Striking Terror in the Hearts of Homophobes

It’s Halloween so I feel compelled to review something seasonally appropriate. The works of Romero, Carpenter and Craven are typical fodder for this sort of thing, or I could look at a couple of Frank Whale and Jacques Tournier films if I wanted to get all New York Times about it (I don’t). Instead, I thought I’d explore a different type of horror director, one who pays homage to horror conventions yet puts his own unique spin on the genre. This Halloween, I’m delving into some select works from David DeCoteau.

No one should watch a David DeCoteau horror movie expecting to be scared. Even his best ones are standouts not because they succeed as horror movies, but because they possess that so-bad-it’s-good magic. Yes, DeCoteau is that kind of filmmaker, occupying the same strata as Fred Olen Ray.

Like FOR, DeCoteau is extremely prolific, with 165 directorial credits to his name as of this writing (FOR only has 159, but he has more writing and acting credits than DeCoteau). Also like FOR, DeCoteau has worked in numerous genres, from hardcore porn to family-friendly Christmas movies. Yet, regardless of the movie’s genre, the era in which it was made, or pseudonym the director uses, there are certain signifiers that reveal a movie as being a DeCoteau product, signifiers that I’ll highlight in the movies below. Though many of these themes and techniques aren’t unique to the director on their own, they are hallmarks of a DeCoteau product when combined with some very specific, recurring tropes.

DREAMANIAC

The moment Thomas Bern realized he
didn’t want to be in movies anymore.

DeCoteau’s first horror movie was this 1986 Nightmare on Elm Street cash-in (one of the movie’s taglines was, “You Don't Have to Live on Elm Street to Have Nightmares”). Adam (Thomas Bern, in his screen debut/swan song), an aspiring heavy metal musician who is never shown playing or listening to it, agrees to let his girlfriend’s snooty sister Jodi (Lauren Peterson) rent his place to host a party for her prospective sorority. When Jodi’s guests arrive it’s soon evident that the sorority she wants to join is Phi Kappa Kunt. “Do I know you?” Jodi’s sister Pat (Kim McKamy) asks Francis (Dixie Carter lookalike Cynthia Crass), a sorority member bedecked in a giant foreskin. “I doubt it,” Francis sniffs. “I went to private schools all my life and I’m rich as shit.” The men attending this party don’t fare much better, being either dorky, goofy or smarmy. Only Pat is remotely likable, though I found her initial interaction with Adam to be borderline abusive.

Julia Sugarbaker goes to college.

Luckily for the good of humanity, Adam’s also into black magic (don’t let that Def Leppard tee fool you) and has summoned a succubus, Lily (Sylvia Summers), who’s down to fuck and/or kill the party guests, though she drags her feet doing either. Among the notable-but-improbable kills: Lily entices one of the hotter guys, Ace, to strip down to his tighty whities, wraps an extension cord around him and electrocutes him, somehow. Another head-scratching kill scene has a character getting decapitated by a power drill.

Though Dreamaniac has a few OK practical effects (it’s one of DeCoteau’s bloodier movies, though that “too gory for the silver screen” tag on the poster art is total bullshit), whatever schlocky potential it may have had is dashed by Helen Robinson’s lame script, the high school play-caliber acting and heavily padded runtime. That it was shot on video doesn’t help, though the quality of its cinematography is more early ’80s porn movie than shot on shitteo. That said, the picture is still pretty murky and fuzzy, making it even more of a chore to watch. 

What makes a David DeCoteau film unique? Exhibit A.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Barely 40 minutes of story to an 82-minute runtime. (I swore when I first watched it the movie was 1 hour, 42 minutes, but maybe it just felt that long.)

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Repeated footage; footage of people walking/running; repeated footage of people walking/running; slooooow pans; even slower opening and end credits.

Kim McKamy considers whether porn
might be less demeaning.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Kim McKamy took the name Ashlyn Gere in 1990 and had a long career in adult video.

