Only now does it occur to me... that I would ever see character-acting legend and scene-stealing nutball Robert Picardo (TOTAL RECALL, THE WONDER YEARS) busting such savagely hip and creepy dance moves, and all in service of seducing America's Sweetheart, Meg Ryan! Note: "The Invisible Lasso," an essential move in Picardo's dance arsenal.
I saw INNERSPACE on television as a child, and for whatever reason I did not remember much, beyond it being a comedic 1980s update of FANTASTIC VOYAGE wherein an experimental pilot (Dennis Quaid) is miniaturized and accidentally injected into the bloodstream of a hypochondriac (Martin Short). Dennis Quaid embarks on his 'fantastic voyage' while eating a JELL-O pudding snack and doing some kind of Jack Nicholson/Harrison Ford pastiche.
Upon revisiting, I cannot emphasize enough how anarchic and bizarre a movie INNERSPACE is. Robert Picardo is just the tip of the iceberg––though I must admit that in his minor role as a silky-smooth international smuggler named "The Cowboy," he does his darnedest to steal the entire movie. Whether "Travis Bickling" with a blow dryer:
putting the moves on Meg Ryan:
wearing a Speedo and blasting a champagne cork at Martin Short:
or being kidnapped and impersonated by a rubberized (through science-fictioney means) Martin Short:
I guess I'm trying to tell you that it's a live action Looney Tunes episode, a relentless slice of sci-fi mayhem, and a work of good-natured batshittery. In other words, it's a Joe Dante film!
BEHOLD: A villainous henchman (Vernon Wells, "Bennett" from COMMANDO!) with more cyborg arm-appendage weapons than Chuck Connors in 99 AND 44/100% DEAD and "Doctor Claw" from INSPECTOR GADGET combined!
EXPERIENCE: Fiona Lewis (THE FURY, STRANGE INVADERS) as perhaps the most lascivious corporate scientist of all time!
ENJOY: Kevin McCarthy (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS) as a criminal mastermind with impeccable interior (and personal) design!
FIND CATHARSIS IN: Lewis and McCarthy shrunk to the size of children (or we could say "Good Guy Doll"-size) and handling absurdly-proportioned props!
GAZE UPON: 1980s New Wave nuttery and other optical illusions!
SEE: More terrifying rubbery faces than TOTAL RECALL!
WITNESS: A tearful Meg Ryan cab ride, made possible by none other than "That Guy" legend, Dick Miller!
LOOK AT: A Rance Howard cameo! Just look at it!
CONTEMPLATE: A world where Henry Gibson is your bitchy-but-well-meaning supermarket boss!
BE FACED WITH UNSETTLING MELANCHOLY: When the scientist who injects Martin Short (John Hora, Dante's cinematographer) is shot and killed at a mall by Vernon Wells' robo-assassin. As the life flows out of him, he is confronted with the startling image of mall mascots coming to his aid.
He fades and dies, scared and confused. This is probably a good example of what I mean when I say this film is anarchic––but it is emotionally grounded, unlike much of the contemporary absurdist comedy, where many jokes rely upon randomness or anti-humor for their effect. There is an order to this film––a cartoon-logic, if you will––but its anarchy supports the story (also see: PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH, WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, et al.), and it's nothing if not well earned.
I feel as if I've barely scratched the surface of this strange beast. Now, go forth, and rent INNERSPACE!
Stars: 4.5 of 5.
Running Time: 92 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong (TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE, CHAINDANCE), Alyssa Milano (DOUBLE DRAGON, POISON IVY 2), Vernon Wells (WEIRD SCIENCE, KING OF THE ANTS), David Patrick Kelly (WILD AT HEART, THE WARRIORS), Bill Duke (ACTION JACKSON, PREDATOR, THE LIMEY), Dan Hedaya (BLOOD SIMPLE, THE HUNGER, MULHOLLAND DR.), James Olson (AMITYVILLE II, RAGTIME), and a very special appearance by Bill Paxton. Music by James Horner (48 HRS., TITANIC). Cast by Jackie Burch, clearly one of the best casting directors of all time (THE BREAKFAST CLUB, SIXTEEN CANDLES, D.C. CAB, PREDATOR, DIE HARD, THE RUNNING MAN). Cinematography by Matthew F. Leonetti (EXTREME PREJUDICE, FAST FORWARD, POLTERGEIST).
Tag-lines: "Let's party!"
Best one-liner: See review.
Now this is a difficult task I have before me: what can one write about COMMANDO which has not already been writ in the annals of cinema history? I believe that COMMANDO has universal appeal. There's truly something for everyone in COMMANDO. Yet not everyone is willing to sit down and check themselves out some COMMANDO. Thusly, there are many people- the sorts of people who wouldn't immediately recognize DPK as the universal abbreviation for David Patrick Kelly- that aren't giving COMMANDO a fair shake. So I shall put forth the solution to a perennial problem: how to vault COMMANDO from its position as a beer n' nachos slugfest to something that even the Cabernet Sauvignon crowd could enjoy? Well here ya go: a list of 7 low-brow and 8 high-brow happenings in COMMANDO- the best of both worlds. Hopefully, I can win over some hearts and minds. I'll begin with the low-brow because that's exactly the sort of no-class pandering you'd expect of this site:
LOW-BROW HIGHLIGHTS OF COMMANDO:
1. RDC. Or, for the uninitiated, Rae Dawn Chong.
I like Rae Dawn Chong. I like Rae Dawn Chong a lot. When Ironside needed a go-to lady in CHAINDANCE, who did he pick? Rae Dawn Chong. When C. Thomas Howell was pretending to be black in SOUL MAN, whom did he romance? Rae Dawn Chong. When James Remar needed some luvin' after getting freaked out by gargoyles in TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE, who did he shack up with? Rae Dawn Chong. All these great minds can't be wrong about Chong. Anyway, she's pretty horrible in this movie. She's kind of the Kate Capshaw/Willie Scott of COMMANDO. I don't know why I started with this one. Hell, I don't know why I'm telling you this, period.
