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Learning Day: Raw Deal’s Fake Death
Author: Tom Reimann
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Learning Day: Into the Silververse
1993âs Hard Target is a film of many distinctions.
Pictured here.
It is John Wooâs first American film; in it, you can see him honing the skills to the level of cinema mastery required to craft Face/Off four short years later. It features Jean-Claude Van Damme at Peak Van Damme, the absolute height of his powers, fueled by a Samson-like bond with his mullet, which would have also been clad in denim had the filmâs budget and production schedules allowed it. An entire subplot is devoted to The Mummy violently bullying a man who looks like a tobacconist screamed his McDonaldâs order into a 3-D printer. It is the longest a film has ever made us think about Lance Henriksenâs hog. In short, Hard Target is not only a perfect movie: it is the best movie.
Van Damme plays Chance Boudreaux, because nobody could figure out where the fuck he was from in the ’90s so they settled on âFrench.â (See also: Universal Soldier) Chance is an unhoused day laborer with a Military Backstoryâ˘, which is meant to explain why he knows karate even though he could beam that knowledge directly into our brains by making eye contact. He runs afoul of Lance Henriksen, who leads an underground safari business that arranges human hunts for unscrupulous millionaires. Lance and his goons quickly learn that Van Damme is The Most Dangerous Game, a truth many had already suspected, including Van Dammeâs parents.
No other director before or since has so perfectly grasped the essence of Van Damme, and what it takes to make the ultimate Blockbuster Video rental for latchkey kids who have yet to discover cigarettes and petty larceny. The entire cast is moist, and the villains are bizarrely jolly. But the triumph of Hard Target is John Wooâs understanding that the only way to film Jean-Claude Van Damme slicing his legs through the air like a pair of smooth denim-clad falcons is to film it from multiple angles and in slow motion. Like the controlled demolition of a national monument.
Hard Target is also a collection of some of the finest moments in the history of kick-based cinema. For instance, in one of these moments, Van Damme punches a snake in the head. I understand that you can read those words, and may have even seen the punch itself in GIF form on one of your many voyages across cyberspace.
But permit me to highlight it once more, with particular emphasis on what it was like before the internet, when movies could just throw something like this at you and you couldnât tell anyone about it. Seeing Van Damme, glistening with the sweat of a bayou summer, clench his mighty fist and blast an angry rattlesnake into the dreamlands was like being mugged by a ghost. My friends didnât believe me, and the cops were mad Iâd called.
Other standout moments do not directly threaten any wildlife, but are arguably ten times as violent. For instance, every member of Lance Henriksenâs crew looks like they went to at least one high school dance in their 20s.
Thereâs a montage of Lance Henriksen playing the absolute shit out of a piano while hatefucking his own reflection. I have nothing to add to this. Just let it take you, like the tide, and eternity.
But standing a meaty head and shoulders above them all is Van Dammeâs Cajun uncle, Uncle Duvee, played with felonious enthusiasm by Wilford Brimley. Itâs impossible to overstate the impact of experiencing this towering achievement in storytelling for the first time. Any words of mine would only paint a crude sketch. Itâs best to let Uncle Duvee speak for himself in the only way he knows how â by galloping away from the explosion that was once his desperately impoverished home.
In the final act of Hard Target, Van Damme is chased into the bayou by Lance Henriksenâs men. He takes refuge with Uncle Duvee, who raised him from a tiny Belgian orphan into a bountiful roundhouse dispenser. Donât worry, the movie doesnât elaborate on their relationship any further.
Van Damme mentions Uncle Duvee earlier in the film while he is explaining his badass past to his sidekick Yancy Butler, who hired Van Damme off the street to help track down her missing father. (Van Damme is the perfect man for this job, because he has never looked more like Dog the Bounty Hunter.) But even hearing whispers of Uncle Duveeâs legend peppered throughout Hard Target cannot prepare you for the moment in which he is revealed to be Wiflrod Brimley in a pair of overalls, using a 70-year-old still to boil cancer into a jar of moonshine.
