Celluloid Heroes

Just once, I’d like a regular, normal Christmas.

This follow-up to the 1988 genre-buster is one of those movies that does just about as much wrong as it can without completely sucking. It’s also not bad for a Renny Harlin movie, but if all you can claim is you’re better than Cutthroat Island, that’s not much to hang your hat on. The best you can say about it is that it keeps your eyes and ears sufficiently entertained that you don’t notice that your brain hasn’t joined in the reindeer games.

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Russians don’t take a dump, son, without a plan.

How quickly did we leave the Cold War behind? The dust had barely settled on the fall of the Berlin Wall when this 1990 Tom Clancy adaptation was treating the subject like a period film. Of course, the world had changed so drastically since the novel’s 1984 publication that it was impossible to view the material as current events.

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Please God! We need a cab! One lousy fuckin’ cab!

Quick Change is probably the least famous of the good Bill Murray movies. This is a grown-up, more cynical version of the Murray characters from movies like Stripes and Ghostbusters. He’s Grimm, a fed-up city planner for New York City and he’s decided to get out of town with his girlfriend, Phyllis (Geena Davis), and best friend, Loomis (Randy Quaid). First, however, he’s going to rob a bank.

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They think you’re moody, make ‘em think you’re crazy. Make ‘em think you might snap. They say you got attitude, you show ‘em some real attitude.

Oh, 1990, what a quaint and backwards time you were. It’s fun to realize that, less than five or six years after Pump Up The Volume came out, technology and culture had passed it by like it was a golf cart on a drag strip. Kid misses his friends back east? Obviously never heard of e-mail, let alone instant messaging. Of course, this was during the dark ages when AOL still charged by the minute, so maybe they just can’t afford it on his dad’s school administrator’s salary. On the other hand, you could say this film was slightly ahead of its time. The protagonist’s pirate radio station is not much different in concept from the podcasters that appeared on the scene in late 2004 and early 2005. Writer/director Allan Moyle got one thing right: the liberating feeling of speaking your mind into a microphone and knowing that somebody, anybody is listening.

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No tracks, no sign, no spoor… You’d think after eating all those sheep they’d have to take a dump someplace.

Someone involved with this movie watched a lot of Saturday afternoon television as a kid, a lot like I did. They obviously saw something they liked in cheesy fifties horror movies, a lot like I did. So when they they grew up, they went out and made one.

Tremors is a pitch perfect send-up of any number of Atomic-age monster movies. Starring a solid cast of A-Minus List actors, it features an intelligent, humorous script and a collection of broad but vividly drawn characters.

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