Homoerotism Level: Lower side of medium, though after executive producer Charles Band screened the movie someone from his office called DeCoteau and asked, “Are you gay?”

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: Less than 10%, though Dreamaniac has more male nudity than other DeCoteau titles.

Will it Scare Homophobes? They may bitch about the amount of man-ass on display, but otherwise, no.

THE KILLER EYE

Ryan Van Steenis never saw the Eighth
Dimension coming.

DeCoteau takes the 1950s drive-in creature feature into the craptastic direct-to-video market of 1999, spicing it up with a heavy helping of homoeroticism and a generous side of naked women. Right off the bat we have “mad” scientist Grady (Jonathan Norman) hiring a hustler (pouty twink Ryan Van Steenis) to be his lab rat. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather screw, Doc?” the hustler asks. “’Cause my rates are the same.” Unfortunately for him, Grady wants a test subject, not a blowjob. The scientist administers eye drops that should, if successful, give the subject a view into “the Eighth Dimension.” Instead, the drops transport an entity from the Eighth Dimension into the blonde twink’s eye, causing it swell so large that it pops from his head and becomes sentient. (I just wrote that!)

Grady, however, was too busy arguing with his horny wife Rita (“You want to talk about you and your orgasms now?”) to notice any of these developments. It’s only after Rita (Jacqueline Lovell) leaves to have a three-way with their downstairs neighbors, hunky stoners Tom and Joe (David Oren Ward and Roland Martinez, respectively), that Grady notices his subject is now dead. So, he calls his assistant Morton (Kostas Koromilas), who conveniently lives in the same building, to, well, assist him, much to the chagrin of Morton’s young wife Jane (Nanette Bianchi). Though it would seem that a giant floating eyeball would be hard to miss, quite some time passes before it’s discovered, even though it’s frequently hovering only a few feet away, using its phallic-like optic nerve to get Rita off while her two stoned studs doze on either side of her, then feel up Jane while she showers. 

A typical night with Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife
and their pool boy.

Meanwhile, Creepy Bill (Blake Adams, billed here as Blake Bailey), a guy who, near as I could tell, just hangs out in the apartment building’s attic, happens upon the dead hustler’s body. Because Bill’s not quite right in the head, he has no interest in blackmailing Grady (“When you tell on others, you’re just telling on yourself,” he says). Instead, he joins the search for the titular Killer Eye, which at this point is more accurately described as the Creeping Molesting Eye. Rita, Tom, Joe and Jane join their efforts to trap the giant eye, to no avail. (“It’s been floatin’ and fucking for hours, so it’s got to be getting tired,” observes Creepy Bill.) But it soon becomes quite obvious that one member in their group has no interest in stopping the sentient eyeball.

The giant, phallic eyeball from
the Eighth Dimension.

This one’s kind of fun, actually. The movie knows what it is and does what it can within its limited budget, managing to deliver a few laughs in the process. It doesn’t do it efficiently, however. For all the amusing moments, there are just as many sluggish, pointless ones. The acting is weak, but still leagues above what was seen in Dreamaniac, with several cast members delivering semi-professional performances.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Really only enough story here to support 70 of this movie’s 90 minutes.

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Extended PG-13 sex scene; extended R-rated shower scene; repeated footage, especially of that big rubber eye; slooooow pans; even slower end credits.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Jacqueline Lovell worked in adult film under the name Sara St. James.

Homoerotism Level: High (see below).

#NoHomo

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: David Oren Ward and Roland Martinez never once put on pants, so a good 30-40%.

Will it Scare Homophobes? They’ll definitely be nervous, though Lovell and Bianchi are well utilized as the movie’s beards.

VOODOO ACADEMY

The spirit of Voodoo Academy
possesses Chad Burris.

Much like this movie’s young protagonist when he enrolls in the Carmichael Bible College, my husband and I didn’t fully know what we were getting into when we rented this DeCoteau offering in the early 2000s. We knew it was trash, of course, and our expectations were appropriately low, but then we started watching it and soon realized we’d happened upon a true hidden gem.