Uncle Duvee lives on a solid acre of terrifying land. He may have been born there; he may be squatting. Itâs impossible to tell which is correct. Van Damme quickly fills Uncle Duvee in on the plot so far, and they initiate a Home Alone Situation, or âSitchâ, against the villains. They have a rapport that suggests theyâve either done this before or theyâve spent considerable time preparing for this eventuality.
In addition to dispensing bleary-eyed wisdom about the times in a manâs life when he just has to kill a bunch of dudes with karate kicks and fire, Uncle Duvee speaks Cartoon French and owns enough dynamite to guarantee he will be the subject of a Netflix documentary. He briefly pauses between committing shocking acts of violence to drop truth bombs like, âGood whiskey makes de jack rabbit slap de bear.â Nobody else even bothers to act during these scenes.
Uncle Duvee immediately blows up his house and most of his property, although I refuse to believe this is the first time his still has been completely engulfed in flames. The explosion only takes out a few of the bad guys, who for all he knows are really U.S. Marshals coming to take his nephew back to prison. Although that would not have changed his behavior whatsoever. Duvee had clearly been planning to commit insurance fraud for years and this home invasion merely presented an irresistible opportunity.
Uncle Duvee puts arrows into several motherfuckers, like he spent several hard winters eating only what he could kill. And he doesnât even blink. His eyes are unreadable, his mustache an enigma. He feels nothing but battlefield lust.
For a brief, horrifying moment, we are led to believe Uncle Duvee is dead. Lance Henriksen lunges out from the cowardâs shield of darkness and stabs him in the chest with his own arrow. It was like watching Santa get shot by a burglar. I screamed confused rage at my auntâs television. But the arrow was deflected by Duveeâs alligator skin flask. His heart was shielded by the very same booze that will one day stop it from beating. Indeed, it seems Uncle Duvee was the hardest target of all.
What does Uncle Duvee do the other 364 days a year when he isnât helping his Belgian nephew kill The Mummy and Lance Henriksen? Weâre given the smallest glimpse of what his life might be like during this brief exchange:
CHANCE BOUDREAUX, THE BLUE JEAN WIZARD: Do you still have the 30.06? The one I gave you for your birthday?
UNCLE DOUVEE, FUCK DRAGON OF THE SWAMP: No. A gator ate it.
Was he hunting the gators or feeding them? I cannot know which, and both might be true.
We can assemble a rough idea of Uncle Duveeâs life based on his interests â kicking back in a jon boat, tossing guns into the bayou for the alligators while greedily slurping bathtub gin from a rusty still and drying sticks of dynamite with a space heater. This is the Hard Target sequel I need. I donât care that Wilford Brimley has been dead since 2020. Uncle Duvee wouldnât let that stop him.
Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where de bear wear de alligator shoe to de Walmart.
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The first thing you must understand about Steven Seagalâs Marked for Death is that Steven Seagal grifted his movie career into existence by giving one of Hollywoodâs most powerful agents a karate lesson.
The second thing you must understand about Steven Seagalâs Marked for Death is that it features no martial arts whatsoever.
The final thing you must understand about Steven Seagalâs Marked for Death is that it is a remarkable showcase of the worst clothing ever made, all of which is worn by Steven Seagal.
To the first point â Steven Seagal is a fake martial artist who forced audiences to agree he was an action star by blunt force. He released so many movies between 1988 and 1992 that the world bent to his will, lest it be subjected to an even more rapid release schedule. Indeed, Marked for Death and Hard to Kill burst unbidden into theaters within the same eight month period of 1990, a year in which the fourth highest-grossing film was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which features more martial arts action than the entirety of Steven Seagalâs filmography. However, Steven Seagal eats way more pizza.
To the second point â Despite being an action star and self-described expert of aikido, a vaguely-defined martial art that seems to be more about chill vibes than performing decapitating tornado kicks, Steven Seagal tries as hard as he can to move as little as possible in every single one of his movies. He has less mobility as a 37-year-old karate DEA agent in Marked for Death than a sculpture of Steven Seagal in a Serbian wax museum. Watching a Steven Seagal movie for the action scenes is like watching an erotic thriller on Nickelodeon â the good parts never come and you are too bored to call the police.
