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Retro Reviews

Hear Me Out- “Short Circuit 2” Isn’t As Bad As You Think

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Johnny Five Takes Manhattan!

Short Circuit 2 sure as shit might not be anyone’s favorite movie, and it’s definitely received a decent amount of hate as far as sequels go. But I’m here to set the record straight: It’s really not as bad as it’s made out to be.

I’ll admit to most people’s standards, you could consider my taste in films to be pretty awful. I was that kid who actually enjoyed terrible films like Garbage Pail Kids and Mac and Me. Are they badly made films? Yes, of course, they are. But I do find some sort of sick nostalgic joy in them every once in a while? Also, absolutely yes. There’s a sly charm inside “Black Sheep” films such as these that you won’t see elsewhere. A great example is the campy and comedic Howard the Duck as it was and still is, panned critically by a lot of cinephile snobs. But, honestly, how can you hate on a movie that showed us the first pair of duck tits ever on a theater screen?

Also, they were, indeed, the first pair of legit boobs I saw as a kid.

The sequel made two years after the original cult-classic Science-Comedy debuted to audiences didn’t seem to fare over well to the same group of people that embraced the now-named Johnny Five as their machine-wired counterpart to our human existence via the glorious 80s. Plenty of people talk a lot of shit about this sweet and sensitive robot turned vigilante scooting around New York City in the 80s- and I’ve had enough of it.

In fact, I’ll just let Johnny himself tell those people exactly what I think about their distaste for Short Circuit 2…

Number Five, now dubbed Johnny Five as he so enthusiastically named himself at the end of the first film, now finds himself in New York helping Ben Jahveri (Fisher Stevens) and tag-along scumbag street-slinger “friend” Fred (Michael McKean) get Ben’s business going into mass production with mini Johnny Five robot toys for kids. Cute, right? Well of course in the middle of this old warehouse Fred had scrounged up as ground zero for the assembly line, is right in the way of a couple of diamond burglars’ plans to heist a very valuable set of jewels. And of course, we all know that our formidable heroes will have to face off against these scoundrels towards the end of the film so we have to throw in a bunch of zany subplots to fill the void until then. Such as:

  • Upon Johnny Five realizing he’s in a city, the once midwestern town robot immediately gets duped into ripping off car stereos by a Latin gang; and then make him an honorary member. “Los Locos kick your ass! Los Locos kick your face! Los Locos kick your balls into outer space!”
  • Ben falls in love with the girl who discovered his toys and got him a deal for a line and is too socially awkward to tell her how he feels. J5 to the rescue as he hijacks a Times Square billboard where he helps woo his friend’s love interest while teaching us some insults in Spanish.
  • Fred tries to sell J5 on the side of his Rolex watch hustle, and our pre-Wall-E robot falls out of a skyscraper via the fear of him being a corporate slave. Just like Batman, this guy has all the gadgets and is saved by his backpack wing glider, and we get a fantastic pre 9/11 view of the New York City skyline!
  • Johnny gets arrested on the street because the cop thinks he’s a man in a suit or someone playing a joke.
  • Ben and Fred get locked in a freezer by the jewel thieves and are rescued in the most ridiculous way possible: calling Ben’s love interest (Cynthia Gibb) and using ye’ old faithful touch tones keypads to play oldies pop songs that give her clues to their location. Oh, with the help of a very nice taxi driver- which is already bullshit fantasy because ain’t no taxi driver in Manhattan that friendly.

All those filler antics have their place in the film for some sort of progression I suppose, be it the hammer over our heads that Johnny Five has emotions like the rest of us, or that we goddamn better remember the exact tune to “Doo Wah Diddy” if ever I get locked in a fish freezer. But perhaps the best moments in this follow-up film that originally starred Alley Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg, is when J5 is cornered by the jewel thieves and beaten to a “battery fluid bloody pulp” in broad daylight on a public sidewalk.

Hey, just another day in New York in the 80s!

What a fucked up segment in a movie that was aimed more at kids this time around. But eh, that’s just the beauty of 80s movies’ trauma.

This is where you might get some sort of feels going, or just laugh your ass off depending on what kind of sick fuck you are, (personally a mix of both is totally acceptable). Left for dead, J5’s backup power kicks and miraculously gets up, rather painfully and makes his way down an alley where Fred finds his frenemy. Lucky for them, Johhny damn near collapses by a Radio Shack and as we all know, that place is the Johns Hopkins Hospital for robots. With a little aid from Fred, the former military robot rebuilds himself into Travis Bickle from TAXI DRIVER and goes on a revenge rampage to track down the men responsible.He is so pissed off, he ignores his low battery warnings and literally revenges himself to death. Well, close to it anyway because what kind of ending would that be for kids?

