BEFORE: How does this happen? How do I find myself watching something that's probably a throwaway film, at best guess, and potentially a big piece of nonsense, especially when this film just appeared on Netflix at the start of August, and there are probably MUCH more important films to watch, ones that have been on the list much longer? I'll attempt to explain.
The original plan was to link from "Once Upon a Time in Venice" to a film called "Replicas", which also has Thomas Middleditch in it. And then "Replicas" also has Keanu Reeves in it, and it would have served as the link to "Bill & Ted Face the Music". (It's not really the original plan, it's the revised original plan, which is the original original plan backwards, because "Bill & Ted" got delayed or something, it's a little tough to remember. No, I think that's correct, because Ron Funches was the original link out of the documentary chain, since he appeared in archive footage in "Fyre".)
OK, so I held a spot for "Bill & Ted", only then it got released in theaters, but not in New York City, which is keeping its theaters closed for now. I mean, it's not like there's a lot of people who live in NYC who want to go to the movies, right? (I don't know, is this true? Between marching in Black Lives Matter protests, building seating enclosures for outdoor dining and just generally trying not to catch Covid while we ride the subways, we're all pretty busy...). Sure, I could watch "Bill & Ted" on Demand, but it's priced at like $20! That's too much to pay for a first-run movie, so I've removed "Bill & Ted" from the schedule. So much for Plan "B" (which, if I'm being honest, was more like Plan "F" or "G") and I did have a back-up plan for my back-up plan. Removing both "Replicas" and "Bill & Ted Face the Music" is possible because "Once Upon a Time in Venice" shares an actor with the next film in the chain. (In the original plan, Kid Cudi would carry over from "Bill & Ted" to today's film...).
Surprise, it's Ron Funches! He's here again tonight, carrying over from "Once Upon a Time in Venice" as I wrap up August - I've spaced out my days so I wouldn't have too many days off in a row - so 23 films in August, and I've got another 22 films planned for September (bringing the year's count up to 3,664), and then I'll be in to horror films for October. Another 24 films in October gets me to 3,688, and then, assuming "Black Widow" gets released in November, 12 more films gets me to the end of the year. (And if I still can't see "Black Widow" in a theater in November, or don't want to pay $20 to see it On Demand, which I could do, then it's on to Plan "J" or "K", damn it.)
Now, removing "Replicas" from this part of the list raised another issue, where should it go? Should I just put it at the bottom of the list, or think of it as a "Maybe" for 2021? Well, I left myself a note that this (sort of?) horror film connects to a number of other horror films planned for this October, so on a whim I checked out placing it somewhere in October, and here's the best news of all - I can use "Replicas", along with two other films recently acquired, to replace a three-film section in October that I really wasn't crazy about. The linking was solid, but watching "Black Christmas", "Beautiful Creatures" and the reboot of "Nightmare on Elm Street" didn't really thrill me, plus I would have had to rent all three films on iTunes for $2.99 or $3.99 apiece. Now I don't have to do that, and I can replace those three films with ones I really want to see, and also already have in my possession - I'll save some money and the October movie count stays exactly the same! It's a win-win. Umm, except for the "Bill & Ted" movie that's off the schedule now, that one I will have to catch up with in 2021. This would also have been a fine place to drop in "Trolls World Tour" (actually, there may not be a good place to drop in that film, it looks horrible) but it's still $5.99 on iTunes, so I'm going to pass on that one too. It's a lot easier to pass when I know I have a solid path to the end of the year.
Anyway, all that explains why today's film is "Killing Hasselhoff", at least I hope it does. I'll total up the stats on August's movies and report back in two days, when it's September.
THE PLOT: A struggling nightclub owner resorts to desperate measures in order to pay off a loan shark.
