Jamie
Red Scorpion. Red. Scorpion. I got nothing. But Slow Bullet? I could talk about that for days. The history of Slow Bullet is a long one. Way back when, even before BMT, I got an iPod touch for Christmas. This was before a smart phone so it was the first thing that really opened me up to things like podcasts. Having some interest in bad movies I searched around and selected a few to try. How Did This Get Made? had just started, but the one that seemed really interesting was The Flop House which had started a few years before. I was immediately hooked and insisted that Patrick also try it. Now fifteen years later and we still listen to the podcast every week. I love The Flop House. In my obsession I found out that the hosts had published some essays on bad movies in a zine called I Love Bad Movies. Obviously I bought all of them. In the first issue Elliott Kalan has two essays. One was about Nukie, which we watched almost immediately, and the other was Slow Bullet, a movie he claimed was the worst of all time. Of course we would watch that as well, except… you couldn’t find it. It basically didn’t exist. That is until I randomly stumbled upon a VHS rip on the Internet Archive not long ago. And so here we go! Slow Bullet! Oh yeah… and Red Scorpion (a precursor to the future Bring a Friend Red Scorpion 2).
To recap, Dolph Lundgren is the bad guy. Literally a Soviet soldier who is sent to the country of Mombaka in Africa to help quell an anti-Communist uprising. In order to do this they set up an undercover mission where he pretends to be a belligerent, disillusioned soldier sent to the brig for getting in a fight. He’s put into holding with the rebel leader and an American photojournalist who doesn’t trust Dolph one little bit. But by helping to stage an escape, Dolph gets them to take him to a rebel encampment. He attempts an assassination of the leader there, but given he’s a thousand feet tall and looks like a special forces soldier they anticipate this and stop him. When an attack by some kind of sentient supercopter (the real bad guy of the film) lands him back with his compatriots he is tortured for failing his mission. Now he really is disillusioned and really has to escape. In the desert he finds a Bushman who takes him to his village where he learns about the value of Capitalism… or maybe it’s the value of magical scorpions… or maybe just the value of being a good dude. I can’t remember. Now that he’s actually a good guy he rejoins the rebels and leads an attack on the Soviet forces. He hunts down his superior, destroys that supercopter and gets the girl (not really, this is a total bro movie for the bros). THE END.
Red Scorpion literally fell out of my brain the instant I watched it. Three interesting things about it (I won’t go so far as to say fun). One is the background that the makers of the film violated US law by filming in a South African controlled region in the age of Apartheid and stirred up quite a bit of controversy. So given we just did Soul Man for BMT, it looks like we’re doing great. Everything’s fine. IT’S FINE! Second is that this is an unexpected entry in the helicopter film genre. The helicopter is used like it’s a terminator sent from the future. That’s one of the few fun things in the film really. Most importantly, though, is M. Emmet Walsh has a scene where he kind of dances/shambles about. It made him look like a gremlin or something. It was wild and a bit disturbing. If you showed me that scene and asked me how old the man in it was I would have been like “uh, 80?” He was 53. It’s the only clear memory I retain from the film. I probably will never forget it. As for Slow Bullet, Elliott Kalan was correct. This really might be the worst movie ever made. I hate that I watched it.
Hot Take Clam Bake! Are we sure Red Scorpion didn’t hasten the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I mean, the film was released in April 1989. Moscow was really losing control by that point. I’m thinking maybe a few too many people got their hands on copies of Red Scorpion and started to get ideas. Wait, Dolph Lundgren was just trying to do right by Mother Russia! Now he’s getting tortured? Unacceptable. You know what else is unacceptable? Communism. Hot Take Temperature: The deserts of Mombaka.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *gif of me greasing up my body while looking in the mirror. I look impressed, but not too impressed, you know? I’m still humble I think* Let’s go!
The good? The only thing that is really truly good in this film is M. Emmet Walsh who is insane throughout and does a crazy dance in the middle which both me and Jamie clocked and were like “that’s a gif”.
The bad? Everything else. The movie is dull. Lundgren is truly terrible in the film. It is actually a little unclear if (1) he didn’t speak English well enough so the director decided on the strong silent character, (2) he literally didn’t speak Russian and sounded ridiculous when he did so the director decided on the strong silent character, or (3) the character was written as strong and silent. Regardless, he is greased up and speaks like 10 words, and it doesn’t work for me.
The BMT? Not much. Maybe once we do the sequel as a friend we’ll understand that this is one of those bridge franchises that is what BMT is all about. But for now I think despite the promise of insane 80s action, this one disappoints.
Oh boy, the friend this week was Slow Bullet. Uh … this isn’t a movie. This is like something I would make. But if I was a lunatic who thought I could make a movie. I’m sure Jamie went into the reason why we watched this film, but rest assured: we had to do this film someday. And now we have. F.
“Based solely on this poster, name 10 keywords which might describe events of themes of this film”: Action, Military, Helicopters, Desert, Rebellion, Control, Weaponry, Survival, Betrayal, Conflict. Of those, Helicopter and Desert are the most intriguing. I did decide to do quite a big job, specifically I took the 2769 films with the keyword Helicopter, and then I asked the LLM whether the poster has a helicopter in it. Of those, 529 of them it said the poster did have a helicopter (~19%). I then personally looked through them and found 101 which did not have a helicopter (~19%) and 428 which did indeed have a helicopter.
Now my eyes hurt, so I didn’t dig further, but that is a decently high false positive rate, high enough to annoy me, but also probably in line with a SOTA object recognition model and actually very good (you should see some of these helicopters it found, they are tiny!!). Anyways, I think I learned that the error rate is high enough that you kind of have to accept it or not use the data.
I did filter the original 529 down to 224 (~42%) based on whether a helicopter is mentioned in the wiki page. So from 2769 we are down to 224 (~8%) films which (maybe) have a helicopter in the poster and helicopter is mentioned in the wiki page. That is actually a workable tight set of films. The final stats my program then prints out based on that Letterboxd page is:
Total: 223; Potential Friend (>10K votes): 22; Already BMT: 18; Future BMT: 20; Total BMT: 36; Wide: 89
There are 159 films that fit all the criteria and have 3K+ votes on IMDb which is a solid threshold for a “real” film. Two funny bits. First, after McHale’s Navy there are four Chuck Norris films in a row in the to-be-watched section, Delta Force and it’s sequel, Invasion U.S.A., and Missing in Action. Second, looking at potential friends the two that pop out are Moon 44 and the amusingly named Biggles: An Adventure in Time. Could we do a whole helicopter cycle?! … no, there isn’t a romance (at least unless you expand to the keyword, then we got new Annie on the block).
A Fictional Country Alert (Where?) for Mombaka according to wikipedia. And fine, Worst Twist (How?) for Dolph Lundgren, after a betrayal, revealing he actually has a heart of pure gold. This movie is Bad, the main issue is Lundgren not being asked or being unable to do anything really, it makes the film pretty dull.
Learn about scorpions in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 