It’s a 80s flick aimed at kids, so it would be a proper ending if you asked me.

Let’s get one thing straight. This movie may suck to a lot of people. But for the rest of us, it’s a feel-good kind of suck that we want to revisit over and over again. As a kid, we all liked these movies, this one in particular, but as I grew older, the child in people just died and formed some sort of disdain for this film; like it was idiotic to like this movie or something. And honestly, the hell with those people.

Worth noting, however, is the “Brownface” donned by Fisher Stevens as an immigrant from India, whereas looking at it now is a tad cringe and unacceptable. At the very least, they made the guy a scientist and not some corner store worker. This isn’t a dig at Fisher Stephens by any means. From what I understand, he worked very hard at getting the accent down and he is a talented guy. However, to this very day, the only guy able to pull this off and get away with it is Robert Downey Jr in TROPIC THUNDER. Other than that, looking back at films like this and SOUL MAN (1986), it’s just a little uncomfortable, especially in today’s climate of change.

Aside from the unpolitically correct problem there in SHORT CIRCUIT 2, the film does a pretty decent job of sending a good message about not being accepted in America and the tribulations of those going through the system to become a citizen. It’s a little subtle for young eyes, but upon viewing it as an adult, the theme seems a little more apparent. And hell, we get to see our Johnny become the first robotic citizen!

As zany, whacky and ridiculous as most of the movie is, at the end of the day, it really isn’t that bad of a sequel. In fact, I actually PREFER it over the first! Yeah, I said it. I just wish they would have made a third one!

Retro Reviews

WTF Am I Watching: Microwave Massacre (1983)

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Not since high school algebra have I been as terribly confused as I was today while scrolling through Shudder’s horror library. How, in all my years of watching cheddar-flavored schlock, had I never heard of Microwave Massacre? Just this morning, I’d have been willing to bet my brother’s kid that this film would be enjoyable – and since I love my nephew to pieces, I’m quite glad that I didn’t.

Typically, the WTF Am I Watching train only comes around once per week, but fuck it. We’ve been off the tracks since Black Devil Doll From Hell, so why conform now?

microwave massacre

Microwave Massacre fittingly begins with a glimpse at a fancy microwave oven and a deteriorated severed head, which, by my standards, is the peak of film openings. Unfortunately, when you reach the highest point of my fictional mountain, the only way left to go is down. A slow, methodical descent into Shitsville (The town at the bottom of the mountain, in case you didn’t know) is the respectable way to come down, but Microwave Massacre more-so slips on eagle shit and slams against every jagged rock until it reaches the surface below.

In layman’s terms, it’s really bad.

Immediately following the opening sequence, the camera follows a young woman around town, focusing primarily on her breasts and butt. This is painfully indicative of the woefully sexist film to come. The woman eventually arrives at a construction site and leans over to peek at the workers through a hole in a fence. At this point, a random man pinches her ass, pushes her boobs through the hole in the fence, and has sex with her.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like rape to me.

Strangely, Microwave Massacre plays this sexual encounter for comedy, with eccentric music accompanying the construction workers as they notice the breasts poking through the hole and rush over to find the woman that they’re attached to. When they reach the fence, the moaning woman removes her breasts from the hole and inexplicably hurries away. Can you see why I’m so goddamn baffled about this? If the woman was being raped, which we all agree that she was, why have her rush off so that she didn’t get caught having sex? Does this mean that she was willingly having sex with a stranger who grabbed her ass and made unsolicited advances? Your boy needs answers, and this film isn’t giving them to me.

All this in the first five minutes of the movie.

donald

The primary focus of Microwave Massacre is Donald, a construction worker who has grown tired of his nagging wife and the diet she forces him to follow. Rather than separating from his partner in the more traditional sense, Donald’s constant misery drives him to bludgeon her to death with a pepper grinder and pop her in the microwave. The way she would have wanted to go, he says, staring directly into the camera.

