HULKACINEMA!: Suburban Commando (1991)

This is the face that will surely haunt my dreams

Why have I done this to myself? I guess I thought it would be fun. Or funny. But the enormity of what I've committed myself to, the colossal stupidity, dawned on me in the first twenty minutes of Suburban Commando.

Summary:

Shep Ramsey is an intergalactic... soldier... guy... who kills bad guys... I think. The film isn't really sure, either. Anyway, he kills a bad guy, and ends up on Earth, after wrecking his own space ship in a fit of rage. There he moves in with the Wilcox family, and gets into all kinds of Shenanigans. That is until bounty hunters from outerspace track him back to Earth. Then he has to save... yada yada. It's taken me more effort to write the above summary than it seemingly took to write this entire film. So I'm just going to stop.

Pros:

Colonel Dusty McHowell: The Wilcox's neighbor, Col. Dusty McHowell, is a former WWII soldier, and looney. He sits atop a decommissioned army jeep with a flower planter in its engine block. There he judges the entire neighborhood, decked out in army fatigues, dolling out wisdom, to both Charlie Wilcox (Christopher Lloyd) and Shep. Dusty is a fun character that I thought for sure would come back later, have some kind of place in Shep's fight with the aliens, but, no, he is wasted. He DOES teach Shep the valuable lesson that "sometimes winning is losing," which the Hulkster ham-handedly repeats later in the film just before outsmarting, or attempting to outsmart, the villain.


Hulk Hogan "Running:" I put "running" in quotes, because I am certain that that word describes what Hogan SHOULD be doing. I am sure the director said, "Hulk, you gotta run! You're fleeing intergalactic bounty hunters!" But what the Hulkster ACTUALLY does is a kind of effeminate, low-energy jog. And it is hilarious to see.


Hulk Hogan "Acting:" I put "acting" in quotes, because I am certain that that word describes what Hogan SHOULD be doing. I am sure the director said, "Hulk, you're an intergalactic soldier/army guy/hired gun! I need those one-liners delivered with some panache!" But what the Hulkster ACTUALLY does is grimace, pop his eyes like he just snorted a line of coke, growl, and spit his lines through gritted teeth. Or, he simply lets the words dribble out of his mouth, having memorized them, and not exactly knowing what else to do with them. In short, Hulk Hogan is a terrible actor. But, like, I still want to see his Hamlet, ya know?

Cons:

Everything: Can I just say everything? No? Damn. Look, this IS, in fact, a film. People wrote things down, made a schedule, memorized a bunch of shit, said it in front of cameras, and cobbled all of that together into something resembling a 90-minute story.


So Short, and, Somehow, So Long: This is a 90-minute movie. I watched it in an afternoon. It felt like a three hour epic. And I don't mean Star Wars epic, I mean The Iceman Cometh kind of holy-shit-my-eyeballs-are-melting-from-boredom kind of epic. It actually felt like the film left somewhere around twenty or thirty minutes on the editing room floor, too: there are characters, like the Colonel, that flit in and out never to be seen again; there are lines written that reference plot developments that we have not actually seen onscreen; the Wilcox children are in the film for maybe five whole minutes, say a few words, and serve as a sight gag for Hogan, other than that, they might as well not exist.


That Weird Ass Music: The soundtrack to this movie is bonkers. It needledrops on some actual music, a weird spoken-word remix of Hogan speaking lines, and a strange, island-flavored reggae tune called "Almost Like Paradise." But then, as the Hulkster wanders around suburbia (at one point running into a mime in a back alley, in the dead of night) to some weird ass anime-style, synth-saxophone blaring audio abortion from the 80s. It's the "Hulk's Gonna Do Something Silly, Come See!" music. And it plays ALL THE TIME. And I kind of love it. And hate it. And love it. And hate myself.

In Conclusion:

This is Hulk Hogan's second feature film, after No Holds Barred, and, boy howdy. It is terrible. Really terrible.

Should You Watch It?

No, absolutely not.

Miscellany:

- One of the intergalactic bounty hunters is played by Mark Calaway. That's right: The FUCKING Undertaker is in this movie.

- Elisabeth Moss is a little girl whose cat gets stuck in a tree. That's right: Elisabeth FUCKING Moss is in this movie.

- This movie's budget was 11 million dollars. It made 8 million dollars in its entire box office run.

- The film was originally intended for Danny Devito and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They opted to make the movie Twins, instead. New Line Cinema bought the script, cast Hulk Hogan, and flushed 11 million dollars down the drain.  

- This movie reuses the PKE meter from Ghostbusters as an energy signal tracker. I knew I recognized that damn thing, and couldn't shake the feeling the entire time I was watching.