BEFORE: I know, I know, this one's not a documentary - but it makes my connection to the last doc in the Doc Bloc, so an allowance needs to be made. So if I can make it through this one, I can finish this year's Doc Bloc tomorrow.
A week after Sinead O'Connor was on SNL and tore up that picture of the Pope, Joe Pesci appeared on the same show and denounced her actions. Actually, he said that if he were the host, he would have "given her such a smack". That footage was used in "Nothing Compares", so Joe Pesci carries over from that one to this one. May the linking gods forgive me....
THE PLOT: A mob bagman finds that his luggage, containing the proof of his gang's latest hit, has been switched.
AFTER: God damn, this movie has been sitting on my DVR for three years, no lie. I recorded it in February 2020, that's PRE-pandemic, and in all that time I couldn't find a way to link to it. OK, I wasn't really trying that hard, because the movie looks really stupid. BUT it's providing a valuable link tonight to allow one more documentary tomorrow, plus it gets me one step closer to my Mother's Day movies. That doesn't mean I'm going to cut the film any slack, though.
This is a movie with a premise that doesn't make any sense to begin with, and then things only get worse and more confusing and pointless after that. OK, so there's this mob guy who needs to deliver proof to his boss that a whole group of other mob guys got wiped out, so he does the most natural thing, he puts their heads in a duffel bag. I'm gonna stop you right there, because WTF? Can't he just take a picture of the dead guys? Or, like, maybe a finger from each one of them? Nope, it's GOT to be the heads, and he's got to deliver them across the country, right away, because if you think about it, they're going to start decomposing pretty quickly, and then how will the mob boss know that THOSE guys got rubbed out?
OK, so he's got to get these heads across the country fast, no naturally he takes the duffel bag and gets on a plane with it. OK, I'm gonna stop you again, because first of all, EWWWWWWW, and secondly, wouldn't those heads start to stink pretty quickly, or wouldn't blood be dripping out of the bag on to the other airline passengers? OH, he wrapped them up first? Well, sure, but still, the smell of 8 human heads in a bag on an airplane with poor circulation. How is this going to, you know, WORK? Well, he distracts the TSA agents at the airport, this film was made before 9/11, so I don't know, maybe? Back in D.B. Cooper's day there was NO TSA, nobody scanned your bag at the airport, you could just walk out on the tarmac with your bag and climb those steps and get on the plane, no metal detector, nobody searching your luggage, nada. Thanks for ruining things for everyone, D.B. Cooper!
OK, so once he gets to San Diego, after being forced to check his bag of heads, and the flight attendant PROMISING him that his bag would be the first loaded off the plane, he finds that the annoying passenger in the next seat has taken his bag from the luggage carousel, and he's got a VERY SIMILAR bag, only with no human heads in it. Ha, ha, that's funny because so many bags look alike at the airport! Only it's not very funny at all. And this was before people needed to find a way to distinguish their black suitcase from every other black suitcase by adding a red ribbon, but then the problem became, how do you distinguish your black suitcase with a red ribbon from every other black suitcase with a red ribbon? My BFF Andy used to cut out letters in bright yellow tape and stick them on his suitcase to spell out "THIS IS NOT YOUR BAG".
Tommy, our screw-up mobster, now only has a bag of clothes and someone's unproduced screenplay, and has to figure out where the mystery man with HIS bag went. Now me, I'd start by paging the name of the screenplay's author at the airport, I mean, it's worth a shot, right? And I suppose there's some tiny lesson here, because if Tommy had only listened to the guy in the seat next to him, he would have recognized his name on the screenplay, or he would have remembered that the guy in the next seat, Charlie, was headed to Mexico after meeting his girlfriend's parents in San Diego. Look, I know all too well that San Diego is like the gateway to Tijuana, on one of my many trips to San Diego Comic Con I took the trolley south to Chula Vista to see "Iron Man 3", and stayed out so late I almost missed the last trolley back to my hotel, I almost had to get a second hotel room just a few miles away from Tijuana.
(I also remember that coming back from San Diego, with a planeload of people who had clearly spent Comic-Con adding to their collections of posters, toys, or collectibles, and refused to check those items before boarding the plane. Look, the rules are, one SMALL carry-on bag and ONE other personal item, any more than that and you've just GOT to check some luggage - but for some reason the flight attendants never enforced the rules, so I got to spend the flight back to NYC with my bag under my seat, because everybody's bags full of Con Junk was taking up all the space in the overhead bins. Bastards.)
