HAIRSHIRT

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Cliffhanger: An Appreciation

When I lived in Seattle, the theater company I'd helped found decided to put on a night of original shorts. We put out a call for submissions and, being a bunch of unknowns without the money to pay playwrights, we did not receive the latest from Stoppard and Mamet. What we did get seemed to have been written by the least talented students in the most cut-rate continuing education playwriting class ever. The stuff was just so pathetically bad that you could not read it without cracking up.

It was so bad, in fact, that we wanted to share it with an actual audience. It was decided, by those in the group who were more conscientious than me, that it might be a bit cruel to perform someone's work in order to mock it. And so we decided, instead, to write our own short plays and to make them as shitty as we could. And so A Night of Shitty Theater was born.

My company in Seattle did Shitty Theater as a fundraiser for three years, writing new stuff each year. When I moved to New York, I brought the idea with me and I've written two more shows of shit. In that time, I've become a connoisseur of shit. I've developed a pretty good eye for what differentiates a merely bad movie or play from a true work of shit.

And, in that spirit, I'd like to say a few words about what is, in my opinion, the Shittiest Movie of All Time: Cliffhanger.

A truly shitty movie doesn't just ladle on a hackneyed story or cliched characters. It revels in them. If there is a tired, worn-out line that could be used in a situation, the shitty screenwriter works that motherfucker in there. The plot to a shitty movie should not make sense when you stop and think about it. If the characters acted in a rational manner, the movie would have some degree of verisimilitude, which is the antithesis of the shitty aesthetic. A shitty movie can only get so far, though, with a shitty director and a shitty screenplay. To reach the apex of shititude, you have to have a cast of really, really bad actors. Cliffhanger has all of this. And more.

Cliffhanger came at the tail end of what might be called Sylvester Stallone's "successful years", before the

craptacular box office implosion of Judge Dredd and Demolition Man taught him that he was not a God and drove him to try to find some pathetic redemption in Copland. So in this flick, he's just got hubris pouring out of his ass. He thinks he's the Alpha and Omega of action heroes here, and, with his co-writing credit on the screenplay, you just know that he beefed up his share of "good" lines. And he plays opposite Janine Turner, in a film performance that helped insure she wouldn't give very many more film performances. Then there's Michael Rooker, who's character, I believe, is named Angry Best Friend. And the cast is topped by John Lithgow, who seems to be in on the joke and actually parodying the movie he's in.

The "plot" of Cliffhanger involves a delightfully over-complicated theft of government bonds by Lithgow and his band of each-creepy-in-their-own-cliched-way villains. The theft goes awry and they crash land (in a fantastic sequence shot with twigs and model planes) onto a mountain, where they face off against Stallone and Rooker. But Stallone and Rooker's relationship is complicated, you see, by the fact that Stallone failed to save Rooker's girlfriend in a beautifully heavy-handed opening sequence that haunts the two men until about half an hour into the movie, when they both forget it happened.

Stallone dispatches the villains, one at a time. He rides one like a sled down a mountain. He shoots another one with a magical fires-when-submerged gun while he's swimming below the ice in a frozen lake. He impales the lone black villain on a stalactite after the fiend implies that he's going to take sexual advantage of Turner.

All this happens while people say some of the worst lines ever spoken on screen. Lines like:

"Hard times, man? What do you know about hard times? You did it your way...and she died."
"There were times when I didn't know what I wanted to do more...love you...or hate you."
"Walker, you resilient bastard, you're still alive."
"We like it extreme!"
"The fight's not here, dammit! It's out there!"
"Damn you, Walker!!!"

All this and more. The thing ends with a Man vs Helicopter sequence that utterly rewrites the laws of physics. Lithgow's expression as he rides the chopper down to its inexplicably explosive destruction is worthy of the great Expressionist actor Max Shreck.

Dear God, I love this shitty, shitty movie. I have dreams of some day turning Cliffhanger into a Broadway musical. I've even written the exciting opening number, sung by Stallone's character as he's climbing the sheer face of a mountain. Sigh. If you have not yet had the pleasure of seeing this masterpiece of the Shitty Movie genre, I highly recommend you do so.

And now my question to you: What shitty movie is your favorite? I'm not talking, by the way, about a "guilty pleasure". I'm not talking about the Adam Sandler DVD you've got tucked away behind your Fellini collection that you watch because you think it's actually kind of funny. I'm talking about a movie that is so awful that you actually love it and are willing to say so proudly. C'mon, let's drag these films out into the daylight and love them for what they are.

posted by Joe # 5:18 PM

Comments:

Hmm. Dungeons & Dragons? I especially like the part where, for no reason at all, they turn into pure energy at the very end. Or maybe Van Helsing, which nobody else seems to realize was one of the worst movies of all time (I've actually had people tell me it was merely mediocre, the philistines).

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Cliffhanger: An Appreciation

Links

Archives