Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Movie Mastery. It's the podcast where we review the movies that you tell us to. I am your host, John. As always, with me is my co-host, Jeff. Greetings and salutations, everyone. Good. Very good. This week, we randomly got one of our many movies that we have been told to watch, and it was a real cherry. Oh, it was just a hoot. It was a cherry 2000. It was the land of 2000 delights. Good God. That's so many delights, you guys. You guys.
delights oh man this is from what 1998 or 1988 for sure oh yeah oh boy well it it came out in the u.s in 88 oh okay but that's because they made this movie and we're very ashamed of it Why on earth would they do that and be that? It came out in 86 in Europe, like actually in theaters. And then Orion Films just put it out like direct to video in 88 in the U.S. And the only reason they did that is because this movie has Melanie Griffith and she was getting notoriety for Working Girl. Right. Yeah, that would make sense. You can tell this is before she was famous for any other kind of reason. Oh, yeah. She has gone on record as saying that this is her least favorite movie that she has been in. I can't imagine why she's. Oh, she's just a peach.
God, this movie. I mean, it's a fascinating movie because it feels like the first 20 minutes are trying to tell us some kind of like big metaphorical story about the way society in the late 80s is crumbling or whatever and how it's all going to fall apart in the future. And then at the almost exactly 20 minute mark, it becomes a boring generic sci-fi action adventure instead, like a post-apocalyptic one. And all the shit that they were setting up in the beginning is just gone. Yeah, it's a weird thing that they spend so much time in this movie trying to...
essentially do world building on an entire area of the world that it will then no longer revisit. Yeah, it never goes back there. We are introduced to a couple of the main characters, like Friends in a bar with a brief appearance from Lawrence Fishburne in it. And it's all this stuff that's like, oh, the future is going to be a horrible place because of the way things are going, let me tell you. And then just like a light switch flips. It's just, no, actually, this is a movie that's like Mad Max with Melanie Griffith. It's very strange. I mean, we are going to go full in-depth into the spoilers and tell you everything that happens, but man.
This movie, just right out the gate, know that it is, it feels very confused about what it wants to be. Not just the whole, like, we're going to spend 20 minutes in sort of a dystopia before we head to a post-apocalypse. But also, just the tone and the ideas are kind of fucking strange. It's just... Well, for the first... I mean, really, I know this is kind of spoilery, but it's only about the first 20 minutes of the film. The first 20 minutes of this is In Cell the movie. And we'll talk about that on the other side of the break. But that's...
The first 20 minutes is incel the movie and the back, what, hour is just sort of generics, a post-apocalypse romance nonsense. Oh, yeah. Just some real unearned shit. It seems like it wants to be both like, oh, we want to comment upon society, but then also like, we're a goofy comedy, but then neither of them work. Well, yeah, to be a goofy comedy, you would have to have gags in it, which it has. Those are like scattered few and far between on the ground. And to have any kind of commentary on society, it probably would have to do something other than introduce a love interest and then simply proceed with the romance apace.
Yeah, I mean, I'll go ahead and give you my non-spoiler review. Not great. Just kind of, there's nothing really there that's like, ooh, this is so bad it's good. I know that this has sort of a cult following. Mostly, I assume, because it's weird to see, I don't know, Melody Griffith being in this sort of a shit movie. Yeah, I can see it having a bit of a cult following. I mean, it's got that 80s, what's the future's going to look like with a really strong dollop of sex poured on top of it, like heavy metal.
Oh, yeah, because this takes place in the far future year of 2017. Yeah, it's the 80s vision of a future where everything's all dismal and shitty, but at least the sex is crazy, which was a common take on 80s looks into the future. But yeah, I mean, there's a couple performances in here I would go to bat for. It's a glorious Tim Thomerson performance. And I'd say that's about it. That's worth the price of admission. Nothing else really is. Yeah, there you go. You know what? Also, there's a couple of...
stunt sequences in this that I didn't hate. I thought they were actually pretty good physical stunt sequences. Sure. Fine. There you go. That's fine. There you go. There's my non-spoiler. So we will be right back with the full spoiler review. We're going to play a little music and then we are going to get right up in to Cherry 2000.
We're back, and it is time to tell you all about the 1986-ish classic Cherry 2000. So I got, first of all, John, a quick story. This is really short, if you don't mind. Oh, sure. The opening of this movie is, I think her name's Pamela Ghibli or Gidley. She plays like a sex robot, and it's her getting dressed behind some kind of weird red slatted screen so you can kind of see the shape of her and so on, because this is one of those constantly hinting at nudity but never delivering nudity movies. Oh, yeah. But while that's playing...
The only sound you really hear is just some bad 80s jazz, but I didn't notice I had left Hulu on because I watched our Smallville episodes first. So I thought the entire intro was scored to some dude talking to some other dude about how his hands got damaged and he can't be a surgeon anymore. I was just like, what the fuck? How do I stop this? And then I paused the movie and it wouldn't stop. I finally figured it out. I had to go back and watch all that again. But at the beginning, it was just like, yeah, the doctor says I'll never be able to play piano again. And my piano teacher told me I had surgeon's hands. And I was like, what does that have to do with this cheesecake? Where are we going?
That's what you get for having too many open tabs. It's a problem I suffer from. I probably have 11 open tabs right now. Ugh, terrible. I know. But yeah, no, that is our titular Cherry 2000 that we see at the beginning here. Cherry 2000 is a sex robot and girlfriend robot. Because you see, in the far future, 2D waifus have replaced real human women because of all of their problems. Well, we basically have two different...
views on it, which was sort of weird that they went in a couple different directions. Oh no, I'm just being tongue-in-cheek. I mean, I know that the bar scene is really the centerpiece of the first 20 minutes. I'm just saying that it's kind of funny to see a movie from like the 80s that's got the exact same tone that you'll see a lot of weird dudes on Reddit have today. Hmm. That the future is sexbots? The future is sexbots because women are unreliable and needy with all of their wants and basic human emotions. Well, I mean, it's also in the bar scene that comes up. We find out that the future of relationships is essentially a business transaction.
Yes. Yeah, it absolutely is. Like everyone will get together and be like, OK, this is my lawyer who's going to write up a sex contract for us. And they have little areas where you can go where you have like a sex resume where you're like, oh, let me show you some of my previous work. This is my demo reel. So we open not on the bar, though, but on our main character. I think the actor's name is like Dave Andrews. He couldn't be more boring.
Oh, Sam Treadwell is the name of our main character, and Sam is just a big old wet piece of toast. Yeah, I looked this guy up to see, I mean, he's the star of this, so I figured he's got to have some other roles, and he does, he's in about a million other things, but nothing, I mean, he's in like Fight Club as a guy who gets beat up. So, okay, he comes home from his long day at the office, and we will eventually learn what his long day at the office is, because they have a piece of stock footage they play as from the 40s, that they say, oh, but it's back now, the future is just like the war. Yeah, well, we get a little world building that there was some sort of border wars, and no real... explanation for why the city of Anaheim, which our main character lives in, is a like futuristic sort of halfway modern, halfway dystopian sort of future city. But then if you try to go out to Vegas, it's all just post apocalypse and like roving Mad Max gangs. Well, yeah, the opening of this movie really fails to set any kind of functional tone because our main character hero lives in an 80s porn mansion.
