Mortal Kombat Animated Video

Mortal Kombat: The Animated Video: The Journey Begins

United States - 1996

Director - Kevin Droney

New Line Home Video, 1997, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour

Had I not staggered across this shortly after reveling in the glory that is Expect No Mercy, I wouldn't have remembered the referrent. So, no thanks to Billy Blanks for reawakening memories of high-school, and thanks to my brain for stiffling them.

Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex

United States – 1995

Director – Jonathan Betuel

New Line Home Video, 1996, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

Sometimes in the process of poisoning my mind with all these films I stumble across one that, despite its relative availability, just demands closer inspection. After watching Theodore Rex, there are a lot of things going through my mind. It’s a mess of confusion and wonderment up there, a jumble of emotion, fright, anger and even some sadness. I feel a little bit dirty. In case you are too young, have forgotten, or never had the pleasure of knowing at all, I’ll give you a quick refresher on the plot. In a nominally sci-fi future dystopia, detective Katie Coltrane (Whoopi Goldberg) partners with a bumbling, human-sized talking Tyrannosaurus Rex (“Teddy”) to solve the murders of several other dinosaurs. Much “hilarity” ensues. However, there is something much more problematic here than the fact that a talking dinosaur has just been given a job as a cop.

On the surface Teddy is an “adult” who drinks, chases women and has a job.  But because he talks, dresses and acts like a child, he is the film’s demographic selling point and titular hero.  Despite, or perhaps because of, his best efforts to channel Axel Foley, our “hero” is given all the attributes of the constantly frightened or mistake-prone sidekick. The subsequent hour and a half wallows in the resentment of his human counterparts. They make no secret of their contempt when such an obviously inferior creature is given a toy job on the police force in order to placate dino-rights activists, (I’m not making this shit up.) Even Whoopi uses the closet-bigot’s time honored phrase “you people,” (errr, dinosaurs.) In this light, we must recall that Theodore Rex is a product of the decade that gave us such PC Tokenism as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the backlash against Affirmative Action. As such, its bitterness towards childlike-adults (read: the mentally handicapped) reeks of the sort of recrimination familiar to an artist forced to sacrifice his aesthetic vision on the altar of commercial viability. Beneath its kiddie, buddy-cop exterior, Theodore Rex is an agonized cry of outrage at the decline of that great imperialist institution, “meritocracy”.

When confronted with movies of highly subjective quality, one often hears the question “why did this seem like a good idea?” This is an understandable response, a reflexive reaction to offended sensibilities, but it’s too loosely used against movies that venture into uncharted territory. Specifically the question lacks definition, being too subjective to serve as any real criterion. Humans are after all gifted with creative, imaginative minds which should be used and enjoyed even if their vision is sometimes more than a little out of their grasp. This film however is one movie for which this overused question is entirely appropriate. The anti-hero has a long tradition in narrative storytelling. Theodore Rex however, takes the unprecedented step of removing the hyphen from the trope and being literally against its hero. This sort of meta-ethical flip-flopping is dangerous, because it dissolves the existential barriers between film, audience and film-maker. It is a mind-warping paradox that can lead to feelings of betrayal and revulsion for all three parties, and ultimately to the sort of resentment that causes a writer/director to quit making films altogether.

Xtro 2: The Second Encounter

Xtro 2: The Second Encounter

Canada – 1990

Director – Harry Bromley Davenport

New Line Home Video, 1991, VHS

Xtro 2 is preceded by trailers for Eve of Destruction starring tap-dancer Gregory Hines as a tough guy fighting a homicidal cybernetic hot chick, and also for Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare which looks about as bubble gum juvenile as you can imagine. In retrospect it makes sense that the caliber of movies advertised in the preceding trailers would give a clue as to the subsequent feature.

Some martial music brings us through the credits and into a laboratory where Dr. Sommersfield escorts a guy in a suit into a giant computer control room where the Dr. immediately professes that all operations are controlled by the main computer, a remark which guarantees some future unstoppable computer dilemma. While the Dr. and the Suit verbally catfight, the woman character commences a particle accelerator inter-dimensional transportation experiment. Suited up in their H.G. Wells model science gear the subjects are zapped into smoke and a few minutes later are communicating from the “other side”. Sadly though, contact is brief and after a couple of screams only one of the team survives.

Fire up the dumbenator!

In fact from here on out it’s clear that what happened was that they transport themselves through a dumbening event in which they returned with a severely challenged version of Aliens, (and Predator if you believe the shameless declaration from the box cover). Summoning the Hero Shepherd from his self imposed exile, the main characters, including a team of stoner mercenaries have a meeting and decide to take action. The alien however makes the first move, bursting forth from Survivors chest in the form of a savage hand-puppet, it quickly grows, issuing alien like screams from alien like lips, and begins catching people and eating them into gooey scraps.

Try holding it like that when you're firing live ammo and see how bad you get burned pal.

Another meeting, and just as they’re about to take action again, the scheduled computer problems begin, first, sealing them into the building, which I predict, will be followed by some kind of imminent mechanical death. Sure enough before I can even finish that thought. The Mercenary boss unzips his trousers and flops his giant polished penis extension onto the screen but in his debut fight scene is greased to make way for that misunderstood Hero (Jan Michael Vincent who doesn't hesitate to put the largew caliber compenasater to work himself) who exchanges stony glares, and squealing noises with the alien amid a storm of aberrant gunfire. Time and again the alien catalyzes the bickering shitheads into firing wildly and somehow feeding it another member of the team, the last part being far and away the most appealing part of each exchange.

Only appearing to get killed seems to be this monsters modus operandi, and trusting appearances it would seem, its opponent’s primary weakness. If it hadn’t been for the splattery alien generated messes which pepper this soap opera caliber gem, (in particular the computer nerd falling down an elevator shaft) I would have been wishing I could have transported myself back in time 92 minutes.