bad/awesome flixxx review: Black Moon Rising (1986)

"I am *wide* open for suggestions right now!" - Quint

"Don't fuck with the government!" - Johnson

"There's a nice mugshot, now how about a profile?" - Quint

This is one of the baddest movies I've watched in a long time. I thought I'd seen most everything connected with John Carpenter, but sometimes, a neat little hidden gem like this will come along. The reason most JC fans haven't heard of this one is because he didn't direct it, he was one of the writers. But who cares! Its a great movie even if it has nothing to do with him! Young hilarious Tommy Lee Jones, Linda "my hair is always horrible" Hamilton, Bubba "hightower" Smith, Lee Ving!, and Robert Vaughn in BLACK MOON RISING!!!

Talk about badass. A young, lean and mean Tommy Lee Jones plays Quint, a man in some kind of debt to the government. It leads you to believe since he's a professional thief that he's stolen something from them and their agent Bubba Smith, and in return to get out of jail time, he must steal something for them in return. When the flick begins, Quint witnesses a young kid try to rob the gas station he's in, and hilariously talks him out of it. If this is the scene he read for that helped him win the role from the likes of Jeff Bridges and whoever else was considered for it, I understand why. This is an early moment of that charming wit and wry one-liners that Jones became known for.

So Quint has to steal this cassette from this place and he successfully does so. But he also has some competition in Lee Ving, another contracted thief, who REALLY wants this cassette. They're constantly fighting throughout the flick... one scene has Ving and his goons beat Quint senseless for a good ten minutes, slamming his head in a car door, kicking him over and over and over, until he pulls a gun out from under his 5.0 and blows one of their faces off. So, in his desperation to get away from Ving and secure the tape successfully back to the pigs, he hides it in the license plate of an experimental car that is being taken to some car show. He then follows the car to the show in hopes of recovering the tape.

Unluckily for him, Linda Hamilton just rolled into town with about 25 car thieves and while everyone is wining and dining in the hotel lobby, they steal every single one of the fancy cars, and hide them in a huge skyscraper complex that either chops them or sells them to people overseas or some shit. This organization is headed by Robert Vaughn who basically kidnapped Hamilton when she was a runaway teenage car thief. Quint follows her and sees what's happened, and offers the owners of the "Black Moon" a chance to get their car back if they'll help him. They say fuck that, then realize there's no way in Hell they can get the car back without his help, after their mute mechanic (William Sanderson!!) is run over and killed by some goons.

Quint wins over and bangs Linda Hamilton and she falls for him because she knows her shitty boss has manipulated her for years. The boss has creepy tapes of her from when she was young and secretly wants to bang her but he's such a creep she would never go for it. Quint hatches a plan, gets some dude to give him schematics of the building and teaches the black moon crew how to be cat burglars. He scales one whole building and then still has the strength in him to do the old "arrow building to building rope slide" move. TUFF!!! And finally it comes to a showdown where they have to get the car out of the top of the second building (WHICH IS -BY THE WAY- WHERE THE DUDE WHO WROTE 'TOWER HEIST' STOLE HIS IDEA FROM except for he didn't even finish writing that movie which is why is was such a piece of shit) and faced with no other choice, they floor it and crash through the window Dukes of Hazzarding it through the window into the first building! FUCKING AWESOME! I highly recommend this one.... word.

Monday, March 26, 2012