cabot on the parallel bars, and the movie informs us it was based on the novel "THE TERRIBLE GAME" by DAN TYLER MOORE. I imagine "loosely" based, or else Moore is a fucking asshole too. And... that's it? What.
The Events, Characters, And Firms Depicted In This Photoplay Are Fictitious. Any Similarity To Actual Persons, Living Or Dead, Or To Actual Events Or Firms, Is Purely Coincidental, And You'd Have To Be Seriously High Or Badly Brain-Damaged Not To Work That Out On Your Own.
AGHGHGHLOAHGOSGHOIAOGHAKLHG!
I will never watch this movie again. I will, God willing, not think about it for at least twelve hours. This movie is so unrelentingly mediocre that it makes my BALLS CLENCH every time I see it. That fucking pommel horse haunts my dreams.
I hate most of the universe right now.
Ugh.
Next film up? Probably EQUALIZER 2000. Probably.
Forget You Ever Saw Me,
fuck YOU, gymkata.