AFTER: It's been a pretty big week for loansharks, they figured prominently in the plots of "The Gambler" and "Once Upon a Time in Venice". It's interesting what Hollywood thinks about loan sharks, look at the actors they cast to play them - John Goodman, Ken Davitian and Will Sasso. So, all loan sharks are fat guys? Seems like an interesting stereotype - I guess a fat guy is shorthand for a rich guy, but then they also have to be ruthless, mean characters who will hurt or even kill people if they don't pay up, and that's just not what most fat guys are about. Fat guys are jolly, happy guys in real life, right? I can believe Michael Kenneth Williams as a loan shark, but I'm not sure about Will Sasso. John Goodman's a good enough actor to pull it off, I think - when he threatened Mark Wahlberg's character, I believed it.
Ken Jeong's character here, Chris Kim is the clueless lead, unfortunately he's not smart enough to handle a loan shark who wants to collect on the money he borrowed to open up a nightclub - especially when the club gets some bad publicity due to a false sexual harassment claim (umm, yeah, that's a really questionable plot point, see NITPICK POINT below) so when the loan shark comes to collect, it seems that Chris' only option is to collect the money from the celebrity death pool that he's been a part of for six years, and the pot keeps growing every year because all of the 18 celebrities chosen have decided to keep on living, so I guess the participants re-invest every year, which makes the pot worth about half a million.
NITPICK POINT #1 - 18 guys betting $500 each adds up to only $9,000 - can $9,000 in a bank account grow to over $500,000 in just 6 years? That seems like an impossibly high interest rate. Even if each participant anted up another $500 each year, I'm not sure that the math here justifies the total. Six times $9,000 is just $54,000, and I still don't think that money could grow tenfold in just six years in the bank. So there goes the premise, right out of the gate.
But the lead character picked David Hasselhoff to die - factoring in that "The Hoff" is sort of getting up there in years, plus may be likely to engage in high-risk activities like sky-diving or driving his own version of the KITT car. Hell, even shaking hands with fans is a high-risk activity these days, you never know what you could catch. And who are the other celebrities that were picked in the pool? I just paused the film to find out - they include high-risk celebs like Charlie Sheen, Dennis Rodman, Gary Busey, Courtney Love, Mel Gibson, Tommy Lee, Britney Spears and Tara Reid. But I may have to call a NITPICK POINT on some of the other choices. Somebody picked Howie Mandel? Being a total germophobe will keep you alive longer, I believe. Hulk Hogan? He may be a big jerk, but he seems pretty healthy, except for the steroid damage. Tony Danza, Nicolas Cage and Joe Piscopo? They all seem like they're aging well - but I guess they had to round out the field somehow. Technically, you're not supposed to use even the NAME of a person in a movie without permission - so perhaps these are just the 18 celebrities who said "yes" when the producers called and were willing to sign a release. (One loophole method around this is to find a regular, non-celebrity person also named "Tommy Lee", for example, and have them sign a contract for $1 to use their name in the film. But good luck finding another person named "Britney Spears" or "Hulk Hogan".
The Hulk Hogan thing is a bit interesting - it seems he was a big part of this film at one time, but then had a dispute with WWE Studios (which produced this film) and then the whole film had to be re-cut to remove every scene he was in. It seems he made some racial remarks that resulted in the termination of his contract. I suppose it's possible that this film was once called "Killing Hulk Hogan", then they had to find Hasselhoff as a replacement - I'm not sure. It's a bit like "Being John Malkovich", which managed to cast John Malkovich to play himself - and if he hadn't been available and willing, what would they have done? Would they have cast another actor to play Malkovich, or changed the title of the film to accommodate whoever replaced him? "Being Terrence Stamp" just wouldn't have been the same film, admit it. But today's film could have easily been transformed into "Killing Shatner" or "Killing Stallone" or even "Killing Grammer", any larger-than-life celebrity willing to poke fun at his own image would have sufficed.
Still, it's great that Hasselhoff said yes and agreed to come along for the ride. He at least seems like he's in on the joke - another celebrity might have taken umbrage or not been able to laugh at himself in the same way. As long as everybody understands that reality is not being depicted here, we're viewing everything through the comedy lens and taking everything with many grains of salt.
