MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "MEGAFORCE"
In this week's installment of Memory Lane, I revisit the 1982 action-adventure film MEGAFORCE, directed by Hal Needham and starring Barry Bostwick, Persis Khambata, Edward Mulhare and Henry Silva. If you were not a child of the 70s, you probably cannot understand the anticipation and excitement this film generated among kids and teenagers before its release. It was merchandised heavily in advance, and given lavish attention by trade and fan magazines (which were what we had instead of the internet). The movie was even examined by the U.S. Army as it was being shot to observe the Hollywood-designed "attack" dune buggies for their practicability in battle against tanks. Alas, what ended up on the screen was not quite what we were hoping for. So let's step in the time machine and go back to when Ronald Reagan was still the gipper, Michael Jackson released "Thriller," and gallon of gas cost $1.22....
I saw this movie in the theater in 1982 and am still waiting for my refund.
All joking aside, this is one of the biggest pieces of shit ever to come down the pike.
I rewatched the flick as a grown man, hoping to find in it the sort of camp, kitsch and enjoyable shlock that makes so much of my childhood cinema fall into the category of so-bad-it's-good. But this movie is beyond that categorization. It is beyond COBRA in its silliness and cringe-worthiness and complete lack of self-awareness or shame. It is so bad that it is awful, although it opens itself up to Rifftrax/MSTK-style ridicule more than any other movie I can think of. This is one of those flicks which achieves its few level-ups by accident. The jokes aren't funny, but the drama is. It's like a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. And not a good one either.
As kids, we had a special vocabulary to describe things that were especially bad in popular culture. The titles of very bad television shows or feature films were a kind of shorthand to let other kids know how bad something was. If you likened something to, for example, "Battle Beyond the Stars" or "Warlords of the 21st Century," the other kids knew it was trash, but passably enjoyable trash. If you talked about "Krull," that meant a really bad movie which was actually a lot of fun if accepted on its own terms. If you referenced "Automan" as an insult, thems were fighting words, because that show was horrific (this also applied to "Masquerade"). But the lowest of the low, the insult of insults, the unholy of unholies, was "Megaforce."
Some of our approbrium probably stemmed from the movie's hype. It was Cold War time, and America was in the early stages of achieving catharsis for Vietnam by embracing ultra-nationalistic shoot-'em-ups in which all wrongs could be made right with napalm. Kids are especially vulnerable to military jingoism, and to the ideas that military service is like summer camp with guns, and that war is glorious fun in which you get to fiddle with cool gadgets and blow things up without harm to yourself. The pre-release propaganda campaign for this movie hit those notes pretty hard. At the same time, we were in a post-"Jaws" era where the summer blockbuster had become a regular weapon in Hollywood's arsenal, so the marketing blitz, which included magazine articles, ads on comic books, toys, etc., etc. had been going on for many months before the movie debuted. So confident was the studio that "Megaforce" was going to be a hit that they'd already begun pre-pre-production on the sequel, "Megaforce 2: Deeds Not Words." There was, however, one small problem, one tiny flyspeck of blight on this sunrise of golden optimism:
This movie SUCKED.
From the pompous opening crawl to the so-bad-it's-like-wrenching-stomach-cramps last image (the infamous "thumb kiss"), "Megaforce" baffles even its pre-tween audiences with its horrible, cringing, sniveling stupidity. It literally defies analysis how it could have been green-lighted, because everything about it sucks. The writing sucks. The acting sucks. The art design sucks. Even the music sucks. Plus, it's got Persis Khambatta AND Michael Beck, and meaning them no personal insult, either one is the kiss of death to almost any big-ticket project they were involved in: put them both in the same flick and it's like whatever the two-object version of a trifecta is.
The plot of the film is basically this. A mercenary warlord played by Henry Silva is doing bad things in some made-up country in the Middle East or North Africa or something. The locals, represented by P-Khambatta and the redoubtable Edward Mulhare (of "Knight Rider" fame) prove helpless, so they journey to America to enlist the aid of folks who REALLY know how to blow ---- up. These folks are Megaforce, a super-secret band of tippy-top soldiers recruited from all around the globe and financed by the world's democracies to fight evil with the highest-tech weapons available. Basically they are G.I. Joe, except they wear horrible gold lame jumpsuits that leave NOTHING to the imagination and ride dirt bikes and dune buggies. Megaforce is run by Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), who is basically a blond, bearded, blow-dried James Bond crossed with Evel Kneivel. He agrees to take Megaforce to the made-up country and battle Henry Silva, who is actually an old friend of his. After that, a lot of things explode, but in a curious forerunner to the days of the A-Team, absolutely nobody gets hurt. I mean it. With the exception of three bad guys who seem to get vaporized, nobody dies or even bleeds in this movie. It's mainly horrible dialog shouted over explosions, designed to show us the utter invincivbility of Megaforce. The best thing about MF is that it keeps doubling down on the cringe, in a kind of antic blackjack where you can never exceed twenty-one. From the crotch-hugging gold lame jumpsuits to the horrible romance between Barry B and Persis K, in which affection is expressed by kissing thumbs, to the multicolored, vaguely patriotic smoke screens eminated by the bikes, to the flying motorcycle...this movie is a bottomless pit of trash. Barry Bostwick was coming off a long stage run when he took this role, and he acts as if he's still on stage...at the open air theater at Universal Studios. His every movement and facial expression, even his tones of voice, and melodrama turned up to a comic 11. Persis K cannot act, cannot even smile convinincingly. Henry Silva enjoys his scenery chewing so much I suspect he may have been high during the entire production. And Edward Mulhare is to be pitied for having to do his dignified, stiff-upper-lip Brit shtick for fare which wouldn't have made the cut for the worst episodes of "Matt Houston" (one of which he was in, may God rest his actually Irish soul).
