Remember how during the 1970s, cool private detectives were popping up all over Harlem? There were studly, capable Shaft-wannabes on every street corner, but not enough work to go around. Well, one of them revised his business plan, moved to Florida, and put on some mom jeans. Meet... the Guy from Harlem. (Not in. FROM. Very important.)
Vanilla Ice’s album To The Extreme sold fifteen million copies. It is important to keep this in mind while you watch Cool As Ice, because at some point in time, you will inevitably shriek at the TV, “Who thought this was a good idea? How did this happen? Are they really trying to make ‘yep yep’ his catchphrase? Why???” And the answer to most of those questions is: Vanilla Ice’s album To The Extreme sold fifteen million copies.
Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a Russian (they had to keep prying the waffles out of his hand and replacing them with bowls of borscht). The ghost of Bruce Lee plays himself. And 80s training montages star in this film about 80s training montages.
This movie is a cheesy gift that just never stops giving: as fundamentally and delightfully bad as The Room or Birdemic. Our hero is police captain J.B. Coldyron: robotics genius, cattle rancher, blurter of analogies re skeletons making love in tin coffins. He invents some sort of “robotic cop,” if you will, and stuff goes wrong, and suddenly there’s lots of murdering. One of my favorite movies we’ve ever done! - KWM
The titular cop is played by sort of a proto-Tommy Wiseau with two major differences: you can mostly understand his dialogue and his hair is gorgeous. I mean Megan Fox-before-everything-went-wrong gorgeous. Except for the scenes they filmed later when he’d obviously got it cut off and he wore an eleven dollar drugstore wig.
Miles O’Keeffe, everyone’s favorite Cave Dweller from the MST3K episode of the same name, is back, and he’s Cave Dwell-ier than ever!
Miles reprises his role as the dopey, well-coiffed warrior Ator, which is pronounced all different kinds of fun ways depending on which chopped-up segment of dubbed Italian cinema you happen to be looking at.
At long last, the movie with more punctuation than basic logical coherence, it’s A Talking Cat!?!
Who is the Cat who Talks? None other than Eric Roberts! Director David DeCoteau (who directed the movie under the alias Mary Crawford, can’t imagine why) famously admitted that Eric Roberts recorded all of his lines in 15 minutes in his own living room. Which you’d never believe, hearing him in the movie! Because it sounds much worse than that, like he’s speaking from inside a tin can deep in a garbage truck in another dimension. Or maybe Eric Roberts’ living room IS a tin can deep in a garbage truck in another dimension? We may never know.
It’s the future! Dinosaurs have made a comeback, whereas pants have gone the way of the dinosaur! At the center of it is a man named Yor, who is here to kick ass and hang glide on giant bats, and fortunately he’s not out of giant bats because boy is that scene where he hang glides on a giant bat hilarious!
Right off the bat, there’s one thing you should know about the Suburban Sasquatch: his nipples are huge.
Huge, detailed, and poorly sculpted. He barely comes near a suburb in the entire course of the movie, so it should probably have been called Big Detailed Nipples Sasquatch instead. But hey, hindsight is 20/20. (20 is also roughly the diameter of the sasquatch’s nipples, in inches).
Beloved children’s entertainment should not be this trippy or surreal, but it turns out to be great riffing fodder when it is. Join noted Blockheads, Mike, Kevin, and Bill for Gumby: The Movie!