To the third point â Steven Seagal wears a selection of outfits in Marked for Death that can only have been assembled from his own shallow closet. No other human being would choose these clothes for him. He personally selected each garment to accurately reflect his inner aikido master. They are the clothes of a dipshit, a man-child who has spent several thousand dollars on infomercial throwing stars.
As an exploration of the second and third points, I am going to take you through the major scenes of Marked for Death with an eye towards Steven Seagalâs unique talent of deflating every room with his baffling acting choices and unshakeable defiance in the face of doing any actual karate, and his tremendous array of douchebag costumes, which he 100% brought from home. I will be grading these things on a scale of 1 to 5 Tiger Manfaces, a metric that will make absolutely no sense until it suddenly does.
Marked for Death combines Steven Seagalâs two biggest loves – pretending to know martial arts and being extremely racist. The movie succeeds so well at that second thing that a message appears during the end credits, explaining to the audience that not all Jamaican people are murderous, drug-dealing sorcerers.
Straight out of the gate, weâre hit with a steel drum foot chase through the streets of Columbia. Steven Seagal is unable to make this sequence thrilling, because he runs like a toddler in a baton race. It is not merely his default setting, but his only setting. Still, he tries his best to get the audience excited by shoving people out of the way that arenât even in his path. He practically runs over to people just so he can shove them down.
The man he is chasing is future Hollywood icon Danny Trejo, who attempts to thwart Steven Seagalâs pursuit by pushing over a cart of tamales. Steven Seagal cannot abide that mistreatment of street food, and he expresses his displeasure by getting hit by a station wagon.
It seems like Danny Trejo is getting away, but Steven Seagal uses his aikido magic to teleport in front of him and kick him in the stomach. Itâs not a graceful martial arts kick, but the kick of a man trying to dislodge a candy bar from a vending machine. We have arrived at the first of Steven Seagalâs aikido outfits.
He is wearing multiple layers because Steven Seagal always layers up like a 1980s It Girl. The centerpiece of this ensemble is a satin jacket with white trim, commonly known as âa little league jacketâ or âa coat for children.â Heâs wearing a beaded half hoop earring in one ear, like an open mic guitarist who just got out of the Navy.
Beneath the jacket, Steven Seagal is wearing a black collared shirt tucked into black slacks. He looks like if tarmac could sexually assault people. I award this look 2 Tiger Manfaces â ridiculous, but subtle enough to bluff his way onto the judgeâs table at a pre-teen karate demonstration without anyone suspecting he intends to challenge the winner to a bo staff duel.
Steven Seagal interrogates Danny Trejo in the trunk of his car. Danny Trejo is the finest actor in this scene because he has to pretend that he canât just pummel Steven Seagal into hamburger meat at the slightest provocation. Danny Trejo has actually seen shit. Steven Seagal is a California aerobics instructor pretending he knows karate.
Steven Seagal then slaps the shit out of his partner for taking his eyes off of Danny Trejo, even though his partner caught up to Danny Trejo without getting hit by a station wagon. We are four minutes into this film and Steven Seagal has slapped three of the four actors he has spoken to.
Danny Trejo tells Steven Seagal and his partner about a deal with Salazar, who is a man with a bolo tie and one leg up on a school desk. The deal goes bad and a man in suspenders threatens Steven Seagal with a sword.
Steven Seagal, sensing that we are dangerously close to witnessing a genuine action scene, easily takes the sword away from the guy and chops one goonâs hand off. Then he bonks suspenders guy on the head with the sword and kicks him through a mirror. Then a third guy comes running up and Seagal sidesteps him through a table in slow motion. He does a prancing karate dance, presumably to distract us from the fact that he has yet to do any karate.
A naked woman gets the drop on his partner and shoots him. Steven Seagal shoots the naked woman 12 times. That is not an exaggeration.
