MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND
I PAID TO SEE HOWARD THE DUCK

HOWARD THE DUCK - to think some people believe bringing Jar Jar Binks to life was George Lucas' low point.  Speaking of something that was a bad idea from the start, early 2002 just has not felt right without a second season of the XFL.  In the aftermath of this nation's tragedy, what better way to soothe those painful wounds than with the antics of "He Hate Me" and the rest of the Not Ready For Monday Night Football Players?  Vince McMahon's and NBC's redheaded stepchild should have at least been allowed to exist long enough so that we could have gotten that XFL video game that was in the works.  It would have been the only football videogame on the market in which the rules during the game's season mode would change in the middle of the season.  We'll never get to sit in our living rooms and recreate the "human coin flip" that preceded each game.  Worst of all, the folding of the XFL meant that the online fantasy XFL league that I played in also would cease to exist.  Alas, my beloved San Juan Chupacabras and Vatican City Cardinals will never take the field again!  Farewell XFL, at least you're guaranteed to live on in TV history right alongside My Mother The Car and The Mysteries Of Al Capone's Vault.

TIGER BOMB

Now, before I get into the crux of this particular column, I want to comment on a few things that are completely unconnected to one another:

  I saw BLADE 2 and it was without a doubt the best damn C.H.U.D. sequel ever!  No, I actually enjoyed BLADE 2 quite a bit despite some very annoying over sights, plot conveniences, and gaps in logic in the script.  Still, it was just nice to see a no BS, R rated and damn proud of it action film as opposed to all the Mountain Dew commercials masquerading as action/adventure movies that we've been subjected to lately.  Speaking of which, the trailer for the upcoming Vin Diesel actioner, XXX, ran before the film and I started getting the urge to "Do The Dew!"  But for those of you who did see BLADE 2, didn't the Reapers remind you of the CHUDs? Maybe it was their bald heads, diseased skin, unearthly eyes, homeless person fashion sense, and penchant for lurking in sewers, but I just kept thinking that they were just jacked-up, badass CHUDs.  Still, I think the Reapers were the coolest movie monsters to come along in quite some time.

  A few words about NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VAN WILDER.
No, I haven't actually seen it but if I do a top 10 of films in 2002 that I didn't pay to see, this film is guaranteed to rank very high on it.  Has National Lampoon really sunk this low?  This movie looks like a Simpsons' spoof come to life.  I remember an episode of The Simpsons where Homer was watching some 80s teen movie in which a hunky slacker named Corey got some geek named Nerdlinger to build a bra bomb to go off just as the stuffy dean was giving the President a tour of the campus.  The bomb goes off and the dean is furious, but the President dances as the sky rains bras and names Corey the Secretary of Partyin' Down.  I'm convinced that VAN WILDER is that parody brought to life only minus the laughs.  And why is the perennial slacker in this movie played by a guy who looks like he should be posing for teen heartthrob magazines instead of a Jack Black type?  If ANIMAL HOUSE got made today, they'd probably cast Ryan Phillipe in the John Belushi role!  And while we're on the topic, another one of the stars of said film is Tara Reid.  Am I the only one who thinks she looks like she was made by combining Christina Aguilera, a raccoon, and one of the skeletal gladiators from THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD?*  Think about it.

*Whoa!  We're heading into Dennis Miller territory now, Scott! -Ed.

  I saw the trailer for Jennifer Lopez's upcoming woman-in-peril
thriller entitled ENOUGH.   It's a 100% complete knock-off of that crummy Julia Robert's thriller SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, only she has a kid and instead of faking her death, she just moves away, changes her identity, and starts taking Tae Bo classes.   One of the big lines in this film is "Self defense is not murder" in reference to the plot twist, given away in the trailer no less, in which Lopez sets up her psychotic ex-husband in a situation so that she can murder him and make it look like self-defense.  It's no surprise for me to see a trailer and get a negative vibe, but this film caused my bad movie 6th sense to blow a fuse!  Oh, I do believe ENOUGH has the potential to become the subject of one of my columns.  I can see the title right now, "The Foywonder Has Had ENOUGH!" I can also already see the J'Lo/ENOUGH Oprah episode because you just know this thing is going to be touted as some sort of important female empowerment message movie rather than the exploitation film it will actually be.  ENOUGH looks like it should have been made for the Lifetime Network or The Oxygen Channel.  Of course, if it had been, I'm sure J'Lo's character would have been pregnant and going into labor during the final showdown.  And whose idea was it to cast THE ROCKETEER as the ex-husband stalker?  Could you at least hire a guy who has at least a fleeting sense of menace?  Why not cast Steven Seagal to stalk her?  At least given his real life reputation for misogyny it would be more believable.  Enough already!

