Author: Tom Reimann

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Horny Christian Doom Novelization

Listen – the first thing you need to understand about paperback science fiction and horror novels of the 1990s is that they were all desperately horny. Depressingly horny. Horny in a way that made me ashamed to be a boy going through puberty. And I wasn’t going through it gracefully – I was shambling into my teenage years like a sex werewolf. Indeed, I suspect most of us make the transition into adulthood in a similar fashion.

But even then, I was more than a little uncomfortable every time I ran boner-first into a clumsily graphic sex scene in my latest Aliens adventure, or was whisked away to a dystopian future in which the men were abstract shapes and the women had enormous breasts that were described in painstaking detail. I quickly learned that genre fiction’s three favorite words to assign to female characters – ample, heaving, and spilling – could also be used to describe WWE Superstar Tugboat at a wine tasting.

I’d be lying if I said the DOOM novel was no different. First of all, merely attempting to turn the experience of DOOM into a novel is the act of a psychopath. Any halfway faithful adaptation would just be a rambