I've seen some really pissy movies in my time. I've seen Showgirls, Wild Wild West, The Lost World, and the Sound of Music. I've also seen a lot of ham-handed, desperate attempts to turn a piece of crap into something that would hopefully make a couple of dollars before it takes its dive. Usually these are half-decent measures, including nudity, special effects, and violence. I can appreciate that. Explosions, dinosaurs, splattered guts, and wall-to-wall lesbian sex can lift even the worst movie from the gutter of pure suckiness to the sidewalk of amusing mediocrity.
I did not see that kind of movie this evening. I saw the new straight-to-video release "Militia," starring Dean Cain and Jennifer Beale. Golly, it must be depressing to know that you've peaked and that the rest of your career will be beating the dead horse of "B" movies. I'm not sure if it's better or worse to have a stunningly successful movie like, say, Flashdance followed by a string of endless cinematic feces as opposed to climbing to the dizzying height of a moderately successful but short-lived TV series (Lois and Clark) with only roles such as "Main Dork" in the movie "Dorkfest 2000" to look forward to. Either way, it sucks.
So I was watching this movie out of the corner of my eye while engaging in my never-ending quest for hot new Internet porn. Then I see something that grabs my attention. They show a couple of men walking past a big sign that says "Cyberdyne". I do a double take. Did the station change on me? Did they switch movies midstream? Was "Militia" so terrible that the control room guys say, "Man! This sucks! Quick! Throw in another tape! Any tape!", resulting in the sudden switch to Terminator 2?
The next scenes showing two terrorists stealing Anthrax from the lab made me think I was seeing things. Perhaps my mind finally snapped. More scenes followed, though. The cops converged in a familiar fashion on the movie and a helicopter shined its light into the building.
I was still in denial at this point. Then I saw one of the terrorists kick a desk through the window and begin spraying the police cars with his assault rifle. The resulting carnage, though, was EXACTLY the same footage they showed in Terminator 2! My disbelief turned into extreme contempt when I saw the terrorists blow up a floor of the building to cover their escape. Amazingly, that explosion was identical to the one in T2.
But that's not the icing on the cake. The terrorists slip out the back door and hijack a-can you guess?-a SWAT van! The van charges through the police barricade with damage suddenly appearing to the windshield and doors and with a very muscular guy driving. He looked kinda like an Austrian dude I saw on this movie once…
As I said, there are a lot of ways to make a crappy movie better, but to steal from a well-known film or, more accurately, a film that I have seen is just plain STUPID. Oh Dean and Jennifer, what have you reduced yourselves to? Who put the sugar in the gas tanks of their careers? Talk about a complete lack of effort. The rest of the movie may have been pure Shakespeare for all I know, but that blatant scene-stealing was more than I can handle.
God only knows how many movies they ripped off that I haven't seen.