Look, the movie just gets worse from there. Tommy, who's under deadline to find the heads and deliver them to a mob boss in San Diego, flies all the way to Maryland because that's the address on the screenplay, and he locates Charlie's roommates and tortures them until they help him figure out where Charlie is meeting those future in-laws in Mexico. Which is stupid, because come on, it had to be within driving distance of San Diego, there can't be TOO many resorts in Mexico that close. Meanwhile, for some reason Charlie gets to the resort and DOES NOT open his duffel bag right away, which is also stupid, because that's always the first thing you do when you get to a hotel, you open your bag and you start putting clothes in a drawer or a closet.
It's a good long while before anyone opens the duffel and the heads start falling out, causing anyone who sees one to totally freak out, Charlie's girlfriend's mother thinks he's a serial killer, but she's also so hysterical that she can't express herself in words, and her family sedates her, you know, just to be on the safe side. It's ridiculous how impossible it becomes here for any character to express a rational thought to another character, or to even come close to what the hell is going on, for a solid half hour at least. It feels a lot like a screenwriter started a story here and simply had no idea how to continue it - but MAYBE a way to end things, so come on, let's just stall for time. The writers' strike that started yesterday is maybe something that highlights the importance of GOOD writing, but a BAD screenplay also manages to do the same thing. A movie plot needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end, you can't just say, "Well, two out of three ain't bad."
Charlie and his girlfriend try to bury the heads in the desert, but that doesn't work out because a gang of Mexican thugs interrupts them and bullies them, or something. Then Charlie, for some unknown reason, thinks that flying BACK across the country with the heads and just giving them back to Tommy will save his roommates, but that's also a terrible idea. His father-in-law gets stopped with a head in his possession, and now he's in jail for murder. Yeah, great plan, Charlie.
Tommy gets Charlie's roommates to acquire MORE heads for him, thankfully it's a college with a medical program and there are a bunch of cadavers lying around (again, EWWWWWWW) but doesn't this defeat the whole purpose of the trip, to present EXACTLY THOSE 8 heads to the mob boss, so he can confirm end of life? Finding 8 other heads that sort of look like those guys, but not really, probably isn't going to cut it. Anyway, didn't Tommy miss that deadline, like five days ago? You told me at the beginning that if the big mob boss didn't get those heads the next day, then something really bad would happen. What happened to THAT plot point?
There's always a dog or a coyote or something trying to eat one of the heads, and somebody's car is always breaking down, and honestly, there's nothing funny about any of that, it's just all a waste of everybody's time - the actors AND the audience. By the time one of Charlie's roommates breaks down and starts running around the airport carrying a human head, claiming it's his "best friend" you, too, will wonder what the point of this little exercise in bad writing is all about. Granny Bennett gets thrown off a cliff and man, she was the lucky one - she didn't have to endure the last third of the movie.
The director of this film has an Oscar for writing "Dead Poets Society" - which, honestly is a bit hard to believe, the two films are like night and day in terms of quality. And at the end of the day, a prosthetic head always LOOKS like a prosthetic head, even if it's cast from a mold of a real actor's face, there's only so much you can do to make it look like a real head, and honestly, I don't think you can ever get there, effects-wise. At least you sure couldn't in 1997. When there's a dream sequence and the heads are seen singing "Mr. Sandman", obviously they pulled the old "put the actor's head through a hole in the table" bit. I wish there had been a better way of filming that, like maybe through stop-motion animation or something, but no, it's super janky. What a cop-out.
Next time, just ship the human heads via FedEx, and save everyone the trouble, OK?
Also starring Andy Comeau (last seen in "One Hour Photo"), Kristy Swanson (last seen in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), George Hamilton (last seen in "Doc Hollywood"), Dyan Cannon (last seen in "After the Sunset"), David Spade (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania"), Todd Louiso (last seen in "The Last Word"), Anthony Mangano (last seen in "The Family"), Joe Basile, Ernestine Mercer, Frank Roman (last seen in "Envy"), Howard George, Matthew Fonda, Michael A. Nickles, Glenn Taranto, Bart Braverman (last seen in "20 Million Miles to Earth"), Sally Colon-Petree, Irene Olga Lopez (last seen in "Sunset"), Tom Platz, Endre Hules (last seen in "Skyscraper"), Calvin Levels, John Zurlo, Roger Cobra, Jeff Sanders, Ric Sarabia (last seen in "Live by Night"), Tony Montero, Michael Groh, Terri J. Vaughn
RATING: 2 out of 10 enchiladas with molé
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