Tag Archives: Patrick Bergin

Capsules

CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll

FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, , Jeff Fahey, , , , Brigitte Nielsen, , Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, , David Carradine (archival footage)

PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.

Still from Eldorado (2012)

COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?

These include, and are probably limited to, the following:

  • Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by
  • A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
  • An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
  • Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
  • Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings

The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.

It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.

Instead we don’t.

We have Eldorado.

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Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that Eldorado’s cast is eclectic is more than somewhat of an understatement. Quite how Mr Driscoll coerced such a parade of (one-time) A-listers to appear in his ‘Mamma Mia for horror fans’ (the filmmaker’s description – not mine) is beyond me. Surely they didn’t all need the money?  But you certainly get more than you bargain for with this ‘B’ movie: Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine (in his last albeit brief role) reuniting from ‘Kill Bill’. Jeff Fahey, Patrick Bergin and Brigitte Nielsen – who deserves a special mention for miming Ottis Redding’s ‘Respect’ in a hair salon whilst kitted out in stockings and suspenders. Throw a cameo by Caroline Munro into the melting pot and you sure have one big steaming pot of erm, surrealism.”–Paul Worts, Fleapits and Picture Palaces

(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: HIGHWAY TO HELL (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Ate de Jong

FEATURING: Chad Lowe, Kristy Swanson, Patrick Bergin, C.J. Graham

PLOT: A supernatural cop abducts an eloping lover and takes her to a literal Hell; her beau must rescue her from her predicament.

Still from Highway to Hell (1991)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This is a fun movie with a cute premise, but it stays well within the comfort zone of your average ’90s frat boy. It’s a good beer-chugger, but it never jumps the cliff into weirdo land, when it very easily could have. What a shame!

COMMENTS: Just to get it out of the way, the band AC/DC has nothing to do with this movie, nor does their warbling appear on the soundtrack. The title, however, is shown in the first shot after the credits, as the title of an arcade video game. Confused yet? So are our protagonists, Charlie and Rachael, who are paranoid about being tailed by a cop due to their clandestine wedding plans, but don’t have the presence of mind to remove the huge pizza delivery sign from the top of Charlie’s car, which marks them with a big red arrow. As they head to Vegas to get married, they stop off at the proverbial Last Chance gas station, where they get warned by the attendant that theirs is not the safest course. Guess who’s not heeding that warning?

With absolutely no foreplay, the couple find themselves detained by a “hellcop,” who looks exactly like you’d expect a hellcop to look. Rachael is now a hostage and Charlie tasked with rescuing her. With a plot no more complicated than a Super Mario Brothers’ game, the festivities are now underway. The gas station attendant turns out to be just the guy to prep Charlie for his quest into the “hellzone,” the capitol jurisdiction of Hell City and the place of Rachael’s eventual incarceration. Charlie drives through a portal to get to this alternate universe, which looks just like the rural Arizona desert, and then has all kinds of encounters and misadventures with the citizens, who act pretty nonchalant about living in hell. As he careens from Satanic ice cream scoopers to patchwork biker gangs, who variously help or hinder his quest, you get the idea that this road movie was conceived with the cool-factor riding shotgun, common sense taking a backseat, and logic banished to the trunk.

What the movie lacks in depth, it makes up in pace. We hardly have time to ponder the silliness of frying eggs on the sidewalk (hell, it’s kinda hot, you know), before we’re being preyed upon by a AAA tow truck driver: “anarchy armageddon annihilation.” Then it’s off to Hoffa’s bar, where the go-go dancers are so hot that they literally set your arm on fire when you try to grope them. You have to be charmed by the extra dose of corny imagination, even when it’s wasted on lame sight gags. It’s also such a product of 1991 that it has cameos by Gilbert Gottfried, Lita Ford, and more than one Stiller. The whole comes off as a Python-esque series of sketches, connected more tightly and produced on a much higher budget. This is one movie where people can tell you to go to Hell, and they’re doing you a favor because you were asking for directions.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…doesn’t have the coin to fully create a towering vision of the underworld, but it offers enough strange encounters and environments to pass, giving the effort a nice lift when attention turns from Charlie’s panic to the land’s weirdo inhabitants.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)