Back home in Chicago, Steven Seagal is in confession. We are now presented with the second aikido outfit of the film. I call this one âthe Danny Tanner.â
He is dressed like a server at The Cheesecake Factory, or like a kid who accidentally left half of his tuxedo at the mall on his way to prom. This is a 3 Tiger Manface ensemble â heâs dressed like a Wayans brother on the red carpet at the premiere of Encino Man. He looks like a magician on a riverboat cruise. Plenty of people could pull off one or two of these items, but not all of them, and certainly not Steven Seagal.
After explaining to the priest that he is on an unquenchable quest for justice that he knows must bring him outside of the law, he rattles off his list of offenses – âIâve just killed a woman. Iâve lied, Iâve slept with informants, Iâve taken drugs, Iâve falsified evidence, I did whatever I had to do to get the bad guys. Then I realized something. That I had become what I most despise.â Steven Seagal then leaves to go tell DEA Captain Peter Jason that he wants to retire, while the priest presumably calls the FBI.
Steven Seagal towers over Peter Jason in this scene. It looks like Seagal is standing on multiple apple boxes and Peter Jasonâs legs were severed at the knee. Itâs like Peter Jason is watching Kong scale the Empire State Building. Steven Seagal has claimed to be 6â5â, and while heâs visibly a tall guy, there is no way he is as tall as an NBA shooting guard. Even if he were, Peter Jason is 5â11â, and the height differential in this scene is way more than 6 inches. The fourth thing you must understand about Marked for Death is that Steven Seagal is deeply insecure.
Seagal drives his sports car to his sisterâs home in nearby suburbia, leering at some teenage cheerleaders as he enters the neighborhood. His sister is having a barbecue. A little kid runs up to say hello to him and he slaps the kid in the face. Thatâs just how Steven Seagal greets people in this movie, like a dog burying its nose in your crotch.
Steven Seagal goes upstairs to his room, because he apparently lives here, where a bow and loose arrows are sitting out on a desk. There is a shadow box full of guns on the wall. He sits down at his desk and wistfully repairs what appears to be a zip gun, a weapon used to murder traffic cops in the 1940s.
He shows up to the local high school football practice the following day in a velour tracksuit.
This is an outfit worthy of 4 Tiger Manfaces. Heâs dressed like a supporting character on The Sopranos.
The football coach is Steven Seagalâs old friend Keith David. He takes Keith David out to a bar, where âall the ugly girls used to work.â Because Marked for Death is a deeply unsubtle film about the scourge of recreational drug use, Keith David tells Seagal that he had a player overdose on cocaine and die the previous year. Thatâs a lot of cocaine, man. Too much, one might argue.
Steven Seagalâs âgoing out for drinksâ aikido garb is the finest outfit in the entire film.
It technically consists of several pieces, but the only one that matters is the black satin jacket with twin dragons on the front and a tiger with a human face on the back. And now my rating system makes sense.
I cannot stress enough that Steven Seagal dresses like a 10-year-oldâs definition of cool. The only people in this world who would wear that jacket out in public are me and Steven Seagal. The jacket makes several more appearances in the film.
It is his official aikido gi. I award it 15 Tiger Manfaces and my firstborn child.
Bad guys come in and start shooting up the bar. Seagal very angrily pushes a woman down to safety, like he is mad at the inconvenience. He only knows one way to touch people, and that is âwith violence.â He has the opportunity to beat up one of the goons, but he opts to put the guy in an extremely slow wrist lock instead. This is his signature move, because it allows him to completely neutralize his foes while keeping 98% of his body motionless.
The Jamaicans, enraged by Steven Seagalâs involvement, drive by his sisterâs house in a BMW and shoot up the place with M16s. Steven Seagal heroically dives for cover, clearing the way for his grade school niece to catch all of the bullets intended for him. She is now in a coma, and Seagal is officially Marked for Deathâ˘. We do not see his niece again or receive any updates about her condition.
