"Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In" for 9/11/02: "Something"
By JOE BOB BRIGGS
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
In the hierarchy of relative acting skills, you've got
Broadway, then you've got Off-Broadway, then you've got Off-Off-
Broadway, and then you've got community theater in the midwest,
which we could call Off-Off-Off-Broadway or just merely intense
pain inflicted on you by your seventh-grade teacher who makes you
sit in a metal folding chair and watch the night staff at the
Dairy Queen do "The Fantasticks."
But thanks to cheap digital video, that experience can now
be transported to any location on the planet, and Mark Adams of
Great Bend, Kansas, has set out to be the Sol Hurok of that
movement.
Don't get me wrong. Mark is a good filmmaker. But it never
ceases to amaze me when independent filmmakers fail to use actual
professional actors, who are so plentiful they'll usually work
for free or for food and gas money, instead of friends who have
trouble memorizing their lines and can't show emotion when a gun
is thrust in their faces.
That's the only thing wrong with "Something," his flick
about a gang of goofy amateur criminals who break into a military
base to find out what's really going on at Area 51. The script is
okay--it's sort of a "Police Academy" for geeks--and the camera
work is fine, but the scenes have so much dead air in them that
you wonder whether the actors are dyslexic, hard of hearing, or
just plain unaware they're in a movie. (They seem like such swell
people, too. One of them is Mark himself.)
At any rate, I have to give them credit for a classic bait-
and-switch to sell the movie. The poster has "JOE ESTEVEZ" billed
above the title, but he's not really in the movie. He does a
little four-minute intro at the beginning, something he appears
to have spent TWO minutes preparing, and that's it.
Now. This is exploitation at its best on two levels. First
there's the simple fraud of saying Joe Estevez is in the movie.
But the underlying premise of the original fraud is that somebody
would buy the movie JUST TO SEE JOE ESTEVEZ in the first place.
(For those of you who have been in a cave, Joe Estevez is the
black-sheep brother of Martin Sheen who has about a hundred
acting roles that are as obscure as those of his brother and
nephews are famous.)
So with all legal warnings out of the way, I can now report
that this is the old familiar story of the amnesiac hitchhiker in
rural Kansas who's kidnapped by an estranged married couple who
have been forced to work for a sinister conspiracy theorist named
Kramen who is intent on breaking into a military base in a 1991
Geo Storm so he can hack into the base computer and find out
where all the space-alien technology from Area 51 is being
redistributed. Meanwhile the kidnapped amnesiac keeps trying to
remember who he is and where he came from while going through
Rambo-style guerrilla training with the bickering couple, until
all hell breaks loose at the base and the entire cast ends up
being pursued by the U.S. Army, a vicious kung-fu artist, and a
spy from the Hershey Chocolate Factory.
Sure we've seen it before, but have we seen it with a four-
minute monologue by the filmmaker about his true love for an
imaginary British princess he thinks is his girlfriend?
I think not.
Absolutely no plot to get in the way of the story. The
finest movie ever made with equipment borrowed from Barton County
Community College.
One dead body. (I think.) No breasts. One kidnapping. One
bomb defusion. Four fistfights. Endless obstacle course sequence.
One thermo-genetic incubation chamber. One six-pronged thought
eraser. Gratuitous treeless prairie. Multiple Kung Fu. Gratuitous
Geo Storm. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Chris Aytes, as
the clueless hitchhiker who says "All I know is that I'm looking
for something"; Kristy Koelsch, as the Tootsie-Roll-Pop-sucking
kung fu mama with a firearm and childhood abuse issues who says
"Money is not the ultimate truth" and "Love is at the root of who
we are as a society"; Mark Adams, who produced, wrote, edited,
directed, and played the lunatic who says "You're the grunt,
you're expendable, and if you survive, you're the scapegoat";
Brock Allen Roesch, as the soldier who says "I can't wait to show
you what the U.S. Army does to terrorists as stupid as you"; and
Sam Wright, as the reluctant computer hacker who knows his kung
One star. Joe Bob says check it out.
"Something" website: angelfire.com/ks3/americantards/