So I Married an Axe Murderer

I love axe murdering.
"The Honeymoon Was Killer."

Hello folks, welcome back to the Tagline, where it's all Mike Myers movies from the early 90s as far as the eye can see. After going on my Wayne's World bender earlier in the week, and while doing research for my post on the matter, I came across a movie so thoroughly forgotten that it had even slipped MY mind for a moment. This was 1993's So I Married an Axe Murderer, a movie that properly speaking had no right to be good OR entertaining, because it was dopey and simplistic at its core. Despite that, I actually really like it and think it's a really funny movie, in no small part thanks to Myers and also the general enthusiasm of the cast. So let's talk about it! So I Married an Axe Murderer was the first movie Mike Myers made after Waynes World 2, and it cuts a similar tone despite a very different premise. In this film Myers plays a beat poet named Charlie who lives in San Francisco. He seems really terrible, but people like him, so maybe I just don't know what a GOOD beat poet is like. Charlie has lousy luck with the ladies, mostly because he is paranoid and a commitophobe, constantly finding reasons or forming theories about reasons why his girlfriends aren't right for him. Around this time he meets Harriet, a local butcher who he immediately takes a liking to. The only catch is that he begins to suspect that she might be a black widow, as some of her strange behavior, along with a tabloid story about "Mrs. X" gets his imagination really running. Charlie has his friend Tony, who is a cop, looking into it. Tony himself has his own problems, centered around how disenchanted he is with actual police work, and how boring it is. Basic premise established, kind of a mixed bag of rom-com cliches along with some other thoroughly random bits, but really the random bits are what makes the movie entertaining.


Wayne's World Double Post

Party time, Excellent!! WOOWOOWOO
"You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll hurl."

Good morning boys and girls. Today I'm going to do something a little different, but that is really not and is actually the same. Because that's what the game is all about, promising something new while delivering the same old bullshit as always! I decided over the weekend that I really wanted to watch Wayne's World, and then I realized afterwards that I also REALLY wanted to watch Wayne's World 2, so I did that also. I mostly wanted to write a review about Wayne's World 2, but I felt like that would be wrong, just focusing on the bizarre sequel and leaving out the movie that made it all possible. So I'm going to compromise and do a little bit about each film, and the ways that I liked them both. So let's start at the beginning! In the before times, long long ago, people watched Saturday Night Live, and Mike Myers was on it instead of being sentenced to play Shrek for literally the rest of his life (presumably this was some condition of the devil's bargain he made to become rich and famous). So Wayne's World was a recurring segment on SNL where Myers would play Wayne Campbell. a rocker guy who, along with his friend Garth Algar (Dana Carvey in maybe his all-time least hate-able roll) host a public access show where they basically do dumb stuff that is amusing in a public access kind of way, mostly talking about how much they like metal and hot babes, and tricking their local guests into saying gross and/or profane things. As a sketch featuring TWO SNL cast members who were going to hit the big screen (though obviously one a LOT harder than the other) it is not really surprising in retrospect that Wayne's World became a feature film. The basic premise of the movie is expanded on the sketch: Wayne and Garth do their show in Wayne's parents' basement, and attract the attention of a TV executive, Benjamin Kane (Rob Lowe, who decides he can make some money off of it and so sends one of his producers to try and figure out where the show is taped, so they do some sleazy contract signing, because 90s movies love to be about sleazy Hollywood guys. Wayne is on board, but Garth has doubts, but being the mumbly weirdo he is, he doesn't say anything about it. The two spend their new-found wealth the way you might expect, by going to rock concerts and buying expensive guitars and stuff.  It is at one such concert that Wayne meets Cassandra Wong (Tia Carrere) and starts spending a lot of time with her which causes DRAMA.


Van Helsing

Look at his awesome hat.
"Adventure lives forever."

