Going Nowhere Faster (21 page)

SHOWGIRLS
— It’s possible this is just plain good.

TANGO AND CASH
— Sly Stallone and Kurt Russell in a meeting of the minds so unexpected that it seems possible, even a half hour in, that this is really a documentary about the Potsdam Conference. How did one camera manage to shoehorn both egos into the same movie? Did they use a special NASA lens? Anyway, somehow Sly and Kurt end up in prison, where they beat up every single prisoner, twice.

COBRA
— Sly (a loner cop named “Cobretti”) blows away two gang members while they’re robbing the meat counter of the local grocery store. “The only thing that stands between these animals and the Black Forest ham is me!”

THE COLOR OF NIGHT
— Includes many unpleasant shots of a half-naked Bruce Willis. The script may have been dictated by a transplanted brain being kept alive in a jar of saline solution while being prodded by a series of low-voltage electric shocks.

RAW DEAL
— Arnold before both THE TERMINATOR and elocution school. Arnold drives a convertible Cadillac full-speed into a dump truck and walks away without a scratch on him. Arnold beats up a mannequin. Arnold has tiny handgun that somehow, instead of the usual eight, appears to hold a couple hundred bullets. He works his way up from mob enforcer to trusted confidant in order to exact revenge on the Big Boss, and then shoots 173 people. He somehow keeps a straight face the entire film, even though his character’s name is “Joey.”

THE SUBSTITUTE 2
— “I hate to say this, buddy, but I don’t think detention is going to do it anymore.” Treat Williams plays a substitute high school teacher who was in Vietnam, so he knows how to punch hard and employ the Montessori method. The school is full of bad types (graffiti, switchblades, torn spandex), and Treat puts up with them for about a day and a half, before deciding to take the whole package up a notch, mostly by replacing Thursday’s meat loaf with knuckle sandwich on the cafeteria menu.

STONE COLD
— Classic biker movie starring former NFL washout Brian Bosworth, who is pumped so full of steroids he looks like a balloon filled with lumpy gravy. The terrific Lance Henriksen plays “Chains,” the head of the local biker gang. Big, expensive motorcycles get revved a lot, and then the Boz kills about 9,000 bikers. Later, he saves the world from drugs.

COCKTAIL
— Tommy Cruise as a hotshot bartender on the national bar circuit. Tommy flips bottles of rum in the air and catches them behind his back. He pours many drinks at once. He handles security and the register. The girls are impressed. A subplot involves Tommy feeling bad about the tough-but-honest waitress back home that he treated badly while on his way up the bartending ladder. In fact, he feels so bad about it, he stays in his dark apartment and doesn’t throw a bottle of rum in the air for, like, three days. Rumor is they almost named this film Citizen Gin.

TOP GUN
— Stars Tommy Cruise, Val Kilmer, and the bald guy from ER. Lots of Really Fast Motorcycles and Really Fast Planes. Lots of bad mustaches. Lots of gender-confused buttocks-kneading. Everyone has a nickname, like “Goose” or “Maverick.” In the end, the Russians lose.

ST. ELMO’S FIRE
— All you need to know is that Rob Lowe plays a sax player. (Oddly, his fingers aren’t moving but somehow lots of notes keep coming out.) Also, earnest career sad sack Andrew McCarthy plays a tortured poet (He’s got writer’s block? Maybe a haircut would help). Preenhancement Demi Moore plays a world-weary party girl who wants to go straight, but sadly invested too much in a yellow Jeep. Pre-MIGHTY DUCKS Emelio Estevez plays pre-MIGHTY DUCKS Emelio Estevez with the kind of style and élan not seen since the robot from SHORT CIRCUIT tried to learn how to dance.

BREAKDOWN
— We all know that America’s highways are crawling with big, fat, mean killer truckers. It’s in the news every day. You’ve heard the stories. Big, Fat, Mean Killer Truckers abduct people’s wives and hide them in their hundred-thousand-dollar underground lairs, and then steal all the stuff in their wallets and cars. It’s like a goldmine. I mean, why bother actually driving a load of tomatoes somewhere and getting paid for it, when you can kidnap someone’s wife and then STEAL everything in their SUV? There’s gotta be, like, eighty bucks in travelers’ checks alone? Not to mention a socket set and three flares. But who would have thought they’d be dumb enough to pick on Kurt Russell? Anyone with half a brain knows Kurt’s gonna give at least one hundred and ten percent to get his wife back. At least. Those are bad odds even for Big, Fat, Mean Killer Truckers.

HARLEY DAVIDSON AND THE MARLBORO MAN
— Stars Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson. Isn’t that enough? Voted #1 on the list of favorite movies by The Society of the Aggressively Dim.

GLITTER
— Mariah Carey plays a younger version of herself by wearing her hair in two pigtails, and then later in the movie, not wearing them. She has a record producer/boyfriend named “Dice.” He wears a necklace dangling in his chest-hair through the whole movie that says “Dice.” In the end, Mariah dumps Dice and then makes a lot of money with a combination of surgery and dance singles. Her boyfriend’s name is Dice.