Like The Killer Eye, this 2000 release takes a premise that would’ve been common on the movie screens of yesteryear and pulls it into the 1990s, with DeCoteau putting his own, unmistakable spin on the material.

Christopher Sawyer (Riley Smith) is a devotee of Rev. Holice Carmichael’s “Neurocystic Christian Church” (a mix of Catholicism and Scientology, as one character describes it), so he’s thrilled to be accepted into the reverend’s bible college. Of course, the school’s extremely small, all-male student body — Christopher would be the school’s sixth student — is a bit of a red flag, but Mrs. Bouvier (Debra Mayer), the school’s sole administrator, explains that’s only because Carmichael Bible College is still an experimental institution. The school isn’t even accredited yet, another red flag, as is Rev. Carmichael’s sudden introduction of confessional booths. And seeing how the Rev (Chad Burris, who looks like he could be Jeff Stryker’s little brother) interacts with his students — placing hands on their muscular thighs, fixing his seductive gaze on their young, handsome faces — you just know those booths have a glory hole. 

Kevin Calisher looks over Carmichael
Bible College’s newest student.

It’s not until Christopher’s hunky classmates succumb to the effects of drugged wine (Christopher, a staunch teetotaler, abstained), and begin writhing in masturbatory torment that the devout new student decides to investigate. When one of the students, Rusty (Huntley Ritter), walks, zombie-like, upstairs to Mrs. Bouvier’s apartment (“That’s it, Rusty, follow your urges,” Mrs. B intones), Sawyer follows and discovers the truth: Carmichael Bible College isn’t a religious school at all—it’s a front for a voodoo priestess, and its students are all sacrifices to Macudo!

Simply put, Voodoo Academy is DeCoteau’s masterwork, second only to his one stab at indie legitimacy, 1997’s Leather Jacket Love Story. While the acting isn’t that good (it’s still a DeCoteau movie), the male cast gamely sells the homoerotism, especially Burris and, as class smartass Billy, Kevin Calisher. What’s amazing about this movie is that though its content is relatively tame, it’s so heavily suggestive that by the time the final credits roll you’ll swear you saw the guys suck each other off.

The boys of Voodoo Academy can’t fight the feeling.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Though 92 minutes is a wee bit longer than it needs to be (80 minutes is closer to the mark), Voodoo Academy doesn’t overstay its welcome. 

Rusty is swiftly punished for following his urges.

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Lingering shots of guys writhing in their underwear; repeated footage; extended opening credits; slooooow pans.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Despite all the guys in the cast looking like they were plucked from Chi Chi LaRue’s stable, none of them have done porn. Debra Mayer was in several Full Moon films prior to her death in 2015, but no porn.

Homoerotism Level: Were it any higher it would be hardcore gay porn.

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: Oh, 60%, easy.

Will it Scare Homophobes? They’ll be fucking terrified.

EDGAR ALLEN POE’S HOUSE OF USHER

Frank Mentier and Michael Cardelle make
awkward, awkward love.

With his 2008 retelling of the famous Poe tale, DeCoteau doesn’t waste time with mere homoeroticism. This one’s motherfuckin’ gay! What’s more, he made it for Here! TV, the gay network that gave us the wonderfully terrible series Dante’s Cove and The Lair. Was I giddy at the prospect of watching this? You bet your Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs!

Unfortunately, Here! TV didn’t get the director of Voodoo Academy; it got the director of the 1313 series. DeCoteau’s interest in the material doesn’t go much further than cashing a paycheck, so what should have been a campy homo horror is a boring slog. He couldn’t even be bothered to eliminate the street traffic noise from scenes that are supposed to be taking place in the gardens of a remote country estate.