Like, all of the walls are, you know those big blocks of glass that you saw in the 80s to wrap around showers and hot tubs? They're like the big thick blocks of glass that made it so you could kind of see scrambled porno on the other side of them. His whole fucking house is made of those. They're everywhere. His whole house is made of these things. And he lives alone in a giant mansion, but there's apparently some sort of generic drone at a recycling factory. I feel like he's got to be one of the managers there. I mean, he definitely has, like, an office that overlooks stuff. Because there's no other way he would be able to afford, like, this giant house and...
Some ridiculously rare, high quality, they don't make them like they used to sex robot, which he very clearly does have. Yeah, no, absolutely. He's definitely a person of some wealth and prosperity, which feels weird in a set in a future where they're like, well, with unemployment at 40%, many are turning to recycling as a last desperate measure to have any money at all. Meanwhile, this guy lives in Showtime porn universe. So yeah, it's the whole reason where I was saying that like the ideas and tone in this are very scrambled between what they want to present because.
Even when we're dealing with this character and is like, oh, yeah, we're living in a sort of Great Depression alike where everyone's got to go recycle their old things and not have anything go to waste. And oh, there's so much unemployment. But also we're going to show that basically Anaheim is fine. Yeah, it's sort of it's sort of fine. Basically, the closest city analog I can think of from any other movie to what Anaheim is like in this movie is whatever city Theodore Rex was set in. Because it's the same shit where it's like, oh, if you go out on the streets, it's like weird hover cars and creepy cyberpunk weirdos and so on. But if you go into any building, it's just high class 80s bullshit. Oh, yeah.
So it's very strange. So he comes home from work and there's his girlfriend waiting for him. She has spent the entire day dressing up in his clothes and then getting undressed and then dressing up in her clothes and then making him a meal. And when he comes home, he's like, hey, here's some stuff that happened at the office. And she's like, here's a random fact about things that were invented in the United States. Then she gets mad at him when he doesn't care about it.
Well, it's supposed to be, let's set up that this is a robot because she's like, ah, I have made your favorite food. And he takes like one bite and she's like, I see you are done. And then just takes it away. Yeah. But it's coupled with him being like, oh, that's okay. When she's like, all these things were invented in the United States. He just kind of goes, oh, all right. And she's like, may I get you dessert? So you can tell she's like miffed that he doesn't care about her anecdote, which is weird. But anyway, you're right. It's just a sex setup. She just goes off to get started on something else. And he walks over and they start making out. And then they're...
Their sink starts flooding, so now they're having soapy, bubbly, fun, bubble time sex. And then she breaks because she's a robot. That is to say, there is no sex happening here. They're just sort of, they kiss and kind of roll around with some skin showed on the side, but nothing actually, like, sexual happens because, you know, she gets in water and her circuits fry. Which seems weird, given that she is supposed to be, like, a fully functional sex robot. You would think that, like, I don't know, less than an inch of water wouldn't completely fry her. Yeah, you'd think that...
I'd say maybe day two of the feature list designed for the top of the line sex robot is can you shower with it? Yeah. I mean, even looking at it, I'm going like, OK, but like, where did the water seep in? Because we later he has to take his now broken sex robot to a sex robotologist to fix it. And he opens like the middle of her gut to be like, oh, yeah, all these things are burnt out. I'm like, how did water get in there? You didn't swallow any. What was.
What's going on here? She just had a hole in her back or something. There was just a leak. She had one of those Existence holes in her back. Well, maybe she just sat on something. She's a robot, so she doesn't feel any pain, and she's just like, oh, I have punctured my butt. I didn't notice because I'm a robot, and now water can seep in. I have punctured?
My butt. I mean, she's not designed with a very strong user interface beyond being, you know, a sexy lady. So it's not like her check engine light could pop on or something. You'd think it would. You'd think she would be like, Master, I am damaged. Honestly, the problem in this movie is that the sex robot, at least her, because we don't really see that many of the other robots, other than just frozen women, is that she's entirely too realistic to the point where there's, obviously the movie's going to revert to more or less shaming him for wanting to date a robot when he could date a real woman, right? Because that's exactly what this movie's going to be about. But she's so human that she can't...
there's like no aspect of her that feels robotic. She doesn't have an on or off switch. She doesn't have any user interfaces. She's just a little, like a human woman. So much so that there's a big part of this movie that, a big discussion that hinges on how his only photo of her has red eye. And he's like, oh yeah, that's because of the flash of the camera. If I took a picture of you, you would also have red eye. And I'm like, yeah, but red eye is caused by blood pooling in the back of the cornea. Does she have blood? I mean, okay, I know the writers of the movie just don't fucking know what red eye is. I get that. Yeah, they are assuming it is just reflection.
Yeah, and it's not. It's that the light illuminates your eye at different levels because there's lots of clear stuff in there, and the number one thing it usually tends to hit is the big globs of blood in the back that are making it so your eyes work. Yes, but you're a nerd, so fuck you, nerd. Fine, fuck me, nerd. That's okay. I'm just saying, when that scene came around, I was like, wait, I wonder if she just has a small amount of fake red blood at the back of each of her robo-eyes for extra realism if someone tries to take a picture. After all, she's top of the line. Oh, yeah, well, I assume she just has eyes that can glow red, and it is programmed to do so right when a picture is taken. Yeah, with an 11% chance that she'll blink instead.
Our clients find it sexy when you fuck up their photos. When Sam takes his cherry sex robot over to the sexologist, he's like, yeah, this whole thing is fucked. You have the chip that has all of her memories and personality functions and movement launder rhythms and whatever dumb shit they say. But it's very clear, the way they talk about it, that this type of model, there must have been sort of a golden era. of sex robottery because, you know, he goes through some options of like, oh, you could try out one of these types of things. But they're all like, oh, this is just sort of a like secretary robot that doesn't really have anything going on downstairs. Most of these are just built for, you know, one thing. And if it's a sex robot, it's not really going to act like Cherry did as far as being sort of the girlfriend experience. Right. Yeah. I mean, ultimately she would because her entire personality and memories and everything are stored on a laser disc the size of a cookie crisp. So whatever you plug that into, it's going to be her. He's just being really picky about her body. The weird thing is.
