TOP TEN GREATEST BULLIES FROM 80’S MOVIES

The movie universe of the 1980’s was a dangerous place to be if you were even the slightest bit different. If you were poor, artistic, creative, intelligent, sensitive, weighed less than 175 lbs., or wore anything besides letterman jackets and acid washed jeans, you immediately became the target of ridicule and abuse from guys with mirrored sunglasses, perfectly feathered blonde hair, Lacoste polo shirts with popped collars, Porsche convertibles, and ludicrous trust funds. The bullies of 1980’s teen cinema were sadistic karate masters, intolerant rednecks, and drunk fraternity clods out to make life a living hell for innocent movie protagonists just looking to find acceptance in a new town or win a woman’s heart. Here then, is LaserCola’s  look at ten of the biggest pricks in 80’s movie history. Assholes, we salute you!

10.) Mick McAllister – Teen Wolf (1985)

Played by: Mark Arnold

We begin the list with one of the all-time great movie jerks. Mick McAllister is your prototypical 80’s antagonist, complete with chiseled looks, athletic ability, the girl of our hero’s dreams on his arm, and a relentless drive to be the biggest douchebag on Planet Earth. Mark Arnold was 28 years old during the filming of Teen Wolf, so he looked extra intimidating during his reign of terror on the basketball court for the Dragons against poor little Michael J. Fox’s Beavers. Mick’s crimes against humanity in Teen Wolf include drawing 179 brutal flagrant fouls over the course of two basketball games; repeatedly calling Scott a freak, nerd, dweeb, geek, etc.; referring to poor, sweet Boof as a “tramp”; and being allowed to stand in the lane directly under the basket to stare down an opposing player attempting two foul shots, in clear violation of the rules of basketball. Total Dick move.

9.) Chuck Cranston – Footloose (1984)

Played by:  Jim Youngs

Chuck is an especially violent example of a 1980’s movie bully. This Texas redneck jerkwad had the unmitigated gall to not only beat the living snot out of the film’s female lead Lori Singer, but he was also out to completely mess up the most perfect head of hair in movie history! Thankfully, Kevin Bacon’s Ren was able to bring back the power of dance to the town of Basin, and kick Chuck’s misogynistic ass in the process.  Let’s hear it for the boy!

8.) Teddy  Beckersted – One Crazy Summer  (1986)

Played by: Matt Mulhern

In Teddy Beckersted, director/writer Savage Steve Holland created a cartoonish parody of the standard 80’s preppie tormentor that met all the criteria and then some.  Blonde hair? Check. Filthy rich? Check. Mean? Check. Violent? Check. Hot girlfriend? Check. Gang of sycophantic asshole friends (including a particularly douchey and balding Jeremy Piven)? Check. Teddy loved doing laps in the pool, wearing sweaters tied around his neck, eating animal crackers, and beating the ever-lovin’ crap out of anyone who even so much as breathed near his Ferrari. (Apologies for the lame YouTube clip…apprently no one bothered to  upload clips of Teddy bloodying up the Stork twins or playing a sadistic game of H.O.R.S.E. using poor Ack-Ack as a human basketball hoop).

7.) Steff McKee – Pretty in Pink (1986)

Played by:  James Spader

Steff McKee broke away from traditional bully tropes in 1986. Since the protagonist in Pretty in Pink was a female, Spader couldn’t beat her up or give her an atomic wedgie in the locker room. He had to rely on classism and psychological warfare instead, using his wealth, status, and razor-sharp tongue to make Molly Ringwald and everyone around her feel like inferior pieces of shit. He also looked like a 36 year-old stockbroker hanging out in a high school parking lot. Spader deserves a ton of kudos for managing to look threatening while rocking loafers with no socks, an all-white linen suit, and a silk turquoise shirt unbuttoned to his navel.

6.) Hardy Jenns – Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)

Played by: Craig Sheffer

Another smug jerkwad in the John Hughes mold, Hardy Jenns added a physical menace to the Steff McKee template of upper-class superiority and psychological torment. This charmer had a Corvette, a  power mullet that would rival Richard Marx’s, and he treated a young, blazingly hot Lea Thompson like a prized piece of beef until Elias Koteas showed up at his parents’ house with a group of 40-year old metalheads. Soon as that happened, Jenns reverted to the meek, pampered pussy boy  he truly was.

