I don’t “do stuff” often, but B-Fest is in two weeks, and Basement Fest (a private affair we started while B-Fest was shuttered for Covid and have continued) is the week after. So it will be March 3rd before we resume.
So I tried to counterprogram the previous Watch Party offering, Doctor Faustus with Richard Burton and (sorta) Elizabeth Tayler. So I showed a like 12 year old Steven Segal movie, Born to Raise Hell. Hilariously, after all the awful flicks we’ve all grimly slogged through, this was the one that people just gave up on and we all just chatted about other things.
Quoth GalaxyJane, in regards to my comment to her that we all continued to pay attention to Doctor Faustus but not Seagal’s offering:
*I think that as veterans of Richard Burton and of the bad movie wars in general, we all expected that Dr. Faustus would somehow pay off by the end. All those ridiculous sets, the cheapass opulence and Burton chewing scenery should have produced at least a few nuggets of Bad Movie Gold. And when it never did despite all that panning we just got mad at it.
Last night’s offering made clear from the get go it was nothing but pure unadulterated garbage, and edited in a blender, so nobody ever got super invested in whether it ever did anything interesting or not so we were just able to let it go and make our own entertainment.
And at least I found Seagal’s immobile waddling and inability to climb stairs or walk at a fast pace pretty funny given his status as the action lead. Damn it was misogynistic though, in the actual sense of the word, nit the meaningless twaddle version that gets trotted out to explain any imagined shortchanging of a female, or just any ideas one doesn’t like, or intend to honestly engage.”
I should note that compared to Seagal’s current “films”–yes, he’s still grinding them out in Russia–Seagal was relatively mobile here. We literally see him, not his stuntman, get out of chairs, or climb in or out of a van. That might not sound too impressive, but in Seagal’s current films he basically never gets out of his chair. Probably because he has a team of six guys to hoist him and it wouldn’t burnish his action hero creds if we watched the process. Think the reverse of how they used to hoist fully armored knights up onto their horse.