Part of the movie’s undoing is its casting. Frank Mentier, as the eccentric Roderick Usher, and Michael Cardelle, as his childhood friend Victor Reynolds, are emblematic of DeCoteau’s erotomania: buff, smooth and young. While Cardelle does look good in boxer briefs — because of course DeCoteau’s going to get him stripped down to his underwear — it’s nigh impossible to believe that his character has traveled the world and seen some shit when we suspect the actor playing him is filming his scenes during his high school spring break (and, based on Cardelle’s performance, between bong hits). Mentier, looking and sounding more bored than stoned, appears to be slightly older — he was possibly on his spring break from university — but not much more believable. These characters needed to be played by men who could act, not boys who could not. Jaimyse Haft, as Roderick’s sister Madeline, tries to deliver a real performance, bless her heart, but, alas, she just doesn’t quite have the acting chops to pull it off.

Who farted?

OK, I know better than to watch DeCoteau’s movies for the acting, but when so little regard is shown for all other production aspects (the script, art direction, the pacing) you become less forgiving. The one possible saving grace House of Usher had was its sex scenes, something to appease the viewers until there’s a Next Door Studios’ House of Usher, but again DeCoteau drops the ball. Mentier makes out with both Cardelle and a blonde whatsisname, yet it barely qualifies as softcore. The actors never even remove their underwear, instead yanking them below their buttocks but keeping their genitalia covered. You’d think a man who has directed gay porn would have a better grasp of the mechanics of sex. I wasn’t expecting to see any dicks, but I thought we could get sex scenes that reached the same level of explicitness as a Shannon Whirry erotic thriller, or, you know, Dante’s Cove.

Unless you share DeCoteau’s fondness of cute guys walking around in their underwear, House of Usher isn’t even worth hate watching. Better to stick with Roger Corman’s 1960 adaptation. Or try your luck with this 1989 adaptation or this one from 2006, both movies looking like they deliver the fun kind of bad DeCoteau didn’t. If nothing else, the acting should be better.

Michael Cardelle reminds us we’re watching
a David DeCoteau movie.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Though there should be enough story to flesh out an 84-minute movie, Simon Savory’s uninspired script, coupled with the sluggish pacing and bad acting, make House of Usher barely tolerable for one hour.

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Repeated footage; lingering shots of guys in their underwear; people walking; extended softcore sex scenes; slooooow pans.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Jill Jacobson of Falcon Crest fame(?) has a cameo so inconsequential it’s insulting.

Homoerotism Level: Extremely high.

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: 50%, augmented with some male rear nudity, but neither helps.

Will it Scare Homophobes? Yes, but they’ll be bored soon enough. 

Boo!

Dreamaniac and The Killer Eye are currently streaming on Tubi.

A Gay Man Watches Straight Porn #3: ‘The Devil in Miss Jones’

Even mainstream critics couldn’t
say enough kind things about
The Devil in Miss Jones.

Though I’d like to think I have a fairly well-rounded appreciation of cinema history, I realize there are serious gaps in my education. Some omissions I’m OK with: I don’t care that Battleship Potemkin is touted as one of the fundamental landmarks of cinema, I just can’t work up a desire to see it; and once I discovered D.W. Griffiths’ controversial KKK silent epic The Birth of a Nation was three-plus hours—which is two-plus hours more racist silent epic than I can tolerate—I decided I could live happily without ever having verified its appalling content with my own eyes.

There are other culturally significant films, though, that I’d regret not seeing before I die. So, to that end, I watched the 1973 porno chic classic THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES.

The Devil in Miss Jones is directed by Gerard Damiano, who in 1972 directed a little movie called Deep Throat. While both movies had a huge impact on the culture, to put it mildly, they couldn’t have been more different. Deep Throat is a dirty joke of a movie that owed its mainstream notoriety as much to highly publicized obscenity charges as it did to its graphic celebration of fellatio. The Devil in Miss Jones, on the other hand, is way more polished, its tone serious and somber. Like, really somber, as in the titular Miss Justine Jones (Georgina Spelvin) slits her wrists within the movie’s the first eight minutes.

If this makes you horny, please seek help.

