waking into a dream journal 12.22.07

this morning's reason to roundhouse-kick chuck norris in the face
silent rage
director: seriously, do i have to give someone credit? // 1982
cinema 4 rating: 3

the year this came out, i was a full-fledged chuck norris addict -- good guys wear black, the octagon, a force of one and an eye for an eye: watched 'em all over and over in my life's initial bout with video madness -- let's not forget return of the dragon against bruce lee, where i first saw him fight, and the multiple showings of breaker, breaker i willingly chose to endure on cable -- this one, though, was the first chuckie film i saw in a theater -- even in those less critical days, i wanted my money back -- the producers apparently wished to splice together a regular norris flying fists epic with halloween, basically pitting the mustachioed one against a michael myers-type serial killer, then in vogue in movie theaters -- they try to achieve this by having two ambitious cretins at a small-town hospital frankenstein an already mentally unstable murderer so that he becomes, literally, an unstoppable killing machine, as it mentions on the movie's release poster -- the doctors alter his physiology in such a manner that his body can heal even the most severe wounds in mere seconds -- hmmm, maybe he could get a role on heroes, where it seems half the characters now have this ability -- look, i will buy any plot device as long the filmmakers jump through the proper hoops in order to sell me on it, and as long as it fits their own twisted logic, even in a perverse fashion -- if these doctors are sooooo ambitious, how did they end up performing surgeries in the sort of small town that would hire chuck norris as sheriff? -- sure, if you are going to perform radical experiments on people, go to a small, out-of-the-way country where human life is cheap and the misfires may be disposed of far easier -- in the original story for lovecraft's reanimator (and in the second film), herbert west and pal refined their techniques in a war, where nobody would notice what they were up to -- but small-town america, where everyone knows everyone else, and nothing doesn't get noticed? i don't think so -- there might be small-town doctors with ambitions as large as these guys have, but there is a big difference between dreaming large and being able to pull off those huge dreams -- guys with this sort of talent are going to be somewhere a tad more prestigious -- besides, in case an experiment does succeed but then the subject goes apeshit, it seems to me that the better place to be, to avoid suspicion, would be a big city, where everyone is bugfuck crazy anyway, and any truly aberrant behavior on the part of the subject could be chalked up to just another wiggy hobo -- you'd think the hitch in these guys' plan would be trying this crap in a town lorded over by chuckie baby -- but he's too busy pitching his icky woo at über-cutie toni kalem to find one seven-foot tall killing machine in a town of about 400 people -- that's right, another movie where a hot girl has to feign enjoyment over kissing chuck on his densely carpeted tittie -- one big fight scene near the end, where chuck and the franken-killer grapple a lot, squeeze each others necks, roll around on the grass, and chuck only gets off a couple of his patented roundhouses -- hardly what a karate champion should be doing in a film until he is too infirm to pull off those moves -- chuck was in his prime then, thus, there is no excuse -- couldn't the doctors at least have downloaded a complete knowledge of martial arts into the monster before they sent him out? then we might have had a good scrap -- a couple of decent kill scenes; to show the killer's strength, they speed the film up, which is a tad too gimmicky, but the one where he slams ron silver's wife's cranium against the wall is pretty good -- oh, yes, ron silver is in this one, which is a decision only slightly smarter than the one where he decided to switch from democrat to republican, and became a presidential butt-smoocher and supporter of criminals like scooter libby -- back then, i was sad he got killed in this movie -- not anymore...