CURRENT FEATURE: MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE
NOT MY FAULT!
BY MICHAEL O'DONOGHUE
There's the windup and here's the pitch....SIX HIT MOVIES
1. Okay, how's this for a plot?--10,000 deranged Sikh extremists rape Steven Seagal's wife and kill his kids and torch his house and strangle his pets and now it's payback time! Pretty good, huh? I mean these guys are so militant they burn their own flag, and Seagal has to fuck 'em up! Call it Blood Bunnies Beneath the Wheat (to cash in on that whole Children of the Corn thing). John Woo to direct. Plenty of action and no dialogue except those droll wisecracks Seagal makes, like when he shanks some raghead in the heart and says, "Have a knife day!" or he says, "I sent you a letter last week, but I forgot to stamp it and kick it and shoot it the face!" or he says, "Sikh extremists and you find extremists!" grabs his wogchopper, and opens up. BRAK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK! VIP! T-ZING! BRAK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK! Heavy on the red gravy. KA-VLAM! V-LOOOM!
2. Here's another one for you, and all I can say is, "Hand me the green ink, Izzy, we just got a license to print money!" because if you liked Schindler's List, you'll love The Dairy of Anne Frank. You heard me--"Dairy." Anne and a herd of cows are hiding up in the attic from Nazis while downstairs, Jewish sympathizers--the so-called "good Germans"--are trying to trick the thick-witted Gestapo:
"Moooooooooooo!"
"Vas ist los? I heard a cow!"
"A cow? Oh, that was me, Oberkommander. I just said 'Moooooooooo the couch.' You see, when you dropped by, we were in the middle of...ah...ah...ah... rearranging the furniture."
"Rearranging the furniture, you say. Very well. Zer gut. But if you should happen to see any Jews around, I want you to report them immediately to--"
"Moooooooooooo!"
"A cow!"
"No, that was me again. I said, 'Mooooooooooove the lamp a little closer to the table.' "
It's got everything--comedy, suspense, cows, and above all, a profound and enduring message that can never be said too many times as far as I'm concerned: "This must never happen again."3. Or lose the cows. Anne, still hiding up in the attic from the Nazis, discovers an old trunk forgotten in a corner. Brushing away the cobwebs, she pries open the lock and finds a strange book inside--a scientific journal kept by her great-grandfather describing certain questionable experiments through which he claims to have unlocked the secret of creating human life. Welcome to The Diary of Anne Frank... ENSTEIN!!! Yes, Anne is a descendant of the infamous Victor Frankenstein, and of course, she's unable to resist duplicating his mad experiment. Sneaking out at night, she collects the body parts of butchered bankers and assembles a huge nine-foot Jew fueled by a single thought--a desire to kick Kraut ass! At last, a role model for the young Hassidim. No more of that whiny, "Oh please let me keep my baby, Mr. Himmler." Now it's, "Suck on this, Adolf!" as Hollywood's first kosher monster ("Smoke good, pork bad!") hurls Hitler off the roof of the Reichstag. Splat!
4. Wrong Lane. Amped on crank, a stock car driver bets he can drive a blood-red '70 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler from Times Square to L.A. in 36 hours. But here's the gaff: He has to drive it on the wrong side of the road! Of course, he has the usual adventures--picking up a curvy young runaway; duking it out with rednecks at truck stops; outsmarting Colombian dope dealers who try to whack him every step of the way--but what elevates this from the typical car chase fare is narrowly avoiding a head-on collision every 10 or 20 seconds. Makes Cannonball Run look like Babette's Feast.
5. Screw the premises. Let's cut straight to how we get the rubes in the tent--namely, the ad:
7 women
6 bullets
1 judge
The Beauty Contest6. And lastly, an epic western--"A movie so big it barely fits on the screen!"
OPEN ON: A wagon train of real dumb Swedes heading west. Even the wagon master, Larph Olson, is a towheaded dope. When they're attacked by Apaches, he shouts, "Pull the wagons into a rhomboid!" They just don't have a clue. We overhear that they plan to get rich by smuggling something illegal to the Indians--possibly some sort of repeating rifle--but we don't find out what it is exactly, just that it's heavy and the wagons are filled with the stuff. So for two hours, we watch these dumb Swedes haul massive Conestoga wagons up mountains and down mountains and through raging rivers and across burning deserts. Finally, ragged and starving, they reach California, contact the local Indian chief, and show him what they have in the wagons--18-inch logs. Every wagon is piled high with 18-inch logs. In fact, the reason they're half-dead is because they left vital supplies--food, blankets, guns--back east so they could squeeze in a couple more 18-inch logs. Why? The answer is as simple as it is sad. Being incredibly stupid and not speaking English all that well, the Swedes got the idea that firewood drives Indians "loco" and they'll do anything to get it. The chief sets them straight: "No, it's not the firewood that drives us loco, you blond morons. It's firewater. Fire-water! You know--whiskey. I mean, we Indians are lacking a lot of things but, frankly, firewood isn't one of them." Disheartened, they start back to Sweden only to be attacked again by the Apaches. Larph shouts, "Pull the wagons into a septilateral polygon!" and they're all slaughtered. The title?--Drunks Along the Mohawk.NEXT MONTH: Training Your Dog to Blow You
NOT MY FAULT 1 - NOT MY FAULT 2 - NOT MY FAULT 3 - NOT MY FAULT 4
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