Runtime: 90 minutes
Directed by: Burt Kennedy
Starring: Hulk Hogan, Christopher Lloyd, Shelley Duvall, Larry Miller, William Ball
From: New Line Cinema
In my first of two reviews that will be posted tonight, I'll discuss a film from my childhood:
This is another film I saw in the cinema as a kid! Presumably some are amused to hear what my late mother took me & my sisters to in our youths. Some were pretty sweet like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade… then some were mediocre like this and Spaced Invaders. Then, there was the nadir: GHOST DAD. That was horrifying to watch as an adult due to the whole Bill Cosby thing and the nasty tone it has. Suburban Commando just looked cheap in general so I can’t get too rankled at it.
The reason why this was finally watched by me as an adult: yesterday I drove from my home (near Orlando) to the Tampa area to see the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team lose to the Oakland Athletics of Moneyball fame-the A’s have changed for the worse in recent years but I could write paragraphs about why I feel so badly for how that franchise has treated their fans-but before that was time spent in Clearwater Beach to visit a certain beach bar. Hulk Hogan has one and it’s about what you’d expect, for better or for worse. No, The Hulkster wasn’t there yesterday. I know that there are valid reasons to not like him as a person between his constant pathological lying and the uttering of a certain racial slur that came out in a surreptitiously taped conversation. Yet I am a wrestling fan from the time when it was actually good so I felt obliged to visit nevertheless.
As for Suburban Commando, what a dumb, dopey film it is; I mean, REALLY juvenile and stupid. This has at least one major continuity problem and it was good that this tale involving “Interstellar Warrior” Shep Ramsey was mostly set on Earth, as it had 1960’s-level special effects during the scenes set in outer space. Due to contrivances, Ramsey needs to spend time on Earth to repair his ship. He is a fish out of water as he lives w/ Christopher Lloyd, Shelley Duvall & their two kids. Lloyd plays a milquetoast who puts up with slimy boss Larry Miller, who plays the expected Larry Miller sort of character.
It is not the sort of picture to view for the first time as an adult. That said, if you did watch this as a kid wrestling fan-at home or at the cinema-then to laugh at it, perhaps you’d want to see it again. Some of the goofy gags did make me laugh; at least Shep helps rescue kid Elisabeth Moss’s cat from a tree (yes. This was one of her first roles) and rescues a dog from a hot car. Incredibly, this uses the PKE meters from Ghostbusters as a different prop! Plus, there’s Mark Calaway playing a bounty hunter before he became The Undertaker.
It's a shame that this was the only occasion where Lloyd and Duvall played a couple—they seem like an ideal duo to me. I’d like to know why it didn’t happen more often; then again, there are more pressing questions. Such as, why did Burt Kennedy of 60’s Westerns fame direct this-at least his presence explains why Jack Elam shows up for about two minutes-or how the process of morphing the script from its original Urban Commando idea took place. No kidding, years beforehand this was designed as a vehicle for Arnold and Danny DeVito! They did Twins instead; probably the right move in hindsight.
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