The word "toyetic" is used to describe films which are essentially 2 hour commercials for toys, trading cards, lunch-boxes and the like. "Megaforce" scales it around 97 minutes, but it is basically one of the more toyetic movies you'll ever watch with a grimace of disbelief and vicarious flop sweat. Even by the VERY generous standards of early 80s action flicks, this movie has no depth at all. There is no arc, no character development, not even the rudimentary development you see in one of the later Friday the 13th films, where the heroine has to overcome some inner demon before she can vanquish Jason. Megaforce is not even the story of an event so much as the solution to a problem: somebody asks you what 2 + 2 equals, so you write "4" ... but you do it with gasoline and 3 and a half tons of fireworks, while singing "The Star Spangled Banner."
What astonishes me about the movie is that even at the time it was understood to be awful, so awful that 10 year old kids like me -- no great critic of cinema -- could see it for the garbage it was. I have vivid memories of running out of the theater across the bridge to the parking lot with my older brother and some friends, laughing and shouting with disbelief that anything could be this bad and get made. Throw in 35 odd years of time, and what we have is a time capsule filled with you-know-what rather than vino.
"Megaforce" had a $20 million price tag ($61.5 million today) and director Hal Needham, who'd helmed "Cannonball Run," "Hooper" and "Smokey & The Bandit" probably seemed like a no brainer to helm the project. After all, it was essentially a series of car stunts and pyrotechnics with some acting sprinkled over the top: but no amount of money, fire or exploding tanks could salvage the terrible script, cartoonish premiuse or the lamentable casting choices. I know Barry Bostwick can deliver, and he can even pull of action roles (he was superb as the cigar-chewing, lady-klling, Japanese-slaughtering submarine ace Carter "Lady" Aster in "War & Remembrance,") but he's not of sufficient charisma or acting firepower to carry a movie this bad. Nobody is.
To sum up: unless you want to punish yourself for some past-life transgression, like being a tower guard at one of Stalin's gulags, or you love 80s cheese and nothing since 12/31/89 has satisfied your craving since the clock rolled over, avoid this trash. Bad enough to waste the time, but paying the $2.99 rental fee?
Two thumb kisses down.
I saw this movie in the theater in 1982 and am still waiting for my refund.
All joking aside, this is one of the biggest pieces of shit ever to come down the pike.
I rewatched the flick as a grown man, hoping to find in it the sort of camp, kitsch and enjoyable shlock that makes so much of my childhood cinema fall into the category of so-bad-it's-good. But this movie is beyond that categorization. It is beyond COBRA in its silliness and cringe-worthiness and complete lack of self-awareness or shame. It is so bad that it is awful, although it opens itself up to Rifftrax/MSTK-style ridicule more than any other movie I can think of. This is one of those flicks which achieves its few level-ups by accident. The jokes aren't funny, but the drama is. It's like a live-action Saturday morning cartoon. And not a good one either.
As kids, we had a special vocabulary to describe things that were especially bad in popular culture. The titles of very bad television shows or feature films were a kind of shorthand to let other kids know how bad something was. If you likened something to, for example, "Battle Beyond the Stars" or "Warlords of the 21st Century," the other kids knew it was trash, but passably enjoyable trash. If you talked about "Krull," that meant a really bad movie which was actually a lot of fun if accepted on its own terms. If you referenced "Automan" as an insult, thems were fighting words, because that show was horrific (this also applied to "Masquerade"). But the lowest of the low, the insult of insults, the unholy of unholies, was "Megaforce."
Some of our approbrium probably stemmed from the movie's hype. It was Cold War time, and America was in the early stages of achieving catharsis for Vietnam by embracing ultra-nationalistic shoot-'em-ups in which all wrongs could be made right with napalm. Kids are especially vulnerable to military jingoism, and to the ideas that military service is like summer camp with guns, and that war is glorious fun in which you get to fiddle with cool gadgets and blow things up without harm to yourself. The pre-release propaganda campaign for this movie hit those notes pretty hard. At the same time, we were in a post-"Jaws" era where the summer blockbuster had become a regular weapon in Hollywood's arsenal, so the marketing blitz, which included magazine articles, ads on comic books, toys, etc., etc. had been going on for many months before the movie debuted. So confident was the studio that "Megaforce" was going to be a hit that they'd already begun pre-pre-production on the sequel, "Megaforce 2: Deeds Not Words." There was, however, one small problem, one tiny flyspeck of blight on this sunrise of golden optimism:
This movie SUCKED.