Justine’s suicide lands her in purgatory, which looks like a Gothic-themed dining room (in actuality, Harry Reems’ house). Waiting for her is Abaca (John Clemons, affecting the demeanor of an effete bureaucrat). Abaca informs Justine that though she’s done nothing bad while alive—why, she’s still a virgin!—the rules dictate that suicides go to hell, a surprisingly Catholic worldview for a porno movie. Abaca is sympathetic to Justine’s plight (he delicately refers to her taking her own life as an accident), but rules are rules. “It’s not as though I’m on a commission basis,” he says. “It makes no difference to me which way they go.”

For someone condemned to spend eternity in hell, Justine is surprisingly accepting of her fate. What irks her is she didn’t do anything in her life to make hell worth it. Abaca thinks she wants to be returned to the living to steal and murder, but Justine has something far less criminal in mind. “If I had my life to live over, I would live a life filled…engulfed…consumed by lust!” Abaca, clearly tickled—possibly aroused—by the idea, decides to let the poor dear spend her time in purgatory exploring her hitherto ignored sexuality. 

Passing through a door, Justine is transformed from looking like a Depression-era school marm to a hot-to-trot divorcée plotting to seduce the UPS deliveryman. Waiting for her is Deep Throat stud Harry Reems, wearing nothing but a mustard-colored bathrobe and a lecherous grin. He introduces himself as the Teacher, and then releases her from her inhibitions in much the same manner faith healers “cure” cancer, albeit without all the shouting and begging for money.

Or similar to an chimpanzee trying to tear a person’s face off.

Then the Teacher begins his lesson, starting with inserting a finger-like dildo up Justine’s ass, also similar to a faith healer, except consensual. Afterwards he gives Justine a crash course in penis appreciation, specifically sucking and riding one (“Please, I want to know what it feels like in my cunt,” begs Justine). A rapturous Justine asks the Teacher to “take that thing out of my backside” and give it to her. She then rubs the lil’ dildo across her face and sticks it in her mouth. (I don’t care if ass-to-mouth is a popular porn category, I still think it’s gross, though given the constraints of shooting on film it’s a safe bet that dildo was washed between the shot of its removal and the shot of Georgia sucking on it. I need to believe this is true.)

After Justine’s first orgasm, she finds herself in a basement, reclining on a plastic-covered bed. Judith Hamilton (billed as Clair Lumiere) arrives, rubbing some gray-silvery oil all over Justine’s naked body before rubbing her face in Justine’s nethers. Fun fact: Judith Hamilton used to be Spelvin’s roommate and frequently co-starred with her, including a lesbian scene in the movie 3 a.m. edited by Orson Welles.

Judith Hamilton also kind of resembles Kristen Stewart,
though there are striking differences. For example, one of these
women has charisma, while another starred in the Twilight franchise.

Most guys probably wanted to give themselves a furious
tugging during this scene, but I just wanted to give that
tub a serious scrubbing.

Justine prepares to orally traumatize a snake.

Following an interlude with an enema hose, Justine returns to worship the Teacher’s cock (“I’m only content when I have you in my mouth”). Once her “lesson” reaches its gooey conclusion, Justine has some private time with a bowl of fruit, a masturbation scene my husband found icky and I found silly. But what do we know? Maybe all women are tempted to stuff grapes in their cooches. More troubling was Justine’s giving a literal snake literal head. How freaked out must that snake have been?

That snake, incidentally, was the pet of Marc “Mr. 10 ½” Stevens, whose 10 ½ is slobbered over by Justine—now wearing garish eye makeup to emphasize her “whorish” desires—and another woman, Sue Flaken. Flaken was originally cast as Miss Jones’ lead until an impacted wisdom tooth took her out of commission (she kind of looks likes Spelvin, actually). Perhaps her recent oral surgery accounts for all her drooling and slurping. Seriously, she gives the boys at Raging Stallion Studios a run for their money when it comes to sloppy BJs [link NSFW; also, gay].