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TOP TEN LAMEST SUPERHERO MOVIE VILLAINS OF ALL-TIME

It’s often said that a hero can only attain greatness if he has a great nemesis; an enemy that challenges his strength, morals, and intelligence  – a darkness to counter the  light . That’s why it’s crucial for superhero movie adaptations to choose characters that have compelling villains, so that the audience is both entertained, and senses the true threat the villain poses to the hero. It’s also important to properly translate that evil-doer to the screen, carrying over their motivations for doing the evil things that they do. Many films have succeeded in this regard, with outstanding performances by Jack Nicolson and Heath Ledger as the Joker, Ian Mckellan as Magneto in the X-Men Films, Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, and Willem DaFoe as the Green Goblin, to name but a few. Sadly, there are just as many horrible mis-fires as there are iconic portrayals of evil in superhero films. Here are ten of the absolute lamest.

10.) Gamma Irradiated Poodle – Hulk (2003)

Played by: Crappy CGI effects.

Hoo-boy…well, we launch the list with one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen on the movie screen. Ang Lee’s Hulk film was a very slow and  cerebral approach to the jolly green behemoth, and featured a lot of weird psychological Father/Son dynamics between Bruce Banner his psychotic Daddy, played by a creepy-looking Nick Nolte. At one point in the film, Nolte, who also experiments with Gamma radiation, decides to sick some gamma-irradiated dogs on his son. As if this concept wasn’t already completely insane, one of the dogs was a giant, mutated…fluffy white Westminster-ready show poodle. Yes, really. One can only hope the Avengers won’t have to face this terrifying creature next Summer.

9.) Laurel Hedare – Catwoman (2004)

Played by: Sharon Stone

I’m not going to pretend that I actually watched Catwoman, but even though I have never laid eyes upon this bowl-curling turd, it’s still safe to assume that ol’ Sharon here has easily earned a spot on the lamest villains list for her portrayal of iconic Catwoman nemesis “Laurel Hedare”. And by “iconic”, I mean a terrible character that no one had ever heard of before. So what makes Ms. Hedare here ultra-lame? Well, apparently she was the co-owner of a cosmetics company who wanted to market a beauty cream that promised to make people’s skin as “smooth as marble”, but it really just melted their faces off. Hedare used the cream and her skin actually became as hard and impervious to pain as marble, but not to Catwoman’s magical claws because they scratched right through it and — Oh, for fuck’s sake… WHO IN THE NAME OF GOD WROTE THIS SHIT???

8.) Bane, Poison Ivy, and Mr. Freeze – Batman & Robin (1997)

Played by: Jeep Swenson, Uma Thurman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger

Yes folks, it’s a trifecta of lameness here from the legendarily God-awful Batman & Robin. Where do I even begin? First off, look at that picture of Bane. Just fucking look at it. The Bane of the comics was a fiendishly clever mastermind who was born in a South American prison, became addicted to a super-steroid called Venom, then came up with a plan to completely destroy Batman and actually succeeded. In this cinematic dungbomb however, he was portrayed as a brainless, grunting oaf by a no-name wrestler in a costume with fake veins and muscles airbrushed over a nude nylon bodysuit. Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy wasn’t all that terrible as far as costuming goes, but she was clearly chanelling some campy, over-the-top  acting style  from the 1930’s, and was pretty much just there to fuel the flames of homoeroticsm between Clooney and O’Donnel.

And to complete the triple-shot of suck, we have Arnold Schwarzenegger (right around the time he was banging his housekeeper) in the most mis-cast role of all-time. Joel Schumacher and company transformed a very nuanced, tormented character into walking neon Mardi Gras float spouting terrible cold-related puns like,  “Hey Batman, Chill!”, “Cool Party!”, “Ice to see you!”, and “You’re  not sending ME to the COOLER!” Any scene from Batman & Robin is painful to sit through, but I’m pretty sure the sequence where Arnie forces his idiot henchmen to sing Christmas songs while wearing a blue polar bear robe and giant fuzzy polar bear slippers was used to force that terrorist courier into disclosing Osama Bin Laden’s location.

7.) Blackheart – Ghost Rider (2006)

Played by: Wes Bentley

You know, I really can’t decide which is lamer here – Blackheart himself, or the Nickelback cover band standing around him. Putting villains in leather trenchcoats is a lame practice that unimaginiative costume designers have been using for years now, and it’s never effective. It just turns characters like this into bland, stock bad guys from an episode of Baywatch Nights.