  REMAKES! REMAKES! REMAKES!  Get ready for remakes aplenty!  We got a "less gory" version of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (I guess they never bothered to watch the original or else they'd already know that it has virtually no blood and guts to begin with), a LOVE STORY remake with Britney Spears, a WESTWORLD remake with Ah-Nuld in the Yul Brenner role, a WALKING TALL remake in which Joe Don Baker & James Caan will be replaced with the younger and hotter duo of Matthew McConoughey and Chris Klein (Yes, the kids will flock to a tale of redneck justice), a remake of FOXY BROWN, Keanu Reeves in the title role of a BILLY JACK remake, a remake of the Hitchcock classic VERTIGO, a remake of THE IN-LAWS, a remake of FANTASTIC VOYAGE, an "urban" remake of AIRPLANE (I can see it now - Method Man and Redman in FLYIN' HIGH), and another big screen version of THE LONE RANGER in which Tonto will now be a hot, young Indian girl in love with the masked man.  Yes, all these remakes are in the works yet the much delayed ABOMINABLE starring Jean Claude Van Damme has yet to begin production.  Screw the remakes!  I wanna see Van Damme kickbox Bigfoot now!  NOW, DAMMIT, NOW!!!

Okay, it's now time for the main event of the evening.  There's been this video sitting on the action movie shelf of one of the local video stores I frequent that has been intriguing me for months.  Making it even more intriguing to me was the fact that no other video store that I visit has this movie and I was unable find any reviews about it online and that includes The Internet Movie Database (IMDB).  When IMDB has a film listing with no plot summary or user comments, that's when you know a movie is obscure.  On numerous occasions, I picked this video box up and was tempted to rent it, but kept resisting the urge.  I knew it was just going to be just some low budget, made for video martial arts film, but I was still intrigued.  I finally broke down and rented it.  The movie is called LONE TIGER and by the time the credits began to roll, I had gained a new appreciation for Lorenzo Lamas' movies.

What kept beckoning me about this film was the box art depicting a guy in a tiger mask in a fighting pose.  Being a fan of Japanese wrestling, the guy looked like a knock-off of the legendary Japanese wrestler named Tiger Mask.  Reading the plot synopsis on the box, it sounded like the film's tiger character was actually a rip-off of the character King from the video game Tekken, who himself is based on Tiger Mask.  Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this direct-to-video atrocity, let me first give a very brief back-story on Tiger Mask.  The character of wrestler/crime fighter Tiger Mask originated as a comic book and cartoon character in Japan in the late 60s and became a pop culture sensation amongst Japanese children.  Think of Tiger Mask as a Japanese El Santo, only more like a comic book superhero with some social commentary thrown in.  Also, keep in mind wrestling in Japan is about a million times more popular and respected than it is in the US.  To try and explain the differences between what you see on WWF TV and what puroresu, the term used for Japanese wrestling, is like would take forever to explain and someone more knowledgeable than me to explain it.  Let's just say, the difference between American wrestling and Japanese wrestling is like the difference between an American John Woo film and a Hong Kong John Woo film.  Anyway, in the very early 80s, Tiger Mask finally came to life when a wrestler donned the likeness of the hero.  Thing was, the guy who took on the identity of Tiger Mask would become one of the greatest, most popular, and most influential wrestlers to ever live.  Long story short, Tiger Mask is still a pop culture icon in Japan.  If LONE TIGER is supposed to be a live action version of the anime/manga Tiger Mask character, then the 70s TV Spider-Man series suddenly seems like an imaginative, top notch rendition of the character in comparison.  I don't know if the owners of the Tiger Mask copyright had anything to do with this film or not, but if they did, now might be a good time to do the honorable thing, if you know what I mean.

