Unwatchable #84: "It’s Pat"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

When we looked at Hobgoblins the other day, I mentioned that it might be possible to construct a Bottom 100 list made up entirely of Gremlins ripoffs. Now it occurs to me that you could probably do the same with Saturday Night Live spinoffs, a thought that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. What horrors await me further up the list? Coneheads? Superstar? A Night at the Roxbury? But after watching It’s Pat, my mind was put at ease. For there to be another SNL movie on the list, it would have to be worse than It’s Pat, and science has proven this to be impossible.

By “science” I mean “me sitting through all 77 minutes of It’s Pat.” Now, 77 minutes may not sound like long to you, but let’s remember that all time is relative. A 77-minute James Bond movie would probably zip on by, but for a movie based on a sketch that wore out its welcome thirty seconds into its first of many iterations, it’s 4620 seconds of pure torture. Surely you remember Julia Sweeney’s beloved Pat character – the tight curls and bushy unibrow, the thick-rimmed glasses, the western shirt and khaki slacks clinging tightly to a blobby physique. And you remember the one and only joke about Pat: Is she a he or is he a she? Nobody knows!

The premise was so thin that the true joke of the sketch quickly became: Can you believe we’re doing this fucking Pat sketch again? So it’s no wonder that the 1994 feature film version became a punch line long before it was given its belated, limited…I hate to even call it a “release”. More of a parole, really. Anyone in their right mind would rather watch 77 minutes worth of surveillance footage of writers Jim Emerson, Stephen Hibbert and Sweeney trying to cobble the script together. “Okay, I’ve got it! Pat falls down the stairs and cries, ‘I’ve crushed my nuts!’ But it turns out – Pat has a pocketful of walnuts! And now they’re crushed!” “That’s good, but I’ve got you beat. We see Pat’s equally androgynous lover Chris (Dave Foley in a unisex bob and colorful assortment of muumuus) with his hand in her lap, or her hand in his lap, or whatever, and Chris says ‘I love to stroke your pussy.’ But –get this – Pat has a cat in his or her lap!” And so it goes, until you’re half-convinced you’re watching some sort of experimental anti-comedy.

To the extent that I’ve spent any time thinking about it, I guess I’ve always figured Pat for a dude, but of course, it makes no difference. Either way, Pat is perhaps the most repulsive character ever to headline a comedy. Self-absorbed, rude, oblivious, and gross beyond human measure, this is no one you want to spend your valuable time with – man, woman or otherwise. It represents a career low point for everyone involved, including former SNL regular Charles “One Season” Rocket and cult band Ween, who seem only mildly embarrassed. Really, the only funny thing about the movie is its German title: Was ist Pat? Now that’s comedy.

Previously on Unwatchable:
85. Battlefield Earth
86. Hobgoblins
87. The Sidehackers
88. College Road Trip (pending)
89. Bloodlust!

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Okay, so there's a new Uwe Boll movie coming out. Big deal, says we. Sure, we're curious about how the Teutonic uber-hack managed to get Dave Foley to star in his new film (Postal, opening in limited release today). And sure, we're even more curious about how he got Dave Foley to do a nude scene. And yes, we must admit that there is something oddly compelling about a filmmaker so universally reviled that a chewing gum manufacturer has helped sponsor a petition to get him to stop directing movies, and who is himself so adamant that he is a cinematical genius that he has challenged his critics to meet him in the boxing ring. But however rotten this German-come-lately may be -- and he's plenty rotten -- for us here at the Screengrab, there is only one true heir to the crappy moviemaking throne vacated by Ed Wood, and that man's name is Albert Pyun. The Hack From Hawaii -- who directed his first film in 1982, only four years after Ed Wood's death -- has been responsible for over forty films and direct-to-video releases, at least one of which has already turned up on movie janitor Scott Von Doviak's "Unwatchable" list. Both in his ridiculously prolific output and his utter lack of talent and shame, Albert Pyun leaves Uwe Boll in the dust. So instead of trying to find a theater willing to screen Postal this weekend, why not settle down for a film festival with our man Big Al? To help you in this terrifying endeavor, we've assembled a list of five of Pyun's best works -- and we use the word "best" in the loosest possible application to which the word has ever been put.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)