Wes Bentley, last seen filming a “beautiful” plastic bag (and getting a handful of Thora Birch’s tits for his efforts), in American Beauty, plays Blackheart in this abysmal Nicolas Cage vehicle. Blackheart is the son of Mephisto (Marvel’s version  of Satan), and is a terrifying creature that looks like this:

In Ghost Rider though, he looks like a douchey rich kid who decided to paint his fingernails black and buy some Dashboard Confessional CD’s in order to bang emo high school chicks.

6.) The Red Skull – Captain America (1990)

Played by: Scott Paulin

This is a photo of Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull from the upcoming Captain America: The First Avenger. As you can see, it’s a near-perfect translation of the character from comic book page to movie screen. However, in the cheesey, low-budget, direct-to-video 1990 Captain America film, The Red Skull looked like this:

Laughable, right? Couldn’t get  any worse, right? Wrong. It gets worse. The film begins in World War II, but leaps ahead into the present day when Cap gets thawed out of an iceberg in Alaska. The Red Skull is also still alive in the present day, but he got some plastic surgery and ended up looking like this:

It’s BIZARRO RONALD REAGAN! Did I mention that he was also Italian and not German in this colossal piece of shit? I think I’ve said enough here…

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9 GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE ‘FANTASTIC FOUR’ MOVIES

A while back, I wrote an article titled Top Ten Good Things About The Star Wars Prequels in which I  attempted to disprove the notion that the universally loathed Episodes I-III had absolutely no redeeming qualities. It was fairly well-received, so I began to think about other much-maligned movie franchises that might make for suitable sequels to the piece.  A friend suggested that I should try mining the dank, black coal caves of the two painfully mediocre Fantastic Four films for some valuable cinematic gems. Now, most Marvel Comics fans agree that Fantastic Four (2005) and the slightly better Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) leave a lot to be desired (many will tell you, quite bluntly, that they outright suck giant rhino balls). These duds feature unimaginative direction by Tim Story, a lack of epic scope, weak action scenes, a lousy latex Thing costume, the infamous “Galactus Cloud”, and a horribly mis-cast Julian McMahon as a weaselly business tycoon version of Dr. Doom. Yet, despite all of these shortcomings, I managed to dig up a few things – 9 to be precise – that will make you feel like you haven’t completely wasted precious hours of your life watching them. So, without further ado, LaserCola.com presents:

9 Good Things About The Fantastic Four Movies!

9.) Accurate Origin

Although Julian McMahon’s smarmy, Euro-trash, corporate tycoon version of Dr. Doom was lazily shoehorned in; the basic story of how the Fantastic Four received their powers in this film is fairly faithful to the comic book version. Reed Richards, and the brother/sister tandem of Sue and Johnny Storm travel into space to study cosmic radiation on a ship piloted by Ben Grimm. A massive wave of cosmic rays bombard them, they crash-land on Earth, and their strange powers manifest shortly thereafter.  Pretty spot-on.

 

8.) Family Friendly Tone

Children adore and idolize superheroes, but it’s a bit difficult to bring little Johnny and Suzie to the Cineplex these days when The Joker is impaling gangsters on pencils and the films in general are darker and more mature to appeal to the 18-35 male demographic. The FF movies however, are bright, sunny, safe, and — cliché as it may sound — fun for the whole family. There’s a little bit of sexual innuendo here and there (especially with Johnny Storm in the first film), but violence is non-existent, and the most traumatic thing I can recall from either installment is Dr. Doom’s scarred, metallic face.

 

7.) Michael Chiklis

I could probably write a 1,000-word article about why The Thing should’ve been an entirely CG character, and not a wrinkled, orange foam latex suit. But, since we’re focusing on only the good here, I’ll simply say that Chiklis was absolutely note-perfect casting as the ever-lovin, blue-eyed Thing. Chiklis nailed Ben Grimm’s gruff, no-nonsense, Yancy street attitude, and demonstrated tremendous pathos as a man struggling to hold on to his humanity after being entombed in a shell of orange rock. The scene where Ben calls his wife from a pay phone outside of their former home, and stares longingly up at the window as she recoils in horror from his monstrous appearance, is pretty damned devastating.

 

6.) Silver Surfer / Human Torch Chase

Whether it was  a result of director Tim Story’s inexperience, or crippling budgetary restrictions, the action set pieces in both Fantastic Four films are underwhelming, to say the least. However, the chase sequence between the Human Torch and the Silver Surfer through the steel canyons and subway tunnels of New York, and eventually into outer space — is fun, fast, and exhilarating. ‘Nuff said!

