FDR: American Badass! (2012)

After the 90-minute awesomefest that was Poolboy: Drowning out the Fury, this was highly anticipated.  It had a short theatrical run in the fall, and then was released on Netflix Instant, where I eventually put it down. I was ready for Barry Bostwick as FDR to destroy me with his wheelchair of death.

FDR: American Badass! has Bostwick as one of our greatest presidents ever, FDR, who is bitten in the leg by a werewolf and contracts polio, which confines him to a wheelchair.  He then wins the presidency, only to discover that the dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, are plotting to spread werewolf-ism throughout the globe, and they know FDR is the only man that's badass enough to stop them.  The question is, can he do it?



Is there any question?  This movie is what you want from a Ross Patterson flick.  It has all the dirty jokes and bad action spoofs we loved in Poolboy, only it's frickin' FDR doing this stuff.  And the idea of werewolves as the Axis Powers is genius.  If I'm comparing the two, I'd give the edge to Poolboy, but it's not FDR's fault Poolboy was the greatest film since Citizen Kane.  FDR still has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and more than gives you your money's worth.  This is American history done right.

The key to this film is how well the actors play it straight, especially with Barry Bostwick in the lead.  Yes, he's definitely having fun, but he also never betrays his part and always plays it seriously, even when he's delivering some absolutely ridiculous lines.  He buys into what FDR is all about, and by doing that, he gives us the movie we want when we see that title.  And from there, it's as if everyone else follows his lead and does the same thing, which makes this whole thing work.  They create a world where the silliness of FDR makes sense to them, which makes it all the funnier to us.



Keven Sorbo should be up for a best supporting actor nod for his cameo as Abe Lincoln.  He's so fantastic, and I love seeing him in Patterson's films.  Speaking of Patterson, he plays a senator from Georgia, and his accent makes everything he says funny.  I have no idea how anyone can act opposite him and give a good take, because I know I couldn't keep a straight face.  Bruce McGill, who played Dalton in MacGyver, is essentially Bostwick's straightman as Louis, FDR's personal bodyguard, and he's great in that role.  Eleanor was played by Lin Shaye, and what was funny about her, was she was the only one who wasn't an anachronism.  It was almost as if she was taken from the 30s and dumped into the 2010s.  I loved veteran character actor Paul Ben-Victor as the Mussolini werewolf, he's always great to see.  Finally, Patterson's character's wife was played by Keri Lynn Pratt, who, according to her imdb bio, is from Concord, NH.  Nice to see the Granite State get some shine in FDR: American Badass!

I left Ray Wise as Douglas MacArthur for this paragraph, because I've noticed that Twin Peaks is really popular on Tumblr, at least among the blogs I follow.  And this isn't people my age or older who remember when Twin Peaks first aired, these are kids who were barely alive and have found it on Netflix or DVD.  Yes, I was only 12 when it first came out, so it's not like I could've been a good judge of what would still be relevant 20 years later, but out of everything that was on TV then, Twin Peaks would've been at the bottom of the list.  Anyway, the question now is, who is more likely to bring the Tumblr kids in to watch FDR: Bostwick and his Rocky Horror fame, or Ray Wise and his Twin Peaks fame?  And why can't it be Sorbo and his Hercules fame.



Last summer, I visited the JFK Presidential Library in Boston.  It was a really cool experience, and made me want to visit some of the others.  The next closest to where I live of course would be FDR's in Hyde Park, NY.  After seeing this movie though, I feel like maybe we should organize a DTVC field trip down there-- or up there, depending on where you're from.  I don't want to sound like Mitchell, but does anyone living in New York have a sofa I could stretch out on?

All right, before we go way off the tracks, let's wrap this up.  If you haven't seen Poolboy yet, stop reading this immediately and go watch it.  Then, finish this review, and go check out FDR: American Badass!  Ross Patterson/Saint James St. James strikes again.  If history had been this cool in high school, I might have actually wanted to get up in the morning and go.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1811315/

Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story (2010)

After the 90 minutes of pure amazing that was Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury, I had to see what else Ross Patterson had to offer, and fortunately, he had a couple on Watch Instantly. I went with this one, because I liked the idea of a movie based on Whiffle Ball, something I used to play growing up.

Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story, is about Ted Whitfield (Patterson), a star in the SoCal Whiffle Ball league, who finds himself something of a celebrity in 1994, when the MLB strike brings a few more people to the game. In 1995 though, when the MLB strike ends, Whitfield, in a desperate attempt to keep people at the games, makes a charge at the league's home run record, something he'll do at any cost. Will he succeed, yet lose himself in the process?



While this is not Poolboy, very little is, and this still has some great moments. Patterson is hilarious, as are many in the cast. I think people who have seen Poolboy will recognize Patterson's style, from his line delivery, to some of the random craziness-- one of my favorites being when he threatens an ump with a box cutter. The film meanders a bit near the end, but Patterson picks it back up, and there's a twist ending that had me in stitches. See Poolboy first, then check this out, especially if you're here in the States and can check both on Watch Instantly.

Ross Patterson is one of those types of comedic actors that can say anything in a movie and make it funny. All of the scenes with him in them were hilarious, whether he's working out and smoking and taking blue dinosaur vitamins-- performance enhancing drugs-- or he's hitting on women giving interviews. His writing in this is great too, especially when the woman who played Peters in Poolboy (Edi Patterson) enters the film as Whitfield's wife, and describes her harrowing ordeal of being vaginally raped by a mountain lion-- in sign language. Who thinks of that? Ross Patterson apparently. The two of them have great comedic chemistry too-- Patterson and Patterson, not Patterson and the mountain lion. What you gotta love about this is that, even though it's not as good as Poolboy, you can see how he gets better from film to film, meaning FDR: American Badass could be something so fantastic words won't be able to describe it-- I may not even be able to review it.



Another thing Poolboy has going for it that might make it more of a fit for readers of this blog is that it's about action movies, which everyone here is familiar with, while Screwball is about sports, and I'm not sure how many of my readers that connects with. Also, this makes fun of the issues Major League Baseball had with players taking steroids, and I'm not sure how many readers outside of the US and Canada know or care about that. For me personally, having grown up an hour north of Boston, I was raised on baseball, and a lot of these jokes rang true. I also grew up near some trailer parks, so a lot of the red neck jokes rang true too.

Whiffle Ball in particular hit close to home. We all used to play in my neighborhood, plus my dad and I would play in the back yard. The idea of a Whiffle Ball league is great, and I imagine people actually have them. I know my buddy played in a kickball league in Portland. No irony either, this was competitive rec league kickball. He asked if I wanted to check out a game, and I asked if I should bring orange wedges. He thought it was funny, his teammates not so much.



Finally, fans of the blog might recognize Jaime Bergman. She appeared in the very first film we reviewed, Boa vs. Python. In this she plays a reporter interviewing Ted Whitfield, who is only in a robe and jock strap. Snippets of the interview play throughout the film. I think in a couple spots she was trying not to laugh. I gotta think there were a few retakes in some of those scenes, because I know I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face. I also thought it would be good to put her picture up here, because her husband is David Boreanaz, and his pics are all over Tumblr. Gotta even things up a bit.

If you haven't seen Poolboy, do that first-- and do that now!-- then take a look at this. You'll recognize things you liked in Poolboy in this, even if you're not a sports fan. The jump in quality though from this to Poolboy has me wondering if the world can handle FDR: American Badass when it comes out. We'll just have to see.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1262978/

Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury (2011)

I first caught wind of this one over at our buddy Mr. Gable's site, Mr. Gable's Reality. As far as he was concerned this was 90 minutes of pure awesome, and after I saw the trailer, which he had embedded in the post, I figured there was a good chance he was right. Kevin Sorbo and Danny Trejo in a massive grindhouse/exploitation spoof? Sign me up.

Poolboy: Drowning Out the Fury, is about a long lost film of the same name, shot by the infamous Saint James St. James (Ross Patterson) when he was ten years old. Unfortunately, the MPAA kept it from being released for 21 years, and he's finally getting a chance to air it for us, with his own commentary and production notes sprinkled in. The movie itself follows Bando (Sorbo), a Vietnam Vet who returns home to find his wife and son murdered by a Mexican pool boy. He swears revenge and vows to remove all Mexican pool boys from Van Nuys. In his way is Danny Trejo, the violent leader of the area's Mexican pool boys, and he's not ready to give up their racket. Can Bando defeat these murderous Latinos?



Mr. Gable is spot on, this is amazing. On one score, it's a fantastic send-up of 70s explotation and late 80s/early 90s bad action and Namsploitation. The dubbed voices, the music, the dialog, the attempts to cover up production mishaps, all things we've seen before and all hilarious. On the other, this is like a reverse Machete, where, instead of having Mexican-Americans fighting bigotry, we have the bigotry coming from the mouths of the heroes in the white people like Sorbo, which I think exposes it for its hate and hypocrisy all the more. Then you have excellent comedic performances, anchored by Sorbo, Trejo, and Patterson, but also other fantastic names like Bryan Callen, Mark Curry, Jennifer Elise Cox, Jason Mewes, Matt Winston, and Gary Valentine, among many others. Stick this in there with Black Dynamite as a genre spoof done right.

When I started the DTVC in 2007, Kevin Sorbo was pegged to be a potential Hall of Famer. After Walking Tall 2, which wasn't bad, we had Walking Tall 3, which, the less said of the better; then Bitch Slap, which should've been what this was but wasn't even close. I think here we finally have the realization of the potential we saw during Sorbo's great Hercules run. This is the movie I've wanted for almost five years of writing the DTVC, and now that it's here, I'm loving it. Also, if you look at his imdb bio, he's not stopping anytime soon. He's playing Abe Lincoln in FDR: American Badass! (from the same production company that gave us this), plus is listed in Albert Pyun's Cyborg: Rise of the Slingers and Sorority Party Massacre. The thing with Sorbo is, he's one of the few actors that can do comedy and action-- Michael Jai White is another that comes to mind-- and we need to exploit that as much as possible. This one does that.



Ross Patterson plays Saint James St. James, the man who directed Poolboy, and he's absolutely hilarious. The eye patch, the smoking jacket, the voice, it all works. When I went back to capture images for the blog, I was laughing out loud as I'd catch various lines, lines that if I tried to describe you'd probably think weren't that funny, but in context work. I can't wait to check out some of the other films he's done. If he's half as funny they'll be great. Another thing I wanted to point out is that image of Saint James St. James, sitting Masterpiece Theater style in a study discussing his movie with us. That's what I was going for when I named this site The Direct to Video Connoisseur, me as Alistair Cooke watching Dolph Lundgren flicks. A few things I didn't anticipate happened as a result though. First, people had trouble spelling "connoisseur", which made it difficult to tell people about it, plus "dtvconnoisseur.blogspot.com" doesn't roll off the tongue, so I had to get the current domain name that I have now. The other thing I think is even funnier: people don't always realize that the title is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, they think I really liken myself as a connoisseur of Direct to Video movies, like I'm some kind of snob. I never know what to do with those people.

This movie, in dealing with issues of race, treads on sensitive territory, but I think does so well. In part it's exposing and mocking racism in American society, but it's also making fun of the more embedded racism that's prevalent in many action and exploitation films. We get African Americans whose dialog is often dubbed over by someone else to make them sound more like a caricature, or Latinos that are only depicted as violent thugs or servants. It's different from Machete, where Danny Trejo was fighting against racist forces. Here he's now playing the stereotype, getting the same message across, but doing it in a different way.



There is a lot of stock footage in this, and I guess included in public use are PSAs, of which they used this classic drunk driving one from the late 80s/early 90s. I always loved this, watching how the "U" on one of the mugs would almost break off on its own. Had this sweet piece of nostalgia not dropped into my lap, I would've instead devoted this paragraph to the film's mention of Del Taco, which I haven't had since I was out in San Diego in 2001. My buddy and I gorged ourselves on burritos and fries one morning, just because we could-- out here in New England, Taco Bell doesn't open until 11, so burritos at 8AM is a novelty. Del Taco and anti-drunk driving PSAs, it doesn't get much better than that.

And it doesn't get much better than Poolboy either. This is the action/exploitation spoof you came for, the Kevin Sorbo flick you came for-- really just the 90-minute awesomefest you came for. Right now it's on Watch Instantly. I suggest you instantly watch it, you won't be disappointed.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1693843/