Three Films Make A Post: Adventure lives forever.

Torque (2004): In 2004, the fast cars and macho men sub-genre was already big enough in mainstream cinema, the hipster impulse to do them ironically could not be supressed. To wit, Torque, as directed by Joseph Kahn, a film that spends the whole of its running time pointing out how stupid and lame it is, which indeed it is very much. As all films of this ilk, it never attempts to do anything but point out its own failures, never bothering to, just for example, not be stupid. That, I can’t help but assume, would take effort, whereas empty irony clearly does not. The end result is a film that will neither entertain an audience coming for a fast cars and macho men movie – because an un-ironic film of that genre would at the very least attempt to not be aggressively shite – nor one perhaps expecting an actual parody of the genre, which, again, would take effort this film just isn’t in the mood to make.

Van Helsing (2004): After realizing the error of my ways regarding Stephen Sommers’s Mummy movies, I had high hopes of recognizing Van Helsing as another film I had unfairly maligned. Well, I shouldn’t have worried my pretty little head, because Van Helsing is even worse than Torque above, foregoing the empty irony for some of the worst jokes in film history. As if the jokes weren’t painful enough, Sommers also manages to get a completely lifeless performance out of Hugh Jackman, pairing him up with the typically wooden Kate Beckinsale until a negative number of romantic sparks fly. Somehow, Sommers also lost the ability to stage fun and exciting action sequences, of pacing a movie, and of being rather clever while pretending to be really dumb. Because that’s clearly not bad enough, we also get Richard Roxburgh as the what I believe to be worst Dracula in movie history (porn Draculas not excepted)  giving a performance that’s so bad, the mind boggles what anyone involved was thinking (if anyone was indeed thinking and not just snorting coke).


Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991): But let’s end this post on a movie that isn’t obnoxiously bad, Craig Baldwin’s collage pseudo-documentary that tells the horrible history of US “intervention” in various Latin American countries. The film avoids the preachiness as well as the dry didacticism that could come with this kid of topic by pretending to be a right-wing conspiracist screed telling the tale of the heroic US fight against evil aliens and their co-conspirators, hilariously imitating the tone of the looniest parts of conspiracy theorist thinking, obviously mostly setting it into picture via footage taken from older SF and horror movies, saying what it actually has to say by inversion. Which manages to make the film funny and inventive as well as informative; given my predilections, the particular footage the film uses adds to the enjoyment, of course.