Steven Seagal hits the streets to dig up information on the Jamaican boss, a guy named Screwface who practices voodoo and appears to have actual magic powers. He barges in on mid-level goon Jimmy Fingers, who is busy having sex with two women. Seagal tells them to âgo find another trickâ using his âcool action guyâ voice, which sounds exactly like a smug dickhead, and starts questioning Jimmy. A Jamaican gang member bursts out of the bathroom to attack.
Once again, Steven Seagal detects that we are getting uncomfortably close to an action scene, so he shoots Jimmy Fingers in the face and the gang member throws himself out of the window. The crisis has been averted.
Steven Seagal returns to his sisterâs house to discover a sinister voodoo spell, and this sceneâs outfit is a true blockbuster.
For reasons buried within his secret heart, Steven Seagal is wearing a puffy jacket, a t-shirt, and a scarf. Like a riding scarf. Like one of the Wright Brothers. I award it 3 Tiger Manfaces for its boldness.
Later that night, Steven Seagal goes to visit a sexy international voodoo expert.
He is wearing a blazer and jeans, like heâs about to perform ten punishing minutes of stand-up comedy. They are not his finest aikido robes, but a suitably insane choice given the circumstances. I award this outfit 1 Tiger Manface.
The bad guys break in and attempt to perform a voodoo ritual on Steven Seagalâs sister, but he lightly jogs inside just in time to rescue her without throwing a single punch or kick. He decides to take the fight to them by hopping into Keith Davidâs Dodge Ramcharger and dispensing vigilante justice, a phrase here meaning âindiscriminately firing guns in the suburbs.â
He and Keith David get into a car chase with the bad guys and force their car through the front of a jewelry store. As a reminder, Steven Seagal is retired, and Keith David is a high school football coach. We are now 53 minutes in, and Steven Seagal has done zero martial arts.
He dispatches several goons with an electrifying series of sidesteps and wrist locks. He does another brief karate dance, as a signal to the audience that something exciting is supposed to be happening.
One goon takes a woman hostage and Steven Seagal attempts to play it off as convincingly as a shitty-pantsed man insisting heâs never shit upon his pants. âYou wanna kill her?â he taunts, telegraphing the incoming wrist lock like Western Union. âGo ahead and kill her, I donât care. I donât know her, I donât know her at all.â The nail-biting standoff becomes too much for the goon to bear, and he tries to stab Steven Seagal, who whips out his signature wrist lock to the delighted applause of audiences the world over and instantly stabs him in the chest with his own knife.
Later that night, bad guys masquerading as construction workers trap Steven Seagal in his bitchinâ sports car. They try to crush him to death with a bulldozer, and he frantically slaps at the doors to try and escape. He literally slaps them, like a cat knocking over a glass of water. I have no idea why he does this, unless of course he is telling the doors âhelloâ in his unique Steven Seagal way.
Steven Seagal and his friends chase Screwface to Jamaica, where he whips out another fabulous aikido costume.
He is wearing a scoop-necked tank top, a long sleeve t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a blazer. There is no reason any of those items should ever be worn at the same time. A puzzling 2 Tiger Manface ensemble.
Steven Seagal and his friends stake out Screwfaceâs base, where he issues silent commands to his teammates using a series of indecipherable hand gestures he clearly just invented. At no point does the movie attempt to translate his signals, because it doesnât know what the fuck he is doing either. His comrades secure the perimeter while Steven Seagal creeps inside and is instantly captured, a development made exponentially more hilarious by the black ops outfit he bought at Party City (1 inverted Tiger Manface).
Once again, Steven Seagal comes dangerously close to performing an action scene. He grabs three goons with a single wrist lock and flips them to the floor but forgets to let go of the guyâs arm and briefly loses his balance. It is very, very funny.
He skips around the room, dealing out sidesteps and arm locks, until no goons are left standing. It is almost impressive how little fighting he has managed to do in his martial arts action movie.
Screwface takes one stab at Seagal that he easily sidesteps. Then he takes the sword from Screwface, flips it into his dick, and cuts his head off. It is both anticlimactic and the coolest thing that has happened in Marked for Death so far.