I don't know that that's true because he also goes on about like, oh yeah, that's a very special specific type. type of chip that they don't make anymore, and our main villain is looking for a chip that specifically will work with a Cherry 2000. And I find it's an interesting thing about this sex robot, where he seems to want it because he's fallen in love with his sex robot. And yeah, okay, she's pretty good. She's good at sex and so on, but he's like, no, I'm getting a full girlfriend experience out of this thing, and that stuff's important to me. But when he's talking to the late-in-the-movie-appearing villain, the villain's like, oh, I would love to get one of those Cherry robots working. They're so good at fucking, it's like fucking a magic octopus. And I'm like, wait, are we saying that she really is some sort of insane super freak? Because...
All of the stuff that we see of her sexuality in the film, which mostly consists of whenever he puts his laser disc into a little tiny cassette player, it plays her going, oh yeah, do that with your hand. Oh, now faster. Oh yeah, it's just a, I will replay some of her internal memories and it either replays everything she said from the first scene or a very brief like, yes, is that your hand? That feels good. Oh, come here. Ah, you stud. Yeah, like if she's going to be fucking amazing at it, I expect to hear that weird ass noise from that YouTube grapefruit blowjob video.
He puts the thing in. Oh, no. Oh, I don't know what she's doing, but it sounds vitally efficient. Yeah, I feel like the the cherry robot in here is much more like, oh, I'm here to be like the nice girlfriend robot rather than the sex freak robot. Yeah, they play her off as a girl next door. It seems as though the villain is like, oh, yeah, the cherry 2000. That's the top of the line. Get down and dirty robot. I'm like, that's weird. Yeah, yeah. I guess she can do whatever. And he's got her set to innocent knife. Sure.
In any event, he's all depressed and grumpy when she breaks. The robot repair person tries to sell him on a variety of other models, but eventually says, okay, if you can't deal with one of these models, then there's trackers you can go higher out in the badlands of the part of California that's shitty. I'll give you the name of one, and they could probably help you find an original one of these. Then, he goes to work, which, oh my god, the work scene. Yeah, he goes to work as a guy who is ostensibly in charge of a recycling center? Of course, he's so mopey because his sex robot broke that we don't ever really see anything other than him moping. He's standing in front of a bunch of...
generic crates full of bits of electronics, and his two work friends arrive. Now, his two work friends are doing a thing. I don't know what kind of bit this is supposed to be, but basically they're talking like the Blues Brothers. Yeah, they're just trying to be like, hey, you got to come out with us. We're going to go over to the glue glue club. I don't like it. You love the glue glue club. What about the Jimmy Jams or the shoe shops? Well, the problem is you're giving them any emotion in their voice where the two of them were basically talking like, why don't you come with us to the glue glue club? Yes, you'll meet a real woman, a real woman at the glue glue club. A real woman is better than a robot woman. Oh, I need to stay and fix the things in sector five. Sector five is a lost cause. No sense in looking into sector five. Come with us to glue glue club. Real woman. I'm like, why are they so flat? What is this? I mean, I don't get that.
I did not get that from that performance at all. I just assumed they were bad actors. Oh, I think it might be both because it's weird. They have a weird high speed, both doing the same flat affect cadence that makes them seem like the Blues Brothers or the Lepidopterists from the Venture Brothers. Well, I feel like they're trying to come across as like the we're the sort of standard type of men that you will find now where we're just like, hey, we just want to go out and get, I don't know, some drinks and then we'll have our lawyer look over a contract for sex. One of the people that I have been looking at will possibly.
have a contract for sex with me. That will be great. You should come watch the contract, not the sex. I mean, let's not get ahead of ourselves on saying that doesn't happen because fine, let's go to the glue glue club where right away we are seeing all of the, oh my gosh, if women's lib continues at the current pace, in the future, women will have so much autonomy that every sex will be a business transaction. See, I don't think that's where it is coming from at all. Oh, okay. What's your take? I think it's just...
that relationships don't work anymore. Sure, that's fine. Is the whole thing. It's just, no one is in an actual relationship. Everything is businesslike. The problem is that all of the jokes are about how the men are gross. Because we get, the very first joke we get is a guy being like, or really, it's just a lawyer. It's Laurence Fishburne saying, my client will not participate in that. And then she looks it over and is like, no, deal breaker. And we don't actually know what that is. Oh, it's the oral clause. No, that's a different one. There's multiple scenes. No, that's Fishburne. You're right, you're right, that's Fishburne. I'm talking about the first lawyer who was not Fishburne, my bad. Then we see Treadwell get off by himself and set up at the bar, and a woman walks up, and without talking to him or anything, just...
presses some buttons on an orb near him, and it starts playing a little tiny porn video of her having standing up sex with some dude in a pair of rotating rings, like on that one spaceship in Aqua Teen Hunger Force? Yeah, no, the whole thing is you can either... be like, ooh, we're sitting down to hash out the actual contract negotiation. Or this is you just go up to someone and go, here, take a look at my resume and my demo reel. Are you interested in taking this conversation to a legal place? Exactly. So she shows up and without asking first, just presses some buttons on the thing and is like, watch me fuck. And so he looks and he goes, yeah, that was very nice. And she's like, okay, I think you have something to show me now, right? And he's like, no, I don't. I don't want to. That's not why I'm, you know what? My card's expired. And she just gets like very, very mad at him.
Well, yeah, because it's essentially you went to a place of business where everyone here is here to do business. You're like, sorry, I don't have the ability to do that. You're like, well, you're wasting my fucking time. No, I'm not saying that she's wrong to get mad at him. I just find it funny because she didn't start with any kind of like, hello, let us engage in the regular transaction of this location. Instead, she just walks up and is like, beep, boop, this is me and a guy I met last night. Okay, now you show me one. Sam was standing next to the sex show orb. Oh, is that the problem? Is that he was, that's the customary decision is to stand near the porn orb? Yeah, he's like sitting there next to the porn orb like he's waiting for someone to show up and make a transaction.
Yeah. Well, she gets super pissed at him. Then we cut to the Laurence Fishburne lawyer scene where, yeah, it's one of the two friends trying to set up a night of passion with a woman. And we get Fishburne having to deliver the dialogue that's like, so you have a standard dinner date followed by full sexual encounter up to it, including full release with an option for an additional round in the morning. And then the woman looks over and is like, I don't like this oral clause. And that's pretty much the gag. Yeah. And that's, you know, watching his friend have the worst negotiation ever and just sort of being a horrible perv during the whole thing. And then also.
you know, having someone come up to him and just be like, hey, this is someone I fucked. You want to fuck like that? He has become so disillusioned that he's like, well, I need to go get my girlfriend robot, so it's time to head out into a different movie. I don't know if we can accuse his friend of being a total pervert. I think his friend might just be operating under the current social norms of the glue glue club. I think he's a horrible pervert in that he's like, oh, we don't need to work it out. We'll work it out in bed, baby. I'm like, don't you try and reasel some things in that contract? Yeah, he's like, hey, maybe we'll just finish negotiations in bed.
