Road House 2, or, Why I'm an Atheist

Jenn tivoed Road House 2, which was airing on Spike at 2 in the afternoon today. You know a film is bad when you can't even convince Patrick Swayze to come back in a cameo. This is a straight-to-video fiasco of epic proportions. We tried to tackle it sober (Jenn is now fixing that situation...) and, as she mentioned in her post, we've managed to survive Battlefield Earth in its entirety. We only made it through about half an hour of RH2 before deleting it and popping in the original as a palette cleanser.

How bad is it? It's like aliens, completely ignorant of our culture, somehow got their hands on the original movie and decided they would communicate back to us using a similar, but entirely foreign duplication of the film. These aliens concentrated very hard on recreating every scene exactly, often using the same dialogue line for line, but missed the part about making it somewhat watchable. No more than thirty seconds can pass before a character knowingly spouts a familiar phrase, then looks at the camera and all but winks. Tee hee! We're in on it!

A loving god wouldn't allow such an affront to a classic of cinema. The original Road House looks like Citizen Kane in comparison. The classic RH had Ben Gazzara as a drunken, pink-bathrobed criminal mastermind. The sequel gives us Jake Busey (Gary was busy, but the Busey brand of insanity is well-known) sporting a Flock of Seagulls haircut and bling. The original had Jeff Healey as a blind guitar savant in the house band. The sequel gives us a soundalike band with a dancing midget. The original gave us Patrick Swayze as single-named philosopher-turned-bouncer Dalton, who had a man-sized mullet. The sequel gives us his mulletless son Nate, a DEA agent-turned-bouncer, who reveals his dad's first name was "Jack". That's like finding out Darth Vader is really just Steve, from Accounting.

Why, oh why?! If it was absolutely necessary to continue Dalton's saga, could it have maybe been done by technically competent people, who know how to place words together to form sentences? Who can frame a shot by placing the actors in front of the camera? Who would beat the living crap out of anyone who tried to pass this abomination off as being in any way linked to the cherished 1989 classic?

Excuse me, I have something in my eye.

Everything I Needed to Know About Politics I Learned from Road House

The new White House chief of staff told employees that they had to either "re-engage" or that now was the time to quit. Somehow, this struck me as very much resembling Dalton's speech to the staff at the start of Road House, where he tells them that if anyone wants to quit, now's the time to do it, because it's "my way or the highway." I can see the new guy showing up in overly tight black clothes, chain-smoking, and laying down the rules- no dealing, no skimming from the till, and so on and so forth.

I wonder if this makes Iraq our "regular Saturday night thing"?