Albert Pyun's first screen credit -- as both director and writer -- is a real doozy that sets the tone for his innumerable too-cheap-to-be-camp movies to come. A standard-issue steel-and-spells epic ripped straight out of Albert's Friday night dorm room Dungeons & Dragons games, The Sword and the Sorcerer cost about nine dollars to make, with a script too dull for TV and special effects that would have seemed hokey in 1972. The real treat here is the cavalcade of has-beens populating the cast: there's well-past-his-prime teen idol George Maharis, his suntan decaying before our very eyes; future Murphy Brown fixture Joe Regalbuto; hulking, self-serious Night Court golem Richard Moll; coked-out Nina Van Pallandt, a million miles from The Long Goodbye; unreconstructed manimal Simon McCorkindale; and, in the lead, none other than Matt Houston star Lee Horsley! Sadly, this collection of fourth-stringers would be the hottest cast Pyun would ever work with. It would be all downhill from here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990)

Oh, sure, everyone wants to see superhero movies now. But we can remember a time when the mere whiff of a mask or cowl was the kiss of death at the box office, largely because of grade-Z capesploitation movies like this. Never before have the adventures of America's living legend, super-soldier Steve Rogers, seemed so completely perfunctory; even Matt Salinger, whose career wouldn't exactly reach to the stratosphere after this dud, doesn't seem to be any happier about being Captain America than we are about having to watch him be Captain America. Still, he's at least better than nonentity Scott Paulin, hamming it up beyond belief as the supervillainous Nazi the Red Skull, while industry vets like Ronny Cox and Darren McGavin stand around sheepishly trying not to look embarrassed. Captain America rides his tricked-out motorbike around a lot, says "shucks" and "gee whiz", and the audience hits pause on the remote control to see if there are any uppers left in the medicine cabinet to get them through the longest 97 minutes of their lives.

KICKBOXER 2: THE ROAD BACK (1991)

Our own movie janitor Scott Von Doviak has already been forced to contend with one of Albert Pyun's cinematic abortions in the form of Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. But not only is that not one of Albert Pyun's worst movies, it's arguably not even Albert Pyun's worst movie with the word "kickboxer" in the title. That dubious honor may just belong to Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, featuring hand-carved dingaling Sasha Mitchell as a man hoping to follow in his brother's footsteps in the highly lucrative career of kicking people in the face. Featuring some of the worst dialogue in the history of kickboxing films, Kickboxer 2 manages the astonishing trick of not only featuring both Peter Boyle and Brian Austin Green, but making you feel sorry for both of them. It's an agonizing wait between kickboxing scenes, but the bits of plot and dialogue are so abysmal you'll begin praying for another kickfight to break out. The movie's tagline was "Put up, shut up, or die!", but sadly, Pyun did none of those things.

BRAIN SMASHER...A LOVE STORY (1994)

By the time this movie rolled around, Albert Pyun had truly found his metier: cheap, exploitative direct-to-video releases timed to take the slightest possible advantage of the flavor of the moment. Or, in this case, the flavor of many, many moments ago. It's a testament to Pyun's impenetrable thickness as an auteur that he decided the moment was right to write and direct an action movie built around the antics of faux-goombah Andrew Dice Clay some three years after the Dice-Man's star had already begun quite seriously to wane. Plodding along in a nebulous phantom zone between sincerity and irony, this half-joking action flick was clearly made by someone who understood neither sincerity nor irony, and the result is an enervating mess that isn't even gleefully offensive, the one quality Dice Clay's standup had going for it; it's just dull. Still, you have to give it up: as much as you might hate this movie -- and you'll hate it, a lot -- you gotta love that title.

URBAN MENACE (1999)

The staggeringly bad Urban Menace was not the first abysmal hip-hop action/horror flick that Albert Pyun would make. It was also not the last. But it was, without question, the absolute worst. The closest thing in Pyun's bloated catalog, in both technique and spirit, to the godawful films of Ed Wood, Urban Menace stars Snoop Doggy Dogg's highly unconvincing stunt double in a movie that knows how bad it sucks and simply doesn't give a shit. The majority of its running time features the stars running around aimlessly in an abandonded warehouse; the script probably took less time to write than the movie takes to watch; and the best thing you can say about the acting is that, in the case of rapper Fat Joe, at least his lines are delivered with such mush-mouthed incompetence that it spares you from having to hear any more of the terrible dialogue. (The film, amazingly, claims four different scriptwriters. Which one of the four will own up to "We got a whole army of motherfuckers and we can still get punished by this skinny guy psycho?")

The Screengrab : dave foley

Unwatchable #84: "It’s Pat"

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment