The 300-Pound Pork Roast

As you're perusing the tags on the site to find your favorite actor, you may have noticed at the top that the first one is "300-Pound Pork Roast." Of all the posts I've done at the DTVC, few are more infamous than the one that spawned that tag. And for that reason, it has its own spotlight in the DTVC Hall of Fame.

The film in question is Extreme Honor, which, by the cover, looked like an Olivier Gruner/Michael Ironside actioner, but in fact features a beefy actor named Dan Andersen, who, according to IMDb, never does another role. I was so angered by this turn of events, that I dubbed Andersen a 300-pound pork roast in my rant of a review, and then proceeded to tear it apart for its egregious bait-and-switch.

The idea of the "pork roast" in a film wasn't new. Any beefy guy with a meaty face was dubbed a pork roast by me. It came from the MST3K episode for Space Mutiny, when one of the crew says that Ryder and the doctor make love and later she gives birth to a pork roast, and it just stuck with me. Another example of me using it is for the film Future Force, where I talk about a pork roast with a poodle mullet. But none of my mentions of the pork roast are as popular as the 300-pound pork roast, which is why it gets this spot in the Hall of Fame.

Another reason why I went all in on the 300-pound pork roast idea when I wrote the review, is Dan Andersen not listed on the cover, nor is he featured on the DVD menu as one of the stars. My feeling is if the distributors think so little of him, under what obligation am I to? I was also pissed. I put this film in my Netflix queue looking for a good time, and I got this instead. The problem is, beyond the bait-and-switch, the film isn't that good anyway. It has long moments of drag, and often the action we do get isn't that compelling. It does have it's goofy moments, like when someone uses the title of the film, saying "You have a lot of honor... you have extreme honor." Well, he had a lot of honor for a 300-pound pork roast.

The film doesn't just boast Gruner and Ironside. Michael Madsen is listed on the cover, and he has a small part as one of the 300-pound pork roast's old buddies--we think as a way to make the 300-pound pork roast look cooler, which never works. We also had another Hall of Famer, Martin Kove, in it for a short scene. In 2011, this was how I picked movies to review, go to a big name like Gruner, see what he has on IMDb that I haven't seen yet, and then based on availability and who else is in it, prioritize it from there, so what also pissed me off so much was the fact that I saw all these names, and bumped it up in my queue, only to be left with a 300-pound pork roast and me stuck without a movie until Netflix got this back and sent me another.

All that being said, the enduring legacy of that review is that the 300-Pound Pork Roast tag is forever at the top of the tagging list, which brings people back to see that review time and again, giving it life well-beyond Andersen's career or what I expected when I wrote the post. That has caused me over time to soften my stance a bit and grow to love the big lug--somewhat. I mean, it wasn't his fault that this was marketed as such an awful bait-and-switch, he was just collateral damage.

And with that, we honor our most infamous tag and one of our most infamous posts with this special inclusion in our DTVC Hall of Fame. You can always go back and look at the original review by clicking the 300-Pound Pork Roast tag on the left-hand side of the site. Also, our friends Ty and Brett looked at this on Comeuppance Reviews--though it was done in 2006, which I think is before Brett joined. Here's to you Mr. 300-Pound Pork Roast, you were one of the great ones.