Like, you know what? If society is degraded to the point where all sexual encounters have a full contract with a lawyer present, then no, you can't just say that. But that's basically trying to say like, I will just have a handshake deal. No worries. But by extension, that means that our main character was completely in the right in the porn orb scene because that woman needed to establish a contract before she engaged in any kind of sexual encounter with him. And I would argue that showing him her porn counts as a sexual encounter.
I would argue that in this society, it doesn't. In this society, that is an advertisement that is saying, let me show you a demo reel. Would you like to move on to the next stage? I don't know, man. Normally when people show me ads, they don't get pissed if I don't immediately buy their product. Like calling me an asshole in a club. The room of let's buy products. Even then, if I walk into a fucking like stereo store and I say, oh, I'm just looking. They're not like.
asshole this guy's just looking okay but imagine a guy comes up to you and is like hey you're in the store huh let me give you a demo on some of our things and he just sits there and gives you a full loadout where you don't say anything and then at the end of it he's like and you go oh i don't i don't actually want to buy anything yeah the guy who just wasted his time giving you a demo is gonna be like what an asshole i love that this is the point that we've decided to have as our sticking point argument because again i'd be like that guy didn't ask if he could show you a full demo he just walked up you and started piling stereo equipment into your hands And there's apparently a point where you're supposed to be like, no, no, no, please stop. I do not want to engage in this encounter. But there was never a point where that was a regular option. The most you could do is when she put in the porn orb, just go, oh, I gotta go. Just return and walk away. So you should have just been like, no, I'm not interested. Thank you, though. Yeah, I guess that at the very beginning, before he sat down and watched her porn, he should have been like, you know what? No, no. Although I get the impression, because our main character is supposed to have been a sheltered weirdo who's only been banging his sex robot, that he has no idea how any of this shit works, which is why he's so incredibly turned off by the club when he finally gets there.
Well, it's weird because he says he hates the glue glue club, which means he's been there before. So he should fucking know. Yeah, obviously he hates it. He has no idea how to interact with it. And weird, creepy shit keeps happening to him. Anyway, he gets in his stupid future car and drives all the way south to somewhere where it's worse. Oh, and by the way, that stupid future car is an actual car that was manufactured, but they only made like a hundred of them. I know. It was like a three-wheeler open top. It's the Hawk Tri-Hawk. Yeah, yeah. It's garbage looking stupid car that makes no sense in the situation because he's driving it out to the desert badlands. And the thing is just like a fucking dune buggy. It doesn't have any kind of top or anything. Yeah, it's...
It was also one of those things where when he drives it out there and he's like, time to go visit the second film. He was he like gets out and he's got a gun and he essentially is like, ah, yes, time for me to travel from dystopia to like Westworld. And I'm just going to leave my hyper futurist car here and I've got no alarm or anything. Like, I assume if he didn't go out into the desert to try and find a sex bot, he would have been like, oh, well, I'll go home. Oh, wait, everything I own has been stolen.
Yeah, I get the impression this guy is crazy wealthy, but that doesn't track, very importantly, out into the Badlands. Not really. Because multiple times throughout the movie we get the impression he's wealthy because he keeps saying things like, money's no object, and I already own the most expensive sex robot in the world. Oh yeah, he's just like, I'm gonna pay you like $500, which the amount there, when we kind of get a scale for what things are, he gets a hotel room and it costs him like a buck fifty, and a shot at a bar is two bits. So the actual scale of dollars, instead of being hyperinflation, was hyperdeflation? Right. So he gets...
to his hotel room where a very unfortunate Asian stereotype, uh, berates him for asking about a type of sex droid that obviously their hotel would never, would never stock. Oh yeah. Well, they also were like, Hey, you can't bring in any outside androids. We have like the hotel androids if you need to fuck something. Yeah. Yeah. And he goes off to find E. What's the name? E. Jones or E. Harris or something. E. Johnson.
Thinking, obviously, she should be a man. That's definitely going to be a man because only a man could be a tracker. Oh, yeah. And the moment that he walks into the office and is accosted and you hear Melanie Griffith's voice say, what are you doing here? You're like, oh, okay. I know the entire arc of this movie now. Yep. There's no sense to watching the rest of this. The main issue of like, oh, yes, Melanie Griffith is here and she's going to be the tracker and they're going to go try and find a sex bot. I know exactly what happens now, except during the course of the film, you're like, man, her attraction to this guy is not at all earned.
Well, nothing about this guy is earned. We're not sure why he's rich. And at this point in the movie, he's a bumbling idiot who gets robbed in a different bar after he turns her down as a tracker for being female. He's like, no, I can't work with a woman on a tracking job. I'll go find a man to do it. Well, no, it's because she wants him to go with. It's not just that. It's both. The very first thing he does is when she's like, oh, I'm E. Johnson. I'll track a thing for you. He's like, eh, I'm going to go find a guy. And then she has to lasso him with a computer chair and haul him over and be like, look, I know how to identify poisonous reptiles. Not venomous ones, poisonous ones.
I grew up out here in the desert and I know this and that and the other thing. So you better be impressed. And he is. He's like, yeah, all right, sure. I'll hire you. And then it's when she's like, oh, but going into this like sector seven part is so dangerous. I'm going to need someone to ride shotgun. And he's like, no, I'm paying a tracker to go in and get me a thing. I'm a rich idiot. I'm not going with you, which seems like a very valid thing to be like, no, I'm.
I'm paying you to be a tracker. I'm not a tracker. I live in Anaheim. Yeah, you'd think the next step for him to be like, well, okay, I find it very weird that you're a tracker who won't work alone, but works alone. Like, obviously works alone, because here I am in your office, and I don't see your normal driving partner. But here's how we should play this out from this point. I don't want to go into the desert, and I'm a rich idiot. You go to the bar, pick out another person, you two go, and bring back my sex robot. Yeah. And I'll pay you both, because money's no object. Yeah, you'd think that would happen, but no, he's just like, oh, I don't want to put my ass on the line. I'm going to go find a tracker that'll do what I want. And then, you know.
He essentially just gets mugged because the other tracker he finds is working for our main villain, Lester, because Lester is looking for a Cherry 2000 chip because he apparently has just like a giant stock of them, but he has no way to get them working. Right. And this is Breon James. There's a couple of people in this where it's like, oh, shit, that guy type dudes. I've always loved this guy as a character actor when he pops up because he looks like this big, scary, like kind of rednecky dude, but he has a little tiny mouth, usually surrounded by a little tiny mouth. You'd remember him as like the general that's always on the phone in the fifth element.
I would remember him as many things. Yeah, because he's in a lot of shit. But basically our hero for this scene and then beyond this scene, not anymore, is a dumbass idiot who gets more or less robbed and has his gun stolen from him. He manages to escape and hires Melanie Griffith to drive him off into the Badlands. But this is his last scene of being like a big city rube as everybody in the bar laughs at him for being from Anaheim. And the people are like, hey, do you have that money for the job on you right now, mister? Yeah, it's weird because we spend this first like third of the movie establishing that.
