Really Awful Movies

Deadly Crossing

Seagal the hoarse whisperer is still in the movie game, for some reason. He should’ve been red-carded a decade ago, abandoning anything resembling fluid movement for eons with respect to martial arts.

In Deadly Crossing, Steven is Elijah Kane, and the ethnically ambiguous aikido master is apparently a Cajun Seattle cop. It’s a reprise of the Cajun accent he started and then abandoned midway through 2005’s dud Submerged which we discussed on our Really Awful Movies podcast devoted to some latter day films featuring Lord Steven.

Deadly Crossing, which sounds like a dangerous intersection for pedestrians due to poor signage, was actually spliced together from a limited-release TV show True Justice: Deadly Crossing that aired on ReelzChannel (is that for realz?).

And it’s pretty police procedural stuff. Kane is breaking up the local heroin scene and going after Russian baddies as part of an elite police special task force, because as we all know very well, Seagal is a special forces op in about oh, 75% of all his films.

When two Chinese-American shopkeepers are gunned down and their daughter is found cowering in the bushes, our man Steve drops a bit of Mandarin before calling for a translator.

The trail leads to a trailer park and a gangster named Domion, a guy “so bad he makes onions cry.” Where’s a re-animated Muhammad Ali when you need him?

Seagal’s new recruit, a hot blonde, and a hot brunette, go undercover at a local strip joint to try and glean info from a gangster improbably named Nikolai Putin and improbably accented by Gil Bellows (Shawshank Redemption), whose performance is beyond redemption.

In a surprising bit of sexism (even for a film like this) one of the gangsters refers to a stripper as a “clam slammer” and in true terrible action movie form, you get legit awful lines like, “you slip, we all fall,” and “Russians don’t play.”

At one point Seagal murmurs, “immigrants are my kinda people,” which prompts the question, what kind of person, ethnically-speaking, is Steven? Maybe it’s Hungarian as he is sporting a utility scrub brush version of Bela Lugosi’s “V” hairdo from White Zombie.

Since he’s “Cajun” (in Submerged we got a taste of the accent when he made folksy references to alligators) Seagal at one point says, “Even an old blind rooster hits a piece of corn once in a while.”

And corn this is. Bland, and despite this being Seattle, nary a Starbucks in sight to provide a jolt. There’s also a warehouse shootout. Because, what action movie is complete without a warehouse shoot-out?

** (out of 5)

Can’t Stop the Music

[CHECK OUT OUR CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC PODCAST!]

The “Official Film of the Village People.” We’d expect nothing less and accept no imitations. Can’t Stop the Music (as much as we’d like to try) is a trailblazer of sorts: it won the first ever Razzie.

A fictionalized account of the gimmicky West Village disco act, it also features Bruce Jenner, of all people, as a square partner in a tax law firm that branches out into the entertainment space to sign the young upstarts (who at this point, weren’t particularly young and whose career was backsliding a bit after knocking it out of the park with hits like “Macho Man” and the second most ubiquitous stadium singalong in the world, “YMCA”).

Steve Guttenberg is Jack, the roller skating principal songwriter and creative force behind the new group (a phrase that conjures up insult king Jeff Ross’ hilarious put-down of Gene Simmons* during the latter’s roast, “why’d you guys break up, un-creative differences?”)

Jack is in a platonic relationship with roommate and ex-model Samantha, who has connections in the music business that eventually lead to a new group being formed in a Greenwich backward. How they got their name is a decidedly underwhelming set piece and pretty far removed from, say, a John Lennon dream about putting a beat behind a beetle.

Samantha then gets a gig as the TV face of the American Dairy Association, and uses the advertising platform to somehow plug the band’s music, featuring kids dressed up as each one of the People.

Goes without saying that Can’t Stop the Music is pretty darn wacky stuff.

In the book, Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr**, author Robert Hofler describes the reception the film received: “audiences were respectfully quiet, but in San Francisco they guffawed at the movie’s strong current of homoerotica…”

The Washington Post asked, “Does anyone believe that the Village People is a singing group with staying power or lasting appeal?” And Yahoo! called it “an absolute trainwreck of a movie,” which is just the way we like ’em.

Not as charmingly cool as Xanadu, nor as criminally misguided and bordering on the offensive as The Apple, it’s still worth a look.

**1/2 (out of 5)

*We both dig KISS regardless and speaking of the group, they were also signed to the Village People’s record label, Casablanca].

**Carr managed Tony Curtis and Peter Selllers among others, and produced Can’t Stop the Music