Justine’s lust-filled time in purgatory cums to an end (sorry, the genre demands at least one of those puns; I think it’s a law or something) in a Levi Richards and Marc Stevens sandwich, though the two men could’ve been billed as Cock #1 and Cock #2 for all we see of their faces (the men in this movie aren’t much more than life-support systems for dicks). 

Then again, given some of the Groucho-esque close-ups of
Harry Reems, maybe it was best that the camera focused
on the male performers’ lower anatomy.

This scene also hypes up the homoeroticism. “Your cock in my cunt is so hard,” Justine breathlessly tells Stevens. “Can you feel him in my ass? Can you feel your cocks together?” She then implores the men to pull out so she can feel them cum outside her. “I want to feel the juice run down my leg,” she says. The two men cum on each other’s ball sacks instead. Oops!

“Can you feel your cocks together?”

After that misdirected money shot, it’s straight to hell for Justine. Her hell is a white-walled cell, where her only companion is a man babbling about dust and flies. A furiously masturbating Justine begs him too fuck her. “I’ll suck your cock,” she says. “I’ll suck your balls. I’ll suck your ass, your beautiful ass.” I had to question that last line, considering the ass in question belongs to the film’s director. I mean, did Gerard Damiano really have a beautiful ass? I somehow doubt it. I wouldn’t rim him, is all I’m saying.

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t judge a man’s ass
based on his toupee-like hair.

It doesn’t matter. The man ignores her pleas for sexual release, condemning Justine to an eternity of sexual frustration. Or, as I knew it, college.

‘Miss Jones’ Owes Classic Status to Spelvin

Though its story is as slight as Deep Throat’s, The Devil in Miss Jones seemed a whole lot more substantial, like it was almost a real movie—well, a real movie with DPs and cumshots. Seeing Justine’s transformation from a sexually repressed wallflower to insatiable nymphomaniac is something to behold. The movie also has something to say about patriarchal attitudes toward female sexuality, i.e., a woman has to be punished for indulging her desires, but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Justine Jones’ look goes from frumpy to slutty.

It’s always a risk when a porn movie attempts a more serious tone, largely because much of its success hinges on having a cast with some acting skill. Had non-actress Linda Lovelace been cast as Justine Jones, The Devil in Miss Jones would’ve become an unintentional comedy. Luckily, Damiano cast Georgina Spelvin, initially hired to run the set commissary. If Spelvin, described by Roger Ebert as “the Linda Lovelace of the literate,” was only half as good a cook as she is an actress, Damiano still came out ahead in the deal. Damiano definitely deserves props for his writing and directing, but it’s Spelvin’s committed performance that elevates The Devil in Miss Jones to its classic status.

Though she had the talent worthy of mainstream movies, Spelvin seldom ventured outside the adult genre, appearing in a handful of soft core (Career Bed, Wakefield Poole’s Bible!) and exploitation (Girls for Rent, Bad Blood) films, with Police Academy being her most prominent mainstream title. According to Sam Sherman, producer of Al Adamson’s Girls for Rent (a.k.a. I Spit on Your Corpse), after completing one scene Spelvin turned to him and said, “This is too hard. I’m going back to making fuck films.” In an interview with Mr. Skin, Spelvin simply said, “I’m not very motivated”— a statement belied by her tour-de-force performance in Miss Jones.

When Georgina Spelvin first heard there were plans to make
a sequel to The Devil in Miss Jones, her response was, “Why?”
Nevertheless, she reprised the role of Justine Jones in Henri Pachard’s
1982 sequel, The Devil in Miss Jones, Part II. Like so many hit movies,
DMJ spawned a franchise, with Paul Thomas’ 2005 reboot, featuring
a cameo by Spelvin, the most recent iteration of the title.

Oh, You'll Welcome Sudden Death, All Right

The poster fairly represents
the movie’s quality.