 

5.) The Fantasticar

Though these films are huge missteps, the production team should be lauded for their efforts to sprinkle them with ancillary characters from the comic books like blind sculptress Alicia Masters, and identifiable places like the Baxter Building. The thing that stands out to me as a nice, (and unexpected) nod to the fans is the inclusion of a version of the flying Fantasticar, the FF’s primary mode of transportation.

 

4.) Costumes

Yes, these suits are a bit dull for my tastes – but they’re practical, they make sense in the context of the film, and manage to remain faithful to the classic FF jumpsuit look. As an added bonus, they also afforded the adult audience an eyeful of Jessica Alba’s loin-achingly perfect posterior encased in skin-tight spandex.

 

3.) Stan Lee as Willie Lumpkin

Stan Lee’s cameos in Marvel Comics films have become fun little cinematic Easter Eggs to hunt for. He’s appeared as various non-speaking characters in the X-Men, Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, and Spider-Man franchises. But in the Fantastic Four films, he got to do something truly unique – play the Fantastic Four’s loveable mail carrier Willie Lumpkin,  a character from the Marvel Universe that he actually created!

 

2.) The Silver Surfer

Performed in both CG motion-capture and in a practical suit by the multi-talented Doug Jones, and voiced by the always awesome Laurence Fishburne, the Silver Surfer was an outstanding page-to-screen translation of an iconic Marvel character. His origin – although unseen – is accurate, as are his appearance and powers. The script also captured the essence of the Surfer’s nobility and his willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice to save humanity from his master, the planet-devouring Galactus.

 

1. ) Thing/ Human Torch Chemistry

Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans captured the dynamic of these two classic characters perfectly.  Their rivalry/friendship is the strongest element of the films, as Chiklis’ tough, take-no-bullshit philosophy clashes brilliantly on-screen with Chris Evans’ brash, hot-headed, skirt-chasing antics. The two actors get to share a healthy amount of screen time bickering endlessly, hurling rapid-fire insults at each other, and playing pranks (such as the power-switching in the photo above), but they also effectively convey the sense of brotherhood and comradery between The Thing and The Torch. In the end, they are family, and that relationship is beautifully defined by Evans, Chiklis, and the crew.

BONUS: Good Things About the Shelved 1994 Roger Corman Fantastic Four  Movie!

Just kidding! There’s absolutely nothing good about this…

TOP TEN GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE STAR WARS PREQUELS

Bashing the Star Wars Prequels has almost become an art form on the Internet. There are lengthy, (and quite hilarious) video reviews that eviscerate the films, and even entire websites dedicated to mocking the much-maligned Episodes I-III. As a life-long Star Wars fan, I decided to try to counter all this hater-ade drinking by taking on the challenge of compiling a list of at least ten genuinely awesome things about the Star Wars Prequels. I actually came up with a whopping twelve scenes/moments, before trimming it to the aforementioned ten. So without further ado, after the jump, here are the Top Ten Good Things About The Star Wars Prequels!

TOP TEN RACIALLY INSENSITIVE COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS

(Ed. Note – This here is a guest column by my good pal Etrane Martinez, a truly funny dude and a first class geek. A ton of research and effort went into this one, so be sure to leave comments for him, or track him down and T.P. his trees. He likes that.)

From the moment the Golden Age of comics hit the shelves of drug stores and penny candy stops, the mythology and lore created by comic books has become a part of not only American, but global culture – so much so that the images and names of many characters are well-known in every corner of the world.  Everyone knows the origin of Batman. Children know the name Superman. Teens across the world relate to the hardships of Spider-man, but what do people remember the most about such characters?

If anything else, the character’s name is the beginning of what defines them, who they are, and what they stand for. Captain America – there is no question what he’s all about. Hell, you want to go low brow? How about Cherry Poptart? Even if you never heard of her I’m guessing that you can take an easy guess at what this adult book is all about. Often times before an artist even begins to first sketch their creation, a lot of thought and revision goes into creating strong and fitting names that best defines the core of the character. The result can truly be amazing… and sometimes it becomes one of the most racially insensitive things ever published and distributed to the masses. Examples of which pop up from the early stages of sequential art to modern-day creations, and everything in between. So much so that sometimes all you can do is shake your head and laugh. Without further ado, here’s my list of The Top Ten Racially Insensitive Comic Book Characters!