LONE TIGER's hero, played by Bruce Locke, most famous as the robot ninja in ROBOCOP 3 and the evil Shang Tsung on the wretched Mortal Kombat: Konquest TV series, is the son of a murdered wrestler who dresses exactly like Tiger Mask and is even referred to as Tiger Mask who was murdered when our hero was still a child.  For reasons that either weren't explained or maybe I was just too bored to pay attention, the adult son of Tiger Mask now wanders the streets of Las Vegas with nothing but the clothes on his back and a sack with a few belongings including his dad's mask.  Long story short, he befriends the homeless and gets into back alley fights with escapees from Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video, led by the immortal Stoney Jackson.  A talent scout for an evil rich guy, played by Z grade movie villain dujeur Richard Lynch, snaps a few pictures of one of his mortal combats leading to him being recruited by the evil rich guy to take part in the big money underground gambling sport of human cockfighting.  When engaging in one of these fights to the death, he dons his dad's tiger mask, but our hero refuses to kill which angers said evil rich guy who compensates by whipping out a pistol and gunning down the defeated opponent leading our hero to come to the realization that they evil rich guy is in fact evil.  Eventually, he meets up with and is befriended by Dark Tiger, Matthias Hues playing a wrestler who claims Tiger Mask as his inspiration despite the fact that he doesn't wear a tiger mask or any kind of tiger themed attire, and soon comes to realize that his evil benefactor, in an amazing coincidence that could only happen in a crappy, low budget action film, may have had something to do with dad's murder all those years ago.  Insert plenty of crappy fight scenes, flashbacks, training montages, & training montage flashbacks.  During one of these training sequences, Robert Z'Dar, aka the man with the world's largest face, whose character is billed in the credits as King Coach, ties the son of Tiger Mask to the back of a motorcycle and drags him around the desert until he becomes strong enough to win a tug-of-war with the speeding motorcycle.  Seriously, I'm not making that last part up.  Oh, and a little note to all potential action movie directors: seeing people getting kicked in slow motion, then flying backwards in slow motion, and finally crashing into, onto, or through something in slow motion does not make things more exciting.

Following the big fight at the end, this movie actually has the audacity to tease a sequel as Richard Lynch looks directly into the camera with a shit eating grin and laughs.  I think the director's desired effect was to convey the fact that the villain got away and was going to seek revenge in a sequel.  I read it as, Richard Lynch taunting this viewer because he just sat through this duller than dirt crapfest with no actual payoff at the end other than the filmmakers flipping the bird at me with the threat of sequel that will never be!  Now I want to don a tiger mask and seek vengeance upon everyone involved with this movie that robbed me of 95 minutes of my life!

It is amazing how a joint US/Japanese production, even a low budget one, could still look cheaper the crime recreation segments on America's Most Wanted, but LONE TIGER succeeds.  You'd think having Richard Lynch (who played the bad guy in most direct to video action films made in the late 80s/early 90s that couldn't afford Michael Ironside), Robert Z'Dar (MANIAC COP himself), Matthias Hues (the evil drug dealing alien from I COME IN PEACE), & the legendary Stoney Jackson together in one movie for the first time ever would be a good thing?  WRONG!  Not even the brief cameo by Timothy "I know that name from somewhere, but I just can't quite place it" Bottoms contributes anything to this waste of time.  Personally, I think Lynch only agreed to be in this stinker as long as he was given free cigars, backrubs from moderately attractive women, and that he be allowed to dress like a combination of Dr. Who and Kolchak the Night Stalker.  I think everyone else were just happy to be working.

The movie, while unrated, would probably merit a PG-13.  It seems really inappropriate, not to mention way to boring, for kids and it's way to lame for adults, so I have to wonder just who the hell this movie's target audience is supposed to be?  I can only assume they were hoping to sucker in unsuspecting fans of Tiger Mask and/or Tekken's King, such as myself.  It sure as hell isn't fans of martial arts movies because the fight choreography in this flick is some of the worst I've ever seen.  The fights scenes in LONE TIGER are so poorly executed that they make the ones in an episode of Bibleman look like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.  Essentially every fight scene involves a guy who is tall, brutish, and/or pot-bellied, with absolutely no hand/eye coordination, slugging it out with this small guy in a tiger mask who fights like he's been studying karate for about a week.  Nor is this movie made for wrestling fans because the wrestling matches are devoid of any actual wrestling as they too are choreographed exactly the same as every other fight in the film only with a referee who counts pinfalls.  Ironically, the tiger mask itself is less a mask than a helmet designed to look like a tiger's head that he simply places over his head and leaves one wondering how it manages to stay on during the fights.

One final surefire sign of this film's wretchedness is the fact that IMDB lists LONE TIGER's release year as 1998, yet the closing credits clearly state it was filmed in 1994.  At least four years from the time it was made to the time it was released. I guess even the producer's knew the film was, as I would say, "sucksational" and weren't sure they even wanted to waste the money needed to market it.

So why on Earth did I waste this space ranting against some movie that your video store probably won't have and even if it does you still shouldn't bother to rent?  Because I'm fairly positive that I am the first person online to have reviewed this movie and, considering what little info I can find on it, maybe even the first one to actually see it too.  The only review you'll currently find for it at IMDB is a condensed version of this one from yours truly so I believe I am currently the only online authority on LONE TIGER which I'm not completely sure is something to be proud of.  So if you ever come across a copy of LONE TIGER or get an opportunity to see it, don't say The Foywonder didn't warn you!

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND
I PAID TO SEE ACES: IRON EAGLE 3