From the pompous opening crawl to the so-bad-it's-like-wrenching-stomach-cramps last image (the infamous "thumb kiss"), "Megaforce" baffles even its pre-tween audiences with its horrible, cringing, sniveling stupidity. It literally defies analysis how it could have been green-lighted, because everything about it sucks. The writing sucks. The acting sucks. The art design sucks. Even the music sucks. Plus, it's got Persis Khambatta AND Michael Beck, and meaning them no personal insult, either one is the kiss of death to almost any big-ticket project they were involved in: put them both in the same flick and it's like whatever the two-object version of a trifecta is.
The plot of the film is basically this. A mercenary warlord played by Henry Silva is doing bad things in some made-up country in the Middle East or North Africa or something. The locals, represented by P-Khambatta and the redoubtable Edward Mulhare (of "Knight Rider" fame) prove helpless, so they journey to America to enlist the aid of folks who REALLY know how to blow ---- up. These folks are Megaforce, a super-secret band of tippy-top soldiers recruited from all around the globe and financed by the world's democracies to fight evil with the highest-tech weapons available. Basically they are G.I. Joe, except they wear horrible gold lame jumpsuits that leave NOTHING to the imagination and ride dirt bikes and dune buggies. Megaforce is run by Ace Hunter (Barry Bostwick), who is basically a blond, bearded, blow-dried James Bond crossed with Evel Kneivel. He agrees to take Megaforce to the made-up country and battle Henry Silva, who is actually an old friend of his. After that, a lot of things explode, but in a curious forerunner to the days of the A-Team, absolutely nobody gets hurt. I mean it. With the exception of three bad guys who seem to get vaporized, nobody dies or even bleeds in this movie. It's mainly horrible dialog shouted over explosions, designed to show us the utter invincivbility of Megaforce. The best thing about MF is that it keeps doubling down on the cringe, in a kind of antic blackjack where you can never exceed twenty-one. From the crotch-hugging gold lame jumpsuits to the horrible romance between Barry B and Persis K, in which affection is expressed by kissing thumbs, to the multicolored, vaguely patriotic smoke screens eminated by the bikes, to the flying motorcycle...this movie is a bottomless pit of trash. Barry Bostwick was coming off a long stage run when he took this role, and he acts as if he's still on stage...at the open air theater at Universal Studios. His every movement and facial expression, even his tones of voice, and melodrama turned up to a comic 11. Persis K cannot act, cannot even smile convinincingly. Henry Silva enjoys his scenery chewing so much I suspect he may have been high during the entire production. And Edward Mulhare is to be pitied for having to do his dignified, stiff-upper-lip Brit shtick for fare which wouldn't have made the cut for the worst episodes of "Matt Houston" (one of which he was in, may God rest his actually Irish soul).
The word "toyetic" is used to describe films which are essentially 2 hour commercials for toys, trading cards, lunch-boxes and the like. "Megaforce" scales it around 97 minutes, but it is basically one of the more toyetic movies you'll ever watch with a grimace of disbelief and vicarious flop sweat. Even by the VERY generous standards of early 80s action flicks, this movie has no depth at all. There is no arc, no character development, not even the rudimentary development you see in one of the later Friday the 13th films, where the heroine has to overcome some inner demon before she can vanquish Jason. Megaforce is not even the story of an event so much as the solution to a problem: somebody asks you what 2 + 2 equals, so you write "4" ... but you do it with gasoline and 3 and a half tons of fireworks, while singing "The Star Spangled Banner."
What astonishes me about the movie is that even at the time it was understood to be awful, so awful that 10 year old kids like me -- no great critic of cinema -- could see it for the garbage it was. I have vivid memories of running out of the theater across the bridge to the parking lot with my older brother and some friends, laughing and shouting with disbelief that anything could be this bad and get made. Throw in 35 odd years of time, and what we have is a time capsule filled with you-know-what rather than vino.
"Megaforce" had a $20 million price tag ($61.5 million today) and director Hal Needham, who'd helmed "Cannonball Run," "Hooper" and "Smokey & The Bandit" probably seemed like a no brainer to helm the project. After all, it was essentially a series of car stunts and pyrotechnics with some acting sprinkled over the top: but no amount of money, fire or exploding tanks could salvage the terrible script, cartoonish premiuse or the lamentable casting choices. I know Barry Bostwick can deliver, and he can even pull of action roles (he was superb as the cigar-chewing, lady-klling, Japanese-slaughtering submarine ace Carter "Lady" Aster in "War & Remembrance,") but he's not of sufficient charisma or acting firepower to carry a movie this bad. Nobody is.
To sum up: unless you want to punish yourself for some past-life transgression, like being a tower guard at one of Stalin's gulags, or you love 80s cheese and nothing since 12/31/89 has satisfied your craving since the clock rolled over, avoid this trash. Bad enough to waste the time, but paying the $2.99 rental fee?
Two thumb kisses down.
No comments have been added yet.
ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION
A blog about everything. Literally. Everything. Coming out twice a week until I run out of everything.
- Miles Watson's profile
- 63 followers