Sam Treadwell is a sheltered, rich, kind of bumbling idiot who just wants a sex robot back. And then as soon as he gets out into the Badlands and is like going through post-apocalypse world, all of a sudden he's like, oh, I know how to use an Uzi for sure. I'll throw some grenades. Yeah, let's do this. I'm an action hero now. I'm a competent badass ready to do my own stunts. You're like, wait, what? Why are you these things?
Why would that happen? I thought you were the pampered manager of a recycling factory. He spent all day and night fucking his sex wife. And then he's like, oh, no, if we're out and being like tossed by a giant crane over a river, I will, of course, be shooting down a whole bunch of goons while I huck explosives and shoot a bazooka. Yeah, no, it's just like it really feels like it's two movies. It really is. He drives out of Anaheim and into a different movie. Yeah.
So she agrees to take him and unveils her car that she'll drive the two of them out into the desert in. A tooled up demolition derby style 65 Mustang. Yeah, it's a Mustang with some giant like off-road wheels. Yeah, yeah. I have a story about how I lost my virginity in a 65 Mustang. Oh no, did you manage to find it again? Yes, it was still in the Mustang. It fell under the front seat. So I've always, because before I went in there and did that, I got a lecture on how you can tell 64 and a half from 65s by the side scoops. And so now that's the thing that's always been stuck in my head.
So it's a 65 Mustang, but it's all kinds of sci-fi teched out. And in this case, it's just an excuse for her to flip 45 switches before the car can start. Yeah, essentially she flips a whole bunch of switches and plays with some knobs and pulls some levers. And all it comes down to is her car go fast and also has a proximity alert. And that's about it. It's just like 35 different little switches and lights and a little heads up display in there and all this shit. And ultimately...
I'm remembering the couple times I've been in a Mustang. I remember you could pretty much just turn the key and press the gas pedal. So I don't know what she's done to it that makes it take 15 minutes to start, but it doesn't seem like it was a very good idea. I feel like that's just an anti-theft mechanism where you're like, well, you got to know which dumb levers and things to switch on or else you can't start my car. You see this row of 23 switches that are all switched to off? No thief will figure out they all need to be switched to on. No, there's a specific sequence of them you have to do. Left to right. They'll never get it. When they head out into the post-apocalypse desert now, they first have to get past...
One of the dumbest things in this movie, as far as this is supposed to be some level of world building, and I don't understand it at all. There are people out in the road who live in the desert, so they aren't part of the community, but they aren't part of like the desert gangs, but they set up roadblocks for no reason. And you'd think that she knows they're there and she knows about the roadblocks. You'd think in an off-roader, you'd just go around the road where they are instead of trying to drive through and shoot all of them. Or you'd think they would be like, oh yeah, we set up roadblocks.
And then we charge people to get through. And that's our livelihood. Yeah. Instead, what happens is they've been in the town of Glory Hole, which is the shit town that is five miles away from the border at which laws no longer apply. So when you get to this border where she has to drive through, laws no longer apply. So a bunch of people set up there because they can just kill people trying to get into the laws no longer apply zone. Like it's the first three minutes of Battle Royale. Oh, yeah. No, they just went, oh, we're going to set up in Purgeville and go full purge. Yeah. And her response to this is to basically just sort of crash through it with her shooting people out the window of her car. Yeah.
Again, no reason why she doesn't drive around. We see the barricade and it is like maybe 30 feet across. Hey, man, we needed some stunt scenes. It can't all be that one shot of the car on the crane. Anyway, now they go driving for a very long time through what I assume is deserty parts of California, because that's a lot of the footage that we have to look forward to.
Yeah, they're headed to Vegas is where Sector 7 of No Man's Land is. And that's where all the sex robots are. So, you know, great. But they've got to drive through desert. They're driving and having conversations about what Cherry 2000 was and what the world is like on the inside of the cities and blah, blah, blah. Eventually, she pulls over to get some sleep, noting that she will not let him drive her car. And given the one time in the movie he does, it's for good reason. Yeah. Because he crashes into a wall immediately.
She pulls over. She's like, yeah, I'm going to take a nap in the car. You just stay near the car. Don't go anywhere. And so his response is, okay, I'll go sit on a nearby wall, plug my tiny laser disc into my tiny laser displayer and play back my robot wife's fuck noises. I'm just going to go reminisce about sexual encounters with my fuck doll. There you go. So within earshot, she's trying to get some sleep and you can hear this like, oh, is that your hand? Oh, let me help you with that. Go faster. Oh, that's good. Faster. And she's like rolling her eyes and trying to sleep. I'm like, this is definitely a social faux pas that's happening. He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything. We just give a fuck because she's just some plebe. He's hired to do a job.
Yeah. Now, at this point is when we find out about Lester and his gang, which is very weird because they appear to be a fairly even split between wearing construction orange or Hawaiian shirts. It's almost like they raided two different vehicles and just took whatever stuff they could from both. But basically, they're parked near a giant drop tower where people would go to make ball bearings. And then beyond that, a huge quarry, like an abandoned quarry.
On the other side of the quarry, you can see Lester and his gang throwing a guy into an ice cream truck and then pushing the ice cream truck into the quarry. Yeah. And then they all like laugh and shoot guns and blah, blah, blah. And so this is a big problem for our hero because he has wandered too far from the car and is punished for this by Melanie Griffith hucking a tire at him and knocking him into the quarry. Yeah, tire rolls into his leg and he just falls down the little hill. Thankfully, there's an outcropping there, which I mean, maybe she knew that was there, but it's not like she could see it. I have to assume she's been doing this for forever and has done it a bunch of times before because he lands on a pile of tires.
But yes, now we know that Lester's gang is out here, so they've got to take some sort of detour. And instead of the detour being, oh, we're going to go away so that we avoid his gang, it is we are going to drive directly at them for no reason. Yeah, she takes him right to their base, like immediately. Like within two minutes of people, we have to go around them. We can't let Lester's team see us. We see one of Lester's team on a walkie talkie being like, hey, Lester, there's definitely a car heading right for us. Yeah, it's that redheaded tracker and some unidentified white male. And they just have, there is a river to cross.