Adventure DOES live forever, man that tagline has a really good point. Welcome back folks, as always I am your host on this breathtaking tour of the underworld of cinema, and today I'm going to be digging deep into the past to 2004, with the release of Van Helsing, a kind of Universal Studios monster orgy that happened somehow and was gifted with an absolutely insane 160 million dollar budget. Yeah that's right, watch that movie and try to guess where they dumped 160 million smackaroos, because I can't quite figure it out. Anyway Van Helsing is not about Abraham Van Helsing, the character from Bram Stoker's Dracula, but it does involve Dracula prominently. In this iteration Hugh Jackman is Gabriel Van Helsing, an agent of the Vatican who is dispatched to kill Dracula. That seems pretty reasonable, because I'm sure that no one in Rome is a big Dracula fan, on account of him being a vampire and all. So Van Helsing travels to Transylvania with his loyal ammo monk in tow (the guy who played Faramir in the Lord of the Rings no less!) to try and deep six Drac. The Holy Order also charges Van Helsing with helping ensure that the Valerious family doesn't end up ever getting stuck outside of heaven's gates, because I guess they don't get to go to heaven unless they kill Dracula or something who fucking even knows. Of course Dracula isn't the only thing that can kill you in Transylvania. There's also werewolves, and Dracula brides, and... gross baby vampires that explode because they need different kinds of batteries or something... stay with me here guys.



Join Mindscape now free for 3 months.
"Don't Let Her In."

Hello children, gather round for another edition of the Tagline, the only blog where I personally write about what Vanilla Ice was doing in 1991 and then make awkwardly sexual comments about members of the Avengers (haha members GET IT). Anyway this week was SUPPOSED to be kung-fu week, but due to some unforeseen acquisition challenges instead it's going to be random crap like every other week-week, but I can't bust out a gem like Cool as Ice every day so instead I'm going to be reviewing a movie that WASN'T a massive joke. After experiencing some challenge actually locating the movie, because the original name was different than the American title of the film, I tracked down Mindscape (called Anna in the US) a film reinforcing my already dubious impression of Taissa Farmiga. This film features Mark Strong in one of his rare roles as not a sneaky bad guy plotting to murder you, or an upfront bad guy who is nonetheless still trying to murder you. Instead he is John Washington, a sort of psychic detective, who can use a kind of hypnotism to enter the memories of others. This memory investigation is the principal conceit of the movie the "one thing" that's different from what is otherwise our world. John is down on his luck as the movie opens, due to a trauma in his past, that sometimes intrudes on his sessions and had previously caused him to have a stroke. The memory investigating and the way a person's own memories can intrude seemed a lot like the dream stuff in Inception, but it was distinct enough that it didn't feel like they were just ripping off that movie. Anyway, John is out of money to spend on booze, and so goes to his boss Sebastian (Brian Cox AKA Hannibal Lecter AKA William Stryker) looking for a job. He is offered one, in the form of Anna (Taissa Farmiga who as you may or may not know is a witch/ghost/member of the bling ring) who is on a hunger strike, and also maybe a complete psychopath. She's the daughter of incredibly rich parents, and is super smart but also extra strength weird, and is on a hunger strike. She eventually reveals that this is because she fears being drugged by her step-father, who wants to have her institutionalized. Ten minutes of her in the movie and I could really see where the guy was coming from, even if he WAS a douche.


Cool as Ice

Okay, this situation is starting to really get grisly. I mean what am I supposed to do, go see THE NINJA TURTLE MOVIE? That doesn't seem like an awesome life choice, and I just hope it doesn't come to that. Not that their weird little Shrek ears aren't endearing or anything I just... if Vanilla Ice isn't in the movie then really what's the point. Hmm... okay, fuck it, since I'm grasping around for ideas about a movie to talk about, and now I'm thinking about Vanilla Ice, let's just commit and do this thing...

...oh good god this is the worst tagline ever.




Dylan Dog: Dead of Night

No problem indeed.
"No pulse? No problem."

