Dustin: Welcome to another installment of our summer movie spectacular!

Fingers: Whee!

Dustin: As you can see, I'm teamed up with the always-enthusiastic Fingers O'Reilly for this review…

Fingers: Nice sarcasm, dingus.

Dustin: Anyway, knowing well in advance that I'd be doing one of these little projects with you, I tried my best to avoid your usual uncooperative attitude by letting you pick the film we'd talk about.

Fingers: I guess that sorta worked, but I did try to pick something that'd drive you nuts.

Dustin: We'll get to that in a minute. Before we get rolling on The Villain itself, I am really curious as to where in heaven's name you dug this thing up.

Fingers: Saw it loooong time ago as a kid. Remember the afternoon movies they'd play on Channel 43?

Dustin: I should clarify for those reading, he's talking about a station in Cleveland that did a lot of independent broadcasting and produced a lot of stuff in house. The weekend movies were always B-Movies of some sort and they were hosted by one of the WUAB announcers dressed up as "Super Host."

Fingers: Bingo. I figured that since you were from that part of Ohio you'd know what I was talking about. The thing is, I don't know if was a Super Host movie or if I saw it on another channel or what, but I think it was one of those.

Dustin: Well, it was a heck of a find, that's for sure.

Fingers: Word.

Dustin: Would you care to talk about the plot?

Fingers: Hell no. That's all you.

Dustin: Okay… the long and short of it is this: It's set up as a spoof of, well… westerns, generally, but I don't think it's spoofing so much as recycling bits of slapstick and using as many Wile E. Coyote gags as humanly possible. The story as it were is that the good guy, "Handsome Stranger," is supposed to escort the exceptionally beautiful "Charming Jones" and a ton of money back to her father. "Cactus Jack" is the villain, and he's been hired by the evil banker who lent Charming's father the money in the first place to steal it, thereby taking possession of a mine. Or something. Really, the plot gets kind of lost after a while and is more of an afterthought.

Fingers: I think it's like a porn movie, but with jokes instead of sex. You know? The story doesn't have to matter.

Dustin: Wow. The surprising part of the whole thing to me was the cast involved. I mean, it stars Kirk Douglas as the villain! I know it's 1979 and all, and he's well out of his Spartacus phase, but the man HAD to be asking himself how in the heck he ended up in this film.

Fingers: Hey, he didn't suck, though. Kinda got the same impression from Ann-Margret, but I don’t think she acted that well through the crap. She kind of just let her breasts do that acting. But oh man, the Governor of California was a sight.

Dustin: I think it depends what you mean in this case. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of "Handsome Stranger" was a pretty far cry from Last Action Hero. Although he was still breaking into the industry at this point, and I get the impression from IMDB that this was his first leading role kind of thing.

Fingers: But he's not the lead, zoomtard.

Dustin: Well, no… that's Kirk Douglas, because you're supposed to LIKE the bad guy in this case, going with a "likeable screw up" sort of angle. Plus, Schwarzenegger's character is so bland, simple, and dumb (and it wasn't just his acting -- I think the character was written like that) that you want to cheer for Douglas anyhow.

Fingers: He's like, what'd you say earlier? Wile E. Coyote?

Dustin: Yes, and that's the really awful thing about the movie for me -- that "the action" is nothing but a series of rehashed jokes from Roadrunner cartoons.

Fingers: Had to do something. Dialogue wasn't really working.

Dustin: Well, there's that, but I made a list of all the extremely improbable ways that Cactus Jack tries to stop and/or rob Stanger and Charming as they’re traveling: He tries to run them over with a boulder and gets comically flattened himself, he dumps glue on a railroad crossing and gets stuck on it and then the front of the train, there's the bit where he actually goes to the "tunnel" gag and paints a cliff face black, he watches as their wagon rolls right through it and then runs smack into the rock when he tries to follow-- but none of this even begins to touch on all the elaborate rope gags or the bit where he's trying to see Ann-Margret's character bathing in a river and falls off a cliff complete with a Wile E. Coyote "Yipes!" moment where he's paused in mid-air before the fall. Totally ridiculous.

Fingers: And what'd you think about the crap with his horse?

Dustin: The bits with his horse, Whiskey, were all much better than that. Horses with personality are at least somewhat better humor than the slapstick, and Whiskey gets some of the more original gags in the entirety of the movie.

Fingers: Didn't like it at all? Good, my work here is done.

Dustin: I guess it's better than some other things I've seen. I mean, it's not like it's trying to accomplish anything; it's just trying to be funny by referencing all this other stuff. It's of the same cloth as a modern day Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Movie… that sort of thing. Just even less original because instead of parody, they just recycle jokes.

Fingers: I guess I still dug it. But it's my thing, and not yours. It's not a Blazing Saddles kind of movie.

Dustin: Heh. No, that's another kind of "cheap" humor, one that really relies on really good writing. This… had none.

Fingers: Just Ann-Margret's cleavage.

Dustin: Ummm. I need a little more than that to make it through 90 minutes of… whatever this was.

Fingers: Yeah, but I like titties. Don't you?

Dustin: I suppose they are kind of nice… Hey, stop dragging me down to your level.

Fingers: My level rules.

Dustin: Whatever. Okay, overall, how would you rate it?

Fingers: Wouldn't turn it off if I came across it on some afternoon. Probably how I first saw it on TV in the first place.

Dustin: Yeah, but like, on a scale of one out of five?

Fingers: Oh. I guess maybe three.

Dustin: I'm going with one and a half… MAYBE a two.

Fingers: Hey… that reminds me of a poop joke early in the movie!

Dustin: Just let it go, man.