Steven Seagal and his friends return to Screwfaceâs lair in Chicago to tell the rest of the bad guys that their boss is slain. Seagal is now wearing a third satin jacket and an overcoat.
He looks like a John Hughes character performing community service as a condition of his parole. He compulsively layers his outfits. He looks like if Silent Bob got really into rain sticks. I award this aikido lewk 3 Tiger Manfaces and 1 Pirate Radio DJ.
But in a genuine twist, Screwfaceâs twin brother appears for a final boss fight. It turns out that Screwface wasnât really a voodoo wizard; he was just two guys. He was Parent Trapping the streets of Chicago.
Screwface 2 proceeds to beat the hell out of a stuntman in a Steven Seagal wig.
Not pictured: Steven Seagal.
Then they have a sword fight, which should be awesome, but Seagal holds the sword like he is afraid heâs going to drop it. He looks like heâs posing for the cover of a terrible NES game.
The sword fight ends almost as quickly as it began. Steven Seagal gouges Screwface 2âs eyes out, breaks him over his knee like Bane, and throws him down an elevator shaft to be impaled on a chest-hollowing spike.
Itâs my favorite moment in any Steven Seagal film. I award it 11 Tiger Manfaces and 1 Astonished Kevin Dunn.
Having single-handedly won the war on drugs, Steven Seagal and Keith David limp out of the lair and walk off into the night. And then the credits roll. Did his niece wake up from her coma? Did she get the surgery she needed? Who gives a shit? This is Marked for Death. 6 Tiger Manfaces and 1 Bullet-Riddled Niece.
Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is currently making a badass tiger jacket out of unsold merchandise from the import store at the mall.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Andreas Larsson, who wears a jacket of a tiger-faced man and is also the opposite of Steven Seagal in every other way.
Predator is an important movie to me, and indeed to many children raised by muscles and aliens and explosions in the decade when VCRs first began stealing food from the mouths of hungry babysitters. A landmark of beefcake cinema, Predator is primarily a movie about being vascular and sweaty in the jungle. But in many ways, it is also a film about several future politicians who would all essentially roleplay their Predator characters during their respective gubernatorial bids.
Without question, the most important element of Predator is hubristic action figure excess. Itâs like watching a kid who just learned swear words after enduring his parentsâ divorce play with G.I. Joes in the backseat of a Camaro with all the windows rolled up. One of the filmâs most iconic images occurs within the first five minutes: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers violently locking hands in a glisteningly muscular greeting, the thunderclap of their palms meeting sending out a shockwave so powerful it knocks me further down the Kinsey scale like a rudderless ship in a hurricane every time I watch it.
Right up front, Predator wants you to know it is a movie about the burliest dudes in recorded history getting together to do some serious Man Shit in the jungle. Also, Shane Black is there; beefcakes must always keep at least one string bean nerd in their numbers to handle all the logistics, like making the necessary travel arrangements and ensuring everyone has made the proper deductions on their tax returns. Like a brave canary, he is the first to be killed.
Because Predator is an action film made in the 1980s, it begins with our team of heroic marble statues getting hired by the C.I.A. to invade a fictional Central American country to prevent the spread of Communism. The first half of the movie is so focused on these gigantic slabs annihilating scores of hapless insurgents that you could shut the movie off at the 40-minute mark and live the rest of your life having no idea that Predator is about an alien monster that kills earthlings for sport.
The biggest hint of science fiction contained within that blessed first third of movie is how an elite squad of comMANdoes with the combined weight of more than one elephant could ride in a helicopter without it plunging into the Earthâs core moments after takeoff. The movie ends with a montage of candid footage of each actor, alternately laughing and flexing in celebration of the joyous time they spent together as Jungle Dudez toppling regimes in the name of capitalism.
The point Iâm making here is, Predatorâs deafeningly violent war on subtlety is the most defining of its many characteristics, which is what makes this guyâs lip stand out like Robosaurus in the drive-thru line at In-N-Out Burger.