Hello friends, welcome back to another hopeless walk through the trackless desert that is September, a month that has thus far proven to be a cinematic death march into the fall season. I mean really what's taking me to the box office this month? I guess A Walk Among the Tombstones (aka Taken 2.5)? Maybe the Maze Runner? I guess I shouldn't complain too much, as October will bring Left Behind, a movie based on the long running series of novels about the end times. Why am I looking forward to this ridiculous guaranteed shitpile? Because it stars Nicholas Cage, and that means that Thanksgiving is coming early for this boy. So there's at least a light at the end of this tunnel, and that light is the flames from the lake of fire I guess. Enough of that though, today I'm here to talk about mediocre and under-promoted movies about paranormal detectives. As an expert of mediocre paranormal fiction it seemed only fitting that I deliver the prognosis for Dylan Dog: Dead of Night. This was a movie that I'd initially intended to review over a year ago, when I first saw it, but I became occupied with movies that were more pressing, so it ended up on the back burner until the world class famine I have on my hands now. In case you aren't really into Italian comic books (how weird!) Dylan Dog is a long running Italian horror comic (started in 1986) about the eponymous Dylan Dog, an investigator who is an expert in dealing with the nightmarish and bizarre. In the film adaptation this holds true, with a few changed details (namely his assistant is not a Groucho Marx impersonator, and I personally am really grateful to whoever made that executive decision, because that sounds terrible). Dylan works in New Orleans instead of London, that makes sense, this is an American movie after all and we couldn't possibly have an UN-AMERICAN HERO, that's insane. Along with his undead buddy Marcus (Sam Huntington, also known as the werewolf on the U.S. Being Human) Dylan doesn't just go around blowing the faces off of the things that go bump in the night. Rather he also acts as an intermediary between them, working to maintain the uneasy peace that exists between various groups.


Repo Men

Certainly looks edgy right?
"For a price, any organ in your body can be replaced. But it can also be repossessed."

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Tagline, where it's all pulp sci-fi all the time apparently. Today I am going to be talking about Repo Men, a movie that is not Repo: The Genetic Opera. Are they similar? I don't know, I haven't seen that, because I didn't want to so sue me. This movie has Jude Law in it, so that instantly made it more interesting to me, also it looked pretty violent. I was not disappointed in THAT regard for sure. Repo Men is another science fiction story set in a dystopic future where artificial organ technology has advanced wildly, so that virtually any organ can be replaced. The caveat is that distribution of these organs is controlled by a company that charges astronomical prices for them, because its the shitty future, and people often are coerced into getting these organs because otherwise they'll die. Then again, the average person can't pay 750,000 dollars for a new heart, and so they end up going into delinquency and then it gets kicked over to collections. As you've probably deduced, that's where the repo comes in, If someone misses enough payments, the property gets repossessed. Out of their chest cavity. You might have guessed that having a guy stun you and literally carve your heart out often results in a distinct case of death. They have that whole Temple of doom thing going on, ripping the heart right from your chest, only with less lava I suppose.


Johnny Mnemonic

There's that cyber slam again.
"A pulse-pouding cyber-slam."

Now be honest, that kind of sounds like some sort of robot sex act doesn't it? Yeah I thought your silent agreement would be forthcoming, but that's beside the point! The point is that today I continue my aimless trek through the empty expanses of cyberfilms of the 90s. Today I go out of the hacker films all the way into full blast cyberpunk, with Johnny Mnemonic, a movie based on a William Gibson short story of the same name. If you don't know, William Gibson was one of the major voices of the cyberpunk sub-genre and also later of what would be known as post-cyberpunk (some of my all time favorite novels were among his later works) Johnny Mnemonic is relatively common of the genre however, and features a data courier who uses his own head for storage. Now me personally, I feel like if I were going to be a courier of stolen data who might be pursued by criminals, I wouldn't want brain to be the receptacle. I guess it guarantees that for a while my head is safe from bullets, but I feel like it sort of increases the chance of the rest of me getting torn up. At any rate, Johnny (played by the ever expressive Keanu Reeves who is 50 today, happy birthday Neo) seems less concerned with this, and more worried about getting enough money to have his implant removed. See while trafficking some guy's data is maybe lucrative, it comes at a serious cost. In this particular case, Johnny has lost all his memories of his childhood, and so is saving up to have that damage reversed, which I don't know how it's possible but apparently it is. So there's Johnny-boy's motivation, but what about the job? Well he's supposed to pick up some obviously hot merchandise from some nerds, and then carry it for them to their potential buyer. The problem is that it's way too much data, substantially more than johnny can carry safely in his noodle (I guess that isn't so surprising given the person we're talking about). Repeated warnings don't stop him from doing it anyway though, and moments later ole' Johnny is running for his life after his employers are shot to pieces and diced up by the Yakuza.
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