And instead of finding some other way across, she's like, ah, this is the fastest way. What we need to do is get this crane with a giant magnet on it to hit our car. Then that's going to pick us up. Then while it's swinging us around and people are shooting rockets at us, we'll shoot the guy who's got the crane and make sure that he doesn't drop us or stop moving us. But then when we do get to the point where we're over the river where we should be, then he'll die and actually hit the button that makes the car descend. Your plan is complicated. Her plan is super complicated because it's not just that he hits the button that lets the car go. It's that she...
uses a chain on the car to attach the car to the magnet so that when in his dying spasms he turns off the magnet the car switches from hanging by the magnet to hanging by the chain and then she plays the chain out so that she can get down into like a drip hole in a in a dam and hide in there yeah and you'd think oh this was all just improvising while she went through but then she's like oh yeah i've done this a hundred times this is the best way to get across the river and i just have to imagine how many crane operators had she murdered it's crazy and Like, while they're there, she hands him an Uzi and she's like, do you know how to use this? And this is our moment where our character, who we have established nothing but being a bumbling upper middle management rich guy type, immediately cocks it into badass action hero pose and is like, I think I can handle it. And then he just starts murdering people. And you're like, okay. Wait, what? Sure. Why not? Were there two David Andrews movies and you needed to smash them together? Anyway, this leads them on a fun little adventure where they meet E. Johnson's, like, mentor, Sixfinger Jake. He brings them in and...
For some reason, E. Johnson has begun to fall for Sam Treadwell for no good goddamn reason. All she has known of him is that he is a bumbling city idiot who likes to listen to his sex robot sex noises. And she's like, what a catch. I like this guy. I mean, I almost kind of get it because he's the first man she's ever met who's not like a drunken, filthy desert rat asshole who immediately tried to kill her. Maybe. That's the one thing. Sure, he's bumbling and ineffectual, but he's not like, wee doogies, I'm going to collect me some women. You know, real ones and not robot ones.
But yeah, they eventually get to the point where they got to go get the car out of the dam, which is weird because they just sort of leave it there overnight. And I guess everyone who worked at that like fort where the crane was just decided to not reel in the magnet at all for a day. I guess. Yeah, I really I didn't want to sleep on during the honestly kind of cool stunt sequence of the car being picked up by the electromagnet and then dropped from the electromagnet to a chain and all that. It was kind of neat.
My favorite part about it in general was when our hero kept passing Melanie Griffith various increasingly large rocket launchers. Yeah, out of nowhere, which was fun. So she has, like, one rocket launcher. He gets another one and gives it to her. She shoots that one at something. He hands her another of that one again. She shoots that. Then he holds out an even bigger, like, the biggest one, and she blows up a nearby butte with it. Oh, yeah, because she basically has, like, bazookas, and then he hands an actual, like, rocket launcher to her. Yeah, yeah. So just increasingly large death machines that I guess were squirreled away in the glove compartment of her Mustang. But yeah, we get the scene where they have to camp overnight with Six-Finger Jake, her old, like...
avuncular cowboy dad mentor who's just like, yep, I collect toaster ovens down here. They're quite useful. Anyway, you two kids are definitely going to fall in love. And our hero's still like, no, I'm not. I'm going to fuck a robot. So, you know, the next day they go to try and get the car or the next night and they get caught and Sam wakes up in the...
camp of our main villain, Lester. And he's been dressed as a bowler. Well, he's in, you know, one of those like Hawaiian type shirts, just a patterned shirt and some slacks. Yeah, no, I mean, I get it. He's in a Hawaiian shirt, but he looks very lounge lizard 70s bowling. Like it's a pink Hawaiian shirt with like martini glasses on it. And someone has taken the time to slick his hair back for him. Great. So, yeah, he I love Lester in this. Lester as a gang leader for being like, oh, this is sort of a no man's land post apocalypse. Like he's a Mad Max gang leader, except he's just like.
a motivational speaker that happens to run a gang because he's just like smiley and friendly and is like, well, here we try to realize our full potential. We like to eat healthy and work out. There's nothing better than a good day's work. Everyone here pitches in. I'm going to murder this guy. Yeah, yeah. This is so weird. There's a bunch of cool actors on this too. Tim Thomerson is playing our villain and he's doing it as sort of a 70s health guru, life coach sort of, but, you know, twisted and evil about everything. And also one of my all-time favorite 80s bad movie character actors pops up here, Robert Zadar.
Yeah, we got a little Zadar. God, do I ever love seeing that guy show up and stuff. One of the weirdest things about this scene, though, is when Sam wakes up, he is greeted by a woman that he's like, oh my gosh, it's Elaine, my ex-girlfriend. And she's like, no, I'm Ginger now. And also I live here. We have never heard or seen this character before. And all of a sudden they're just like.
Yes, we have a complicated history and we will not get into it. Yeah, this is very weird. This character is apparently the main girlfriend of the villain who has lots of them. But she's like, oh, it's you. Hi. Hi, Sam. It's me. And he's like, Elaine. Oh, my name's Ginger now. And you're gonna call me Elaine again. And that's gonna be our one. She'll be like, I just told you my name is Ginger. I need you to learn that. I'm like, we're just learning that your name is Ginger and also that your name is Elaine. This is a weird choice. Yeah, but I mean, she's a great character too, because in the same way that Lester is that kind of like...
almost normal like i'm just sort of a friendly guy but then has that kind of like oh turns out i'm actually a weird murderer like she's just acts very like oh i'm like a den mother for this weird post-apocalypse gang and it's like i'm worried about sandwiches yeah no her the two of them do make a very good matching pair for the film uh because yeah our hero is our villain is basically he's like a community leader for a small neighborhood like he's the most popular guy in a cul-de-sac but now also he's a murderer who has a cadre of sex slaves I mean, we don't know that he has a Kadro sex slave. No, it's true. I couldn't be sure. Although every woman that we see in this camp besides Elaine dresses the same and never talks. I mean, I assume that's because they're robots, but yeah. Hey, they could be robots. You've got a good point there. I mean, given that he talks about how he has a ton of Cherry 2000s that he can't get to work, I assume he, and he controls Sector 7, he just goes into Vegas, gets some sex robots whenever he wants to, and is like, great. Yeah, I just, I couldn't get enough of the Tim Tomerson character because he's, basically everything he says that's not a direct threat is just, you know, hey, do you work out?
I've got this belief that everyone who could work out should work out. You seem like you've really got the frame for it. I want to see every man reaches full potential. Do you know what I'm talking about? Now let's get some sandwiches from the missus. Yeah. I mean, even when he's, they find out that like someone that they got is a tracker. And apparently that's the one thing they super hate is trackers. He's like, all right, well, you're going to need to put this bag on your head. Hey, don't rip it now. And he's still being very jovial and friendly, even when he's like, I'm going to murder you.
Yeah, exactly. I really liked this character. He felt well-realized in a movie where no other characterizations really stick. Yes, he is the one bright, shining spot in this movie because you're like, oh, you're kind of a fun, weird character and an interesting thing to play off of. Great. Yeah, so he hates trackers, probably because trackers come out into his desert and steal his good, ruined technology that he hasn't collected yet. Oh, yeah, they're all coming out here to try and steal his sex bots. Those are his. Yeah, but he doesn't know that our hero had hired a tracker. He's just like, oh, some sort of stand-up gentleman. I'll incorporate him into my weird cult community. Well, yeah, because Elaine slash Ginger...
also stood up and was like, oh, he's a good guy. You should let him join the community. So, you know, she kind of goes out on a limb form too. Right. But he just immediately tries to escape, is stopped by one of the heavies in this community, which is Robert Zadar, you know, giant imposing guard with his famous big weird Robert Zadar chin. And our hero just immediately beats the shit out of him. Well, he thinks he does. But then when Zadar falls down, he has a knife in his back because E. Johnson stabbed him. Oh, yes, that's true. Yeah. So E. Johnson rescues him and the two of them escape. But on the way out, he burns all their vehicles.