Anyway, somebody must've liked it, or else they wouldn't have told her to be really annoying for the duration. Which only proves my point: this theoretical person who likes screechingly vocal, nettlesome female leads is dissimilar to me in almost every regard. And yet the both of us can find common ground in COMMANDO!
2.
I really miss these kinds of mall elevators. They used to be in every movie. Well, they at least used to be in RUNNING SCARED.
3. The emphasis on sweaty Arnie pec-shaking as legions of men wearing mustaches constructed from felt purchased at Jo-Ann Fabrics are gunned down in a wanton display of gratuitous violence.
4. Occasionally in an action movie, they'll show the same explosion twice, from different angles, for dramatic effect. Sometimes they'll show it three times, perhaps alternating shutter speeds or frame rates to give it that DAYUM SHIT IS BLOWIN' UP sparkle. Once in a blue moon, they'll even show an explosion four times, cause they just couldn't resist.
Well, in COMMANDO, the same explosion is shown nine times. Don't take my word for it, either:
5. One-liners, one-liners, one-liners. I know you've heard them all before, from "Don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" to "BULLLLLLLL-SHIT!!!" My personal favorite is probably the head-scratchingly homoerotic, "John, I'm not going to shoot you between the eyes. I'm going to shoot you between the balls!" Regardless, I don't think that I can quite emphasize enough how many one-liners are used in COMMANDO. Look at this graph which compares the number of successful one-liners used in COMMANDO to the number of successful one-liners used in everyday life.
The numbers are staggering. I also appreciate that three thousand years of dramatic writing from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Eugene O'Neill found culmination in 1985 with the following exchange: FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE! *click*
Fuck YOU, asshole!
6. Arnold flinging a phone booth containing a frightened David Patrick Kelly!
7. An axe-low-blow!?
Alright, before I get off track and we lose too many brain cells:
HIGH-BROW HIGHLIGHTS OF COMMANDO:
1. So many random windows in COMMANDO have artsy, Vittorio Storaro/Dario Argento/Bernard Bertolucci-style colorful backlighting. Didn't expect that in COMMANDO, did you? Well, COMMANDO is full of surprises.
2. I've been working, on and off, on this sort of existential science-fiction film called BLACK HOLE ADVENTURE. It attempts to merge the youthful whimsy and 80's-tastical-ness of those old CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE novels with the crushing pessimism and random tragedies of adulthood, and it's all wrapped in a package that's half ROBOT MONSTER and half SPACE ACADEMY. I only mention this, because I discovered that David Patrick Kelly is somehow wearing BLACK HOLE ADVENTURE.
That out-of-this-world suit! The scratchy, woolen needlework! All tied together with a pair of Spicoli's checkered surf shoes from FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH! A-plus, DPK. An A-plus.
3. Hedaya's ponderous jowls. Hedaya's shaggy, caterpillar-esque eyebrows. Hedaya's deeply cleft chin. Hedaya's sunken, terrifying eyes. Hedaya's five o'clock shadow. Hedaya's unnervingly fleecy chest hair, always threatening to crawl out of his shirt and onto YOU. All of these disparate elements converge to form Dan Hedaya.
4. BOOM- out of nowhere- Paxton. He only gets like three lines in a throwaway role as an air-traffic controller, but I still say even just ten seconds of Paxton is ten seconds of class.
5. The COMMANDO font.
Busy, but not too busy. Colorful, but not too colorful. Kinda sporty, but kinda militaristic. Framed elegantly by parallel horizontal lines. I could go on.
6. The opening montage of Schwarzenegger and daughter Alyssa Milano which seems to borrow equally from Leni Riefenstahl propaganda, contemporary political advertisements, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and THE SOUND OF MUSIC.
7. The void in Bill Duke's eyes. Even for the film fan who has seen it all, there's something sincerely uncanny about Bill Duke's deadpan stare. Most of filmdom's great psychos- from Lon Chaney to Dwight Frye to Anthony Perkins to Crispin Glover- have an active glint in their eye, a quivering eyebrow, a narrowed eyelid. Not Bill Duke. Bill Duke looks into your soul, confident that neither he nor you even have one. Then he says that he likes the price of your Cadillac and runs you down with it.
8. James Horner's score. Ever since I got my hands on a copy, I've had nothing but steel drums and discordant wailin' sax stuck in my craw. Now, it may be a total rip-off of Horner's previous score for 48 HRS., but at least this time the tropical locale provides a bona fide excuse for the steel drum action. This is a throbbing, pulsating, hard-driving score that never lets up, never quits, never stops with its firm jams and unyielding grooves.
In all, COMMANDO is the tale of a man who so loves his daughter, Chenny, that he blasts, low-balls, and blows away a ton of dudes so that he can get to a fictitious Latin-American country, change into a Speedo,
row to shore, change back into commando clothes, blow away some more dudes, take off his shirt, and finally face off in a steam room with the leather-pantsed, chainmail-sweater-wearing bastard who has wronged him.
Four and a half stars. Make sure, uh, nobody gets poked in the eye or whatever.