i saw two appalling films recently - world trade center and doghouse - both of them exploitative pieces of trash in extremely poor taste.
the former stars nicolas cage and the latter stars danny dyer.
they are both actors with severely limited talents and tend to appear in very bad movies yet there's something about their screen presence that fascinates me. cage, mainly because of his ludicrous haircuts and his unnerving ability to make a bad movie worse just by pulling a face. dyer does so by essentially playing himself in every film: a repellent cockerknee oaf who's like a cross between big vern and sid the sexist from viz, yet he keeps getting work.
world trade center's a weird film. it doesn't stretch cage's ability too much as all he's really required to do is to grow a moustache and lie paralysed in some rubble for most of the film's running time. he doesn't even have a fancy wig, though the film's most amusing moment is when he's running from the first building falling down to the second building. he looks up in horror at the falling debris as he runs. it's really quite a sight - have you ever tried running whilst looking up? it's almost impossible, yet cage never puts a foot wrong.
the weirdest element of the film is the character of a twitchy ex-marine who decides that the country is at war and goes to help at ground zero, finding cage and partner in the rubble, thus rescuing them. he's portrayed as a near-psychotic hawkish unblinking robozealot single-mindedly doing his bit.it's hard to see the person the character's based on being happy with this portrayal. wiki says that he wasn't happy at all and also that there are a number of distortions of the true events that upset people - one of them was that one of the rescuers inexplicably being changed from a black character to a white character.
doghouse is also in dubious taste but at least it's deliberately so. dyer and his mates ditch their partners (all nagging harridans) for the weekend to cheer up a mate who's just got divorced from some woman who just doesn't understand him. all of them show zero self-awareness and are cheerfully sexist and misogynist (to give things just the thinnest veneer of political correctness, one of them is gay, though he won't let his effeminate boyfriend tag along) . they arrive at a village they're supposed to staying at, only to find it over-run by 'zombirds' who are all out to trap them and kill them. they have some kind of virus or something. all the zombies are dressed like various sexist stereotypes, so there's a dominatrix type, a librarian type, a horsy/hunty posh type, a snippy hairdresser/beautician type, a fat ugly type etc etc. dyer and co take turns calling them slags and fight back with improvised bloke weapons such as footballs and golf clubs, giving these sad-eyed pricks ample opportunities to justifiably mete out violence to women. it would be offensive if it wasn't so outrageously intended to be so. they should have called it slags from hell.