Now with a hankering for human flesh, Donald cuts his wife into dozens of pieces, wraps her up in tinfoil, and places her in the garage freezer. The only part of her body that isn’t covered in foil is her head, which brings to mind The Voices, a far superior horror comedy starring Ryan Reynolds. In that film, Reynolds’ character also keeps the heads of his victims in a refrigerator. While I doubt that Microwave Massacre was any sort of influence on that vastly different film, the connection of that tiny detail seems almost prophetic since there’s a roll of Reynolds Wrap on top of Donald’s meat freezer. This is the type of thing I’ll make conspiracy videos about when I’m 35 and in desperate need of life direction. Not that I couldn’t use some now.

Anyway.

Free from his burden of a wife, Donald starts hanging out with his work buddies more often, feeding them sandwiches made from her corpse. When he grows tired of her meat, however, Donald begins inviting prostitutes over to his house, where he kills them, cuts ‘em up, and cooks them in the microwave – all the while making Rodney Dangerfield style quips while looking, you guessed it, directly into the camera. This occurs repetitively throughout the last 45 minutes of the film, and just when we think Donald has been backed into a corner and that the plot will finally shake things up for us, he uses a bread roll to snuff a woman out and evade trouble.

A goddamn bread roll.

Microwave Massacre is the equivalent to that one friend who thinks he’s hilarious, though he’s actually just obnoxious and abrasive. The attempts at humor are desperate and sad, and the element of horror is non-existent. It’s not the so-bad-it’s-good type of horror movie that the title suggests: it’s just bad.

And I’m done talking about it.

Retro Reviews

WTF Am I Watching: Invasion of the Blood Farmers (1972)

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Suppressed deep within the crevices of my mind are hellish memories of Paris Hilton on a farm. A brief sifting through internet garbage determined that these waking nightmares were pulled from a reality series called The Simple Life, which I have no recollection of ever watching. Now, this could very well be a symptom of life’s recurring stress finally frying my brain to the point of memory loss, but after watching Invasion of the Blood Farmers, I’ve deduced that the likely alternative is this:

Paris Hilton is a druid queen fueled by blood that farmers are secretly harvesting from unsuspecting victims all over the world, and I’m having psychic visions of her terrifying reign. Totally logical, right?

invasion of the blood farmers

For this week’s installment of WTF Am I Watching, it was my pleasure to stream Ed Adlum’s low budget Invasion of the Blood Farmers on Shudder – emphasis on low budget. The production of this exploitation flick is so noticeably cheap that I half-expected the movie to end thirty minutes into the runtime with a title card describing what would’ve happened if the filmmakers didn’t run out of money. IMDb claims that the budget for Invasion of the Blood Farmers was $40,000, but if that’s true, I imagine it was paid for in pennies and IOUs.

The film takes place in rural New York, where otherworldly druids pose as farmers in order to harvest blood from civilians and resurrect their queen. You’d be hard-pressed to decipher that they’re druids throughout the first forty minutes of the movie, though, as they appear to be basic, straw hat-wearing farmer dudes with an insatiable bloodlust. Farmers drink dog blood all the time, don’t they? There’s no real difference here.

It’s not until we’re introduced to the leader of the druids, who talks like a twirly-mustached cartoon villain, when we find out exactly what the hell is going on – but even with the numerous scenes of this character standing in a singular spot and sprouting exposition like goddamn wildflowers, it’s hardly clear cut. It’s something to do with a magical key and finding a host for the blood, and the most heavily-featured druid farmer uses a cane that may or may not have some sort of mystical power… who the fuck knows. The point is that the plot of Invasion of the Blood Farmers is hardly the film’s strong suit.

invasion of the blood farmers

Fortunately for my entertainment, the nonsensical story elements only add to the charm of a film that’s brimming with fantastically low quality. There isn’t one decent performance to be found in Invasion of the Blood Farmers, and while most people would mark that as a criticism, I found this aspect of the movie to be endlessly amusing. It’s painfully obvious that the actors struggled to memorize their lines, not because I’m personally questioning the confidence of their dialogue delivery, but because they actually pause mid-sentence, NUMEROUS TIMES, and search for the words in their mind. It’s a rare feat for one of the actors to get through a line without pausing or stuttering, and it’s honest-to-god delightful.

I know it sounds like I’m bullying a film that couldn’t afford the security to protect itself from jerks like me, but these especially poor quirks are the foundation for a retro exploitation flick that I thoroughly enjoyed. I like my movies how I like my beer: dirt cheap and questionable. Invasion of the Blood Farmers proudly checks both boxes, so it’s alright in *my book.

*This book does not exist