That being said, any legitimate Celebrity Death Pool worth playing would probably have some kind of rule, or at least a guideline, that it's NOT O.K. for one of the players to try and kill their celebrity in order to collect. It's just not sporting. Chris makes three attempts at "offing the Hoff", once by playing upon his shellfish allergy, and once by spiking his juice at a party, before resorting to a handgun, the "old faithful" approach. It's a shame, when the film's storyline went to all the trouble of creating Fish, another celebrity death pool participant who had a mental breakdown after learning that his girlfriend was sexting another guy, and then crafted a long list of ways to kill that guy while institutionalized. Fish gives Chris his journal with over 100 ways to murder Hasselhoff, but only three get tried before Chris realizes that he's not the murdering type. (Yet he still tried twice before realizing this, so that's something of a contradiction. N.P. #3.
While I'm at it, NITPICK POINT #4 - if a celebrity was only 16 years old, and booked the "party room" at the nightclub, whose responsibility would it be to keep that female celebrity away from alcohol and drugs? Would that be the job of the nightclub manager, or the celebrity's mom-ager? It seems to me that this situation itself would create something of a scandal - namely, what is a 16-year old girl doing in a 21-and-over club? Wasn't she herself breaking the law by just being there? I guess this sort of thing might happen all the time - dating back to the Drew Barrymore days and probably before - but come on, there's a lot of blame to go around here. Turning the situation into a false "me too" charge against the club owner is not just bad form, it's missing the point - what was she doing there in the first place? Booking that space for her party was, in itself, a violation. And again, depicting a false sexual harassment claim in a film helps nobody IRL. Agreed, the club owner should have had a better system in place to check IDs, even those of the celebrities.
While I'm at it, a gay hit-man (sent to kill the Hoff by the loan shark, who realizes that he can't collect the money owed to him unless Chris wins the pot) seems like a progressive idea, but if that character just gets reduced to a series of stereotypes, than it's a bit questionable whether any new ground was broken here. The guy can't decide whether to kill Hasselhoff or make love to him, and like the Hoff himself, I'm wondering why those were the only two choices. Is he that unprofessional that he can't separate his job from his desires? A real hit-man wouldn't have this problem, a straight hit-man probably wouldn't have a problem with killing a woman, so what is it about a gay man that his sexual orientation is so easily going to get in the way of completing his assignment? He's so weak when under the spell of Hasselhoff that his judgment is clouded? It's a strange plot point at best, and homophobic in some way at worst. (I'm just not sure exactly how.)
I hesitate to compare this film to "Amadeus", but it's a similar plot-line. Once Salieri decides that Mozart doesn't deserve to live, how does a man just kill another man? How do you get close enough to someone to accomplish that? But since this is a comedy, you know everything's not going to have a tragic result, the Hoff is going to be fine, even if we can't see for a long time how that's going to happen. At least Hasselhoff understands that we've all got to go sometime, so we might as well have a party while we're here. Just don't hassle the Hoff's fans, and everything's going to be OK. I"m very curious as to what this film COULD have been, because the filmmakers have said that it would have been much funnier before all the re-editing, but then, filmmakers can say that about any film that failed to find an audience. The film is just 80 minutes long, so at least it won't take up too much of your time - that gave me a lot of extra time today to wonder where Jim Jefferies' Australian accent went. Because if Aussies don't HAVE to talk that way, then why the heck do they?
Also starring Ken Jeong (last seen in "Lady and the Tramp"), Jim Jefferies, Colton Dunn (last seen in "Other People"), David Hasselhoff (last seen in "Baywatch"), Dan Bakkedahl (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Jennifer Ikeda, Rhys Darby (last heard in "Trolls"), Victor Turpin (last seen in "Murder Mystery"), Jon Lovitz (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Master P, Will Sasso (last seen in "Movie 43"), Flula Borg (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Carlos PenaVega, Michael Winslow (last seen in "Cheech and Chong's Next Movie"), Sarah Colonna, Taylor Collee, Harry S. Murphy (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Alfred Adderly, Joseph S. Griffo, with cameos from Justin Bieber (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Rick Fox (last seen in "Holes"), Kid Cudi, Tony Rock, Mel B, Howie Mandel (last seen in "Gilbert"), Gena Lee Nolin, Pat Monahan.
RATING: 4 out of 10 fans in red swimsuits
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