R.G. Armstrong, playing a character allegedly named General Phillips according to the aforementioned credits montage although I have seen this movie roughly eleven-hundred times and you cannot convince me his name isnât simply âWar Grandpa,â is sporting a mustache so thin I legitimately did not notice it until Predator came out on DVD and I saw it for the first time without the characteristic grain of tobacco stains and hundreds of rewinds unique to rental videocassettes of the era. The ghostly whisp of facial hair haunting this manâs face was so slight that I never saw it over a decade of regular viewings. Predator, a film so averse to half-measures that it ends with Arnold Schwarzenegger diving out of the way of a nuclear explosion, somehow features an actor who felt his character of Grizzled Old Soldier would be better realized by the hypnotic suggestion of a mustache. Itâs like Don Ameche suddenly appearing to seduce elderly widows in the middle of Michael Bayâs Transformers.
Thereâs a clear hierarchy of facial hair in Predator. Sitting comfortably at the top are Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura, sporting the kinds of bushy ticklers required to wear khaki pants in the 1980s. There was a two-week waiting period if you bought a convertible during the Reagan administration, during which you were handed a photo of Carl Weathersâ mustache and sent home to cultivate the proper lip ornament before the dealership would hand over the keys.
Below them on the mustache totem pole sits Arnold Schwarzeneggerâs rugged five oâclock shadow, a compromise I believe was reached after all parties agreed that the sight of Arnold sporting a full Selleck wouldâve knocked the planet off its axis. Meanwhile, Mac is so clean-shaven that he literally carves the flesh off his face with a safety razor.
But then, in slides R.G. Armstrong with his cat burglar sandpaper strip, representing the only understated choice in the entire production. Not only is his mustache understated, but it is so understated that I literally could not see it until dawn broke on the year 2000 and we embraced digital video like the apes circling the monolith at the beginning of 2001. Similarly, I have beaten several people to death with bone clubs since discovering Armstrongâs mustache, so frenzied is my obsession.
As you can see, itâs not totally invisible – there is a telltale shimmer.
What does the faded memory of lip hair on General Phillipsâ face mean? Is it a cowardly display of fealty to the moist beefcakes thundering past him towards their jungle destiny like a wildebeest stampede, leaving him behind, discarded and forgotten, like Mufasaâs corpse? Does his gossamer-thin face warmer belie a sad truth about his character: a proud warrior, past his prime, too old to join in the fight against Communism and aliens but pitiably clinging to his last remaining participation badge by desperately shouting, âHey guys, I have a mustache tooâ? Is this the decaying shadow of former glory? Did Stingâs âFields of Goldâ play in his mind when he trimmed it?
Or is it a bold power move? According to modern philosopher and 9-11/moon landing truther Marion Cotillard in The Dark Knight Rises, it is the slow knife which cuts the deepest. It took me nearly half my life to spot the shimmering, nigh-invisible wraith on R.G. Armstrongâs face. I cannot conceive of a slower knife than that. Somewhere, deep in his old, useless bones, General Phillips knew that his weird combover-adjacent mustache would have the last laugh. âI may be lost in a sea of beefcakes now, in the year 1987,â he arguably said to himself. âBut years from now, in the year 2022 to be exact, people on something called âthe internetâ will revisit this day and finally notice me. Theyâll see me for the grand peacock that I am and raise their voices in unison to ask the universe a single unanswerable question: âWhat the fuck is on that guyâs face?ââ
Flinging the Predator DVD into my compatible playback device like a Busey-sectioning smart disc and discovering that ethereal nose cape for the first time was like stumbling into an unexpected summer romance on a riverboat gambling cruise with your legal guardians. Never in my wildest dreams could I have predicted it. Itâs like doing a word search on the back of a cereal box and accidentally decoding a message from the Zodiac killer. In a movie about an invisible demon on safari, the real apparition was the powdered sugar landing strip painted on this wizened old soldierâs leathery face. I award War Grandpaâs insidious mustache with 17 salutes from Carl Weathersâ severed arm, on a scale of zero to whatever number I just wrote.
Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he has been sporting an undetectable mustache for well over a decade.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, John Dean: Who also has a secret mustache and you will never guess where.