And blows up their beekeeping hive? Yeah, blows up their bees so they can't have any more of their goddamn honey. All that really means is that for the rest of the movie, Tim Thomerson's Lester has bee stings all over his face that he's covering with chamomile. Calamine. Calamine lotion. Yeah, calamine. It'd be weird if he was covering them with chamomile tea. That would be very strange. But he gets mad and pursues. Now everybody's on a race. They head off and go to a...
Like a gas station slash brothel that this guy runs. What is he like? Slippy? Yeah, it's just Snappy. Yeah, Snappy Tom or something like that. And he's Harry Carey Jr. He's the son of the legendary sportscaster Harry Carey. And that is where they find a plane because their car broke down very conveniently right now. Yeah, yeah. You know what? Maybe he isn't. They spell their names differently now that I think about it. They must be two different types of carries.
Oh, no, he is the son of Harry Carey. Oh, it'd be weird if he was, because I feel like he's about the same age as Harry Carey. Yeah, but he's Harry Carey Jr., so he is the son of Harry Carey. He is definitely the son of Harry Carey, but probably not the famous sportscaster one. Probably not. Who knows? Me, they spell their last names differently. Maybe he was like, fuck you, Dad, who's the same age as me.
Or probably a little younger. This is what you get for, yeah, because this guy was born in 1921. So I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb and say that, no, it's a different famous person, just also named Harry Carey. Famous sportsman Harry Carey, born in 1900. So, I mean, let's find out, shall we? When was Harry Carey born? John, you keep telling the story. So yeah, they find a plane and she's like, well, I'll get some parts from the car and fix this plane up. And meanwhile, Lester has like radioed in to Snappy and is like, hey, if you...
If you happen to see any of these people there, go ahead and let me know. And then his, I guess his brothel workers slash wife, I have no idea what their relationship is, just grabs the mic and is like, oh, they're here. You should come get them. I'm very eager to betray people. Yeah, well, she specifically is eager to betray everybody because she doesn't want to live out here with Snappy Tom or whatever. She wants to go live with Lester. Yeah. And they manage to get the plane working in time and fly off. Meanwhile, she manages to kill Six-Fingered Jake. And then Lester kills her because she is too pushy.
Yeah, she's like, hey, Lester, take me with you. And he's like, I'm really mad right now about something else, so please leave me alone and go in your house. Snappy, tell her to go in the house. And Snappy's like, please leave. And then she just keeps going, hey, but come on, we can have some fun. He's like, all right, well. Yeah, and then he just shoots her. Amazingly, Snappy Tom comes out of this alive. Yeah, Snappy Tom always comes out on top. Yeah. By the way, he did not come out of Harry Carey Sr., though, because Harry Carey Sr. was born in 1914. So while older, probably did not have his first son at seven.
Okay. Okay. Just thought you might like to know. Good. Thank you. Now they've got an airplane to our surviving main two characters, and they're flying to Pharaoh's, which was apparently the most important sex robot place in the olden times before the bad things happened. Yeah, we don't, again, have any idea. We do find out that apparently Treadwell is a badass because he fought in the border wars, which is why he also knows how to fly a plane. But we don't get any idea of what that is or why, like, all of Vegas is now mostly under sand.
Yeah, no idea. I mean, granted, if you turned all the lights off in Vegas and stopped paying the water bill, it would be a gross desert in about an hour. Yeah, but I don't feel like you'd get sand dunes that cover up the entirety of every hotel there. No, it's cool. They were blown in from the border wars. Yeah. Yeah, don't worry about it. From the border, with sand. So they fly out to this half-buried mall full of sex robots to find the Cherry Robot. Now, when they escape the attack of Lester on the gas station slash brothel, Treadwell's like, you know what, let's just fucking go. I don't...
I don't have my Cherry Robot chip anymore. Everything's missing and ruined. I don't really even need to go get the thing. And she's like, no, we need to see this through. I'm your paid client. He's like, no, I don't fucking care about the money. You can keep the money. But she still flies him to the robot factory anyway. Oh, yeah. They do have a moment before this that they start making out and then she like sits weird and oh, she has the chip because it starts playing the fucking Cherry 2000 voice thing again from the first scene. And so that ruins their relationship. He's like, oh, you lied to me. Now I want a sex robot again.
Well, that's why he wanted a sex robot in the first place. Real women can't be trusted, despite their 101 charms. Anyway, they make it there. They find Cherry 2000. There is a point where the bad guys who have been chasing them in a truck and a jeep park the truck, and then out of it comes a clown car amount of ATVs. Oh yeah, they have just a small bread truck that you might be able to fit maybe two ATVs in, but like five of them pile out of it. Yes, and then all the ATVs go just...
You know, driving in and then we get a bunch of shooting in this in this sex robot factory where eventually they do find another cherry and load the chip into her. But she's just like, oh, hi, it's me, Cherry. Where are we? What's going on? I love you. And you can already tell that the movie's done exactly what you knew it would do the moment you met Melanie Griffith, which is he's lost interest in sex robots now. Well, yeah, because he's like, oh, I'm in a fight for my life with E. Johnson, who knows what to do. And she's super cool and has my back. But then my sex robot is just like, oh, I want to watch television. Right. He's like, ew.
Now I've realized that real women are the right thing for me, as long as they grew up in deserts and are not contract negotiation prostitute ladies in the glue glue club. Indeed. And I mean, he has to make the choice here where they escape and get into the plane, but it's too heavy. And Melanie Griffith leaps out to be like, oh, you go ahead. I'll hold these guys off. And I don't know if I win, I'll probably steal an ATV or something. But he comes back and tells Cherry to get out. He's like, hey, go get me a Pepsi. And then saves E. Johnson and flies off into the sunset. And Cherry 2000 just sort of.
saunters over to Elaine slash Ginger, who is one of the only survivors here. And it's just like, oh, hi, what's up? And she's like, hey, you want a sandwich? Which she doesn't, obviously, because she's a robot. Maybe she does, because she needs to refund the blood in the back of her eyes somehow. But she just opens up the sandwich. She's like, pretty. And that's, honestly, that's the last line of the movie. But I think my favorite thing about this big shootout at the robot factory is that we're just watching all of Lester's dumb henchmen get murdered one by one. And then they get up to the roof, our heroes do, where Lester's been watching the whole thing happen from the roof. They sneak up on him and they're like, hey, Lester. And he turns around and there's no confrontation. They just shoot him with an Uzi and he falls into the factory. Oh, yeah.
