Tokyo Transporter Express

Posted by Darren on March 31st, 2009 Genres: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Every once in a while, my friends and I get together for a bad movie night. I’m not sure how many of you par­take in sim­i­lar rit­u­als, but I’ll explain the premise for those who may not be famil­iar. Bad movie night is an ongo­ing quest to find movies which fall into that oh-so-difficult-to-reach cat­e­gory of just bad enough to be good. Evil Dead, Bad Santa, and Ham­let 2 are all movies which share the hon­or­able dis­tinc­tion of being good bad movies. It’s not easy for movies to be good bad movies, and there aren’t many of them, but we keep search­ing, as if find­ing such films will some­how illu­mi­nate hid­den aspects of the entire industry.

This week’s line up was as follows:

Tokyo Gore Police

The first movie we watched was Tokyo Gore Police. You have to be a fan of Japan­ese hor­ror films to like this kind of movie. Japan­ese hor­ror movies are gen­er­ally not good, but they are gen­er­ally good bad movies, which is why we gen­er­ally feel they’re a pretty solid bet on bad movie night. Gen­er­ally speak­ing: swords + red corn syrup = good bad movie.

Unfor­tu­nately that recipe didn’t really seem to quite add up in this case. Some­thing about this flick just didn’t quite work for me. Maybe there was too much plot or per­haps too much corn syrup. I started to get a feel­ing in the pit of my stom­ach – sort of like I do after eat­ing too much Thai food – that bad movie night would not end well after the scene where a henchman’s legs turned into an alligator’s mouth. Some­how we per­sisted on until the halfway point, at which time I sim­ply couldn’t stand any more corn syrup and dis­turb­ing body part muta­tions and insisted we move on to the next film. Despite its flaws this movie was eas­ily the best of the three. It’s all down­hill from here.

Trans­porter 3

Next up was Trans­porter 3. I don’t know why we expected this to be a good bad movie. The first Trans­porter was a good bad movie, but the sec­ond most cer­tainly was not. I must not have had access to any sharp objects dur­ing my view­ing of that film because I prob­a­bly would have attempted to insert them into my ear canal. I have no idea what pos­sessed us to give it another go-round.

But we did. In fact, the first twenty min­utes were so action packed – and of a fairly high qual­ity – that I began to think we had actu­ally found the rare tril­ogy where the final install­ment is the best. That the­ory was soon dis­proven and replaced by the the­ory that they sim­ply used up all the good ideas in the first half hour in an attempt to keep the audi­ence around. The remain­der of the flick was packed with for­get­table action sequences and steamy romance that I had no invest­ment in. We man­aged to make it to the fin­ish, but the  end­ing was so unmem­o­rable twenty min­utes later I had to ask some­one to ver­ify we actu­ally had com­pleted it.

Pineap­ple Express

We debated whether or not to watch Pineap­ple Express due to the late hour, but decided to go for it because every­one I’ve talked to loved this film. “Hilar­i­ous!” “So funny!” “You need to see it!” are just a few of the responses I’ve got­ten when inquir­ing about this movie. This was sup­posed to be our knight in shin­ing armor; our sav­ing grace; the gun hid­den in our ankle hol­ster; the mirage in the mid­dle of the desert that turns out to be real. This was sup­posed to fin­ish off bad movie night with a bang.

Maybe it was the fact I’d already sat through two other turds before attempt­ing this one, maybe it was the fact I was only on my third beer but some­how felt I really needed to be at least two more in, or maybe I was just feel­ing bit­ter. On the other hand, maybe it was because I wasn’t stoned. The sus­pi­cion that every­one who had rec­om­mended this movie to me had been absolutely baked while view­ing it grew from a small tin­gling in the back of my neck dur­ing the first few min­utes to a throb­ing cer­tainty located deep within the cen­ter of my fore­head by the time we reached the thirty minute mark.

The plot was pre­dictable, the jokes were child­ish, and all-in-all I felt like I really should have been 19 while watch­ing it. Despite all this we put up a valiant effort, strug­gling to make it through the whole film even as our eyes slowly drooped closed due to lack of stim­u­lus. We made it through an hour and fif­teen min­utes, but the time felt twice as long.

I was glad to call it a night.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 6:22 pm and is filed under News, Previews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.