The 1994 version of The Fantastic Four, produced by Roger Corman, is notorious for two things: being terrible (though worse was yet to come) and being made not as a theatrical release but to ensure the rights to the property didn’t revert to Marvel. I have read nothing that suggests WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH was made for similar reasons, yet I couldn’t help but think the sole reason this unasked-for sequel exists is as a fuck you to whatever studio was hoping to buy the rights, cheap.

Universal Studios couldn’t even be bothered to supply an actual synopsis for Welcome to Sudden Death’s IMDb page:

Sequel to the 1995 Jean-Claude Van Damme action flick.

Both the original and its sequel can essentially be summed up as Die Hard in a sports arena, but I guess supplying that much detail was more time than Universal wanted to waste on this thing. They couldn’t even be bothered to put a “the” in front of “sequel,” they had so few fucks to give. And why should they give them, when clearly the makers of the movie didn’t give any.

Sudden Death, the aforementioned “1995 Jean-Claude Van Damme action flick,” didn’t exactly set box office records. In fact, a planned 1997 sequel was scrapped because the movie under-performed. Were our memories not being jogged occasionally when Sudden Death popped up on streaming services (and on cable before that), the movie would likely have been forgotten. But then, 25 goddamn years later, Universal decided that what the world—or at least Netflix subscribers—needed was a Sudden Death sequel.

This time around, instead an ex-fireman with PTSD we get an ex-soldier with PTSD, and instead of JCVD, who turned 60 on October 18, we get the youthful Michael Jai White, who turns 53 on November 10. Sudden Death took place during a hockey game, making it the original Die Hard on Ice. Welcome to Sudden Death takes place during a basketball game. The biggest difference between the two movies, however, is Sudden Death, while no action classic, is a perfectly enjoyable way to kill a Sunday afternoon. Welcome to Sudden Death is a total piece of shit.

The movie is deceptive in its opening, a flashback to Jesse’s (White) soldiering days. He and his platoon have been taken captive in an unnamed Middle Eastern country, being tortured with electric cables. “Tell me American, where are they?” snarls the interrogator, zapping White’s rippling abs with electric cables.

“Gokis,” gasps Jesse to the perplexed torturer. “Go…kiss…my ass.”

Michael Jai White flashes back to
a better action sequence.

Ass-kicking and explosions ensue. Then Jesse wakes up. The gritty generic action movie we started watching was all a dream, and now Jesse (and the audience) must face a far more troubling reality: he now lives in a syndicated sit-com. His wife (Sagine Sémajuste) gently nags him about not spending enough time with the kids, but after meeting their children—Mara (Nakai Takawira), a sassy 10-year-old and Ryan (Lyric Justice), her surly older brother—it’s clear what Jesse’s wife means is he better get these little fuckers out of her hair soon or she’s going to pack them into the minivan and drive into the nearest river. Instead of running out the door, Jesse instead presents his obnoxious children with VIP passes to the big game between the Phoenix Falcons and I don’t care. It’s Take Your Plot Contrivances to Work Day!

Lyric Justice and Nakai Takawira’s performances will make
you reconsider your opinions about Will Smith’s kids

The kids may have VIP passes, but they’re eclipsed by the game’s real guests of honor: the city’s hand-wringing mayor, the state’s smarmy governor, and, most exciting of all, apparently, is billionaire businesswoman Diana Smart (Sabryn Rock). Diana is escorted by her her rapper boyfriend Milli, short for Millions (sorry if you just vomited in your own mouth), a pairing that’s about as believable as Oprah hooking up with Coolio. Just as perplexing is why a billionaire would choose to dress like an Ikea bedding display.

A stylish red pillowcase pairs
nicely with a cream bed skirt.

Also attending the game is a team of crooks, led by Jobe (Michael Eklund, whose scenery chewing never quite pays off). Arriving under the guise of tech support, Jobe and his team quickly change into security staff uniforms and dispatch all the real security guards —all except you-know-who. 

Jobe (Michael Eklund) doesn’t care who you are.