And he manages to survive that climb out. And when they fly away, he throws a rope onto the airplane and then just gets slammed into a statue and dies. Although I would like to mention that the plane is still able to fly while he is dangling off of it, which means the whole weight thing was bullshit. Well, it was already flying. It was probably losing altitude until they smacked him into a statue of a woman's boobs. Yeah. Well, you know, he went out like he lived in fake boobs. And then they fly away and then it just cuts to credits. That's the end of that. Yep.
That's it. That's the lesson we've learned, is that sometimes a real lady is better than a sex robot, I guess, or something. As long as she's Melanie Griffith, because the funniest thing about this movie, and we were talking about this back in the first 20 minutes of the movie, is that his sex robot desire seems reasonable when he's presented with the alternative, which is a bunch of people doing sleazy contract negotiations in a club. Yeah, when he's presented with, there are no real relationships anymore. Everyone just sort of has to hash out deals in order to have sex. At that point, you go, well, I guess a girlfriend robot isn't that bad of a substitution, because at least you can pretend to be in a relationship.
Right. At least you're not hurting anybody or being hurt yourself. You're just, you know, masturbating with a few extra steps. Yeah. So, you know, humans will pack bond with anything. So it's fine. Yeah, it's whatever. It's better. That's the thing is they present at the beginning of the movie. They're like, this guy's not unreasonable for banging a sex robot because the alternative is frankly unsettling. But then when he gets out of the desert, he meets the only woman in the desert. He's just like, he's like, well, I guess I should date her because she's better than a robot. OK, sure. Why not? The moral of the story is that some women are better than sex robots. The moral of the story is we live in a society. Bottom text.
War garble. So let's go ahead and get into our favorite and least favorite of Cherry 2000. Jeff, I think I know what it's going to be, but go ahead and tell me your favorite thing. I'm curious as to what you think my favorite thing is. Lester. Oh, well, yeah, the Lester performance is fantastic, but actually, I'd say my favorite thing in this movie is the stunt sequence with the car magnet. All right, that's fair. That was a really good stunt sequence. You could tell they were doing, there was squibs and shit. You could tell they were using stunt people for the performance. There definitely was an actual car lifted off the ground. Like, yeah, they're doing it over rear screen projections and what have you, but it was very impressively done. It looked good. It's been a long time since I've seen a scary-ass physical stunt show.
And so that was definitely something where I was like, holy shit, I appreciate the level of commitment they're putting into this scene. But no, other than that, you're right. Lester was a fucking standout performance. Tim Thomerson delivered. It was fantastic. What was your favorite thing? I mean, it was Lester. That is a character that I'm like, oh, that's an interesting twist where everything else in this has just sort of been either paint by numbers or boring. Like, that's a character that stands out as, oh, what an interesting character to have here. What a fun twist on the Mad Max leader. Now, I would also want to throw something out there to Elaine slash Ginger, but the fact that they don't set her up and instead he's just woken up by his ex-girlfriend at this random enclave in the desert.
Oh, yeah. Just an hour in is like, hi, I'm your ex-girlfriend and you're in a weird cult. And he's like, what? What? Huh? I mean, she's a great character and it's a great performance. It just doesn't make any sense where at least the Lester character is set up. Yes. But yeah. So what would you say is your least favorite thing in this movie? I guess I mean, the thing is, I thought the glue glue club was fairly entertaining. Even I would just say it's the weird shift in the movie from at the 20 minute mark or so from, you know, oh, we're showing that we're holding a mirror up to everybody's modern sex politics and their inevitable outcome to not ever mind. It's Mad Max. Yeah, it's it's a very strange.
It's a total shift that feels very broken. And I guess that's probably the reason why it got canned is because of how weird that was. I mean, that is a terrible movie. Yeah, it's also a terrible movie. It's disjointed and stupid. Most of it doesn't look very good at all. And outside of Tim Thomerson, most of the performances are pretty fucking lackluster. Yep. What's your least favorite thing? So, I mean, I would like to say that it is the unearned romance between our main characters. But honestly, the thing that kept annoying me throughout the entire film is the ADR work in here is atrocious.
Normally I'm the one who gets pissed off by sound issues. Oh my God, I couldn't deal with it. For, I would say, 70% of the lines said in this movie, they do not match anyone's mouth. Like, you can tell that it's being recorded elsewhere. They're not even trying to make it sound like it's in the same scene that they're in. It is so bad. Yeah, it's really, really bad. There's so much back of the head talking in this movie. Yeah, it...
It is one of the things that I'm like, normally that doesn't bother me, but it happened so much that I was like, I keep getting taken out of this movie because someone is giving a speech and their mouth is barely moving. It's like, I will move my mouth once and then an entire sentence will come out like, no. Please no. Yeah, it was really, really bad. I mean, as much as I want to even bring up that, you know, one of the problems with this movie was how much it's about sex robots, that just plain didn't bother me. Like, whatever. The problem was, it's the same problem you've seen in a lot of cheap sci-fi movies about robots, is that the robots are just actors. Like, there's nothing roboty about them at all, except for one scene where their stomach gets opened up. Well, yeah, it's any time you can be like, oh, now we're showing deactivated robots and they all look like mannequins, but the second one of them wakes up, they're just an actor. Yeah, it's, but then again, that's just cheap 80s sci-fi for you. There's no getting around it. Oh, yeah.
So we're going to go ahead and give the film its rating. We are both going to give it a zero to five, which will give a full rating out of 10. Jeff, I feel like this is about right on par for a two. Like if the Lester performance was throughout the entire movie and not just the last 40 minutes, this would be a straight up like three and a half for me because he's so great. But I'm going to give it a regular two because mostly I don't care about the leads the slightest. And there's not enough Lester to save this thing. Yeah, I I was really torn between going one and a half or two. I think I'll err on two just because.
The back half of this is so much better than the front half. As far as, you know, Elaine slash Ginger, fucking Lester, Snappy. All of these weird characters that they managed to throw together once they actually head out into the desert. It's fun. You get a cool stunt sequence. You get some weirdos. Like, that's a good time. The first half of this movie is just nothing, though. Well, yeah. The first half of the movie is an incel wandering around and being proven right. Where he's just like, I would prefer to stay at home and have sex with my sex robot. Why don't you come with us to a club? Come on, let's meet some real women. Oh, no. It's awful. I sleep in a large bed with my sex robot.
Yeah, and I have very soft focus sex with her on the regular, even though apparently she's supposed to be insanely crazy about it. All right, well, there you go. Four out of ten. It's kind of shitty. It's definitely low budget, but I can see where it would have some cult following at least a bit. It has a couple of charms here and there, but not enough to make it a good movie. That's basically where we're at. Yeah, pretty much.
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