Jobe takes Diana, Milli, the governor and the mayor hostage in their luxury skybox. When the governor huffs, “Don’t you know who I am?” Jobe kills him, just to show he means business. While I understand the impulse—who among us hasn’t wanted to shoot someone who utters the sentence, Don’t you know who I am?—killing the gov was a tactical error. I mean, cops don’t just let such a thing go, even if the governor was a doofus.

Jobe’s primary motives are revenge and greed. Diana was responsible for getting him fired when they worked together at the CIA, and now he wants Diana to transfer $1 billion to him and do so within one hour. When Diana protests the time frame, one of Jobe’s tech-savvy accomplices, a prissy woman named Psi (Stephanie Sy—not the PBS news anchor, I’m sad to say), helpfully hands Diana a smart phone and tells her to enter her bank account number, routing number and PIN. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Diana doesn’t have an appropriately sarcastic response to this request, so let’s borrow one from a much better movie:

Meanwhile, Mara witnesses some of Jobe’s gang killing a guy in a restroom and is captured, which can happen when you just fucking stand there. Lucky for her, one of the bad guys draws the line at killing kids (darn the luck) so instead she’s taken up to the skybox for Jobe to deal with. Jesse discovers her missing and goes looking for her. He almost finds her, too, until one of Jobe’s goons gets in the way. Michael Jai White beats said goon to death, a scene that might have been more satisfying had there not been some bargain-bin rap music blaring on the soundtrack.

Gary Owen’s portrayal of Gus calls into question
his success in stand-up comedy.

Jesse teams up with the janitor, Gus (Gary Owen), for what I think is supposed to be the buddy comedy portion of the movie, minus the comedy. “This is like some John McClane shit!” Gus exclaims, because nothing helps a shitty movie more than referencing a much better one. Gus and Jesse happen upon another member of Jobe’s obnoxious gang, Gamma (Gillian White), planting a bomb, because Jobe’s plan involves bombing all the exits. When she’s unable to talk her way out of her predicament, Gamma pulls a gun, resulting more fisticuffs and bland rap music. She gets shot in the stomach in the process, but gets the gun thanks to Gus’s clumsiness. Rather than shoot the two guys, however, she shoots herself in the head for the sole reason of providing Gus with the opportunity to shout: “Yo, that is one crazy bitch!” To the movie’s credit, practical effects are used for the gore, not CGI blood spatter. 

Who would’ve guessed this guy would
turn out to be a criminal?

Moving right along, Jesse and Gus disarm most of the bombs (Gus is on his own for the last one, because hilarity), Jesse discovers his boss was in on Jobe’s scheme (time for more ass-kicking!), and then learns Jobe now has Mara. My opinion of this movie would improve substantially if Jesse said to Jobe, “Hold on, I’ll bring you my son, too,” but this isn’t the type of movie to subvert expectations. Anyway, more ass kicking, a final confrontation with Jobe, Mara in peril, blah blah blah… Jesse saves the day.

Michael Jai White in one of Welcome to Sudden
Death’s better fight scenes.

What Michael Jai White probably imagines doing to his agent.

Welcome to Sudden Death answers the question: What if the Disney Channel produced R-rated action schlock? Director Dallas Jackson, also credited with the screenplay along with Sudden Death’s original writer Gene Quintaro, delivers a movie that is almost aggressively devoid of any wit, personality or style. Instead, we get cliched dialogue (including the chestnuts “You had one job!” and “That’s above my pay grade”), cheap-at-half-price production values, and performances barely worthy of an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody (though Owen’s community theater-level acting added a humorous flare to his f-bombs). There’s only so much Michael Jai White can do, and he does the bare minimum here. And yet the movie has the audacity to tease a sequel. I hope for White’s sake he leaves that project to sentient Naugahyde bean bag Steven Segal should it ever materialize.

Corman’s version of The Fantastic Four wasn’t made for public consumption, but it still managed some so-bad-it’s-good charm. Feel free to check it out for yourself. It’ll be a better use of your time than watching the stillborn Welcome to Sudden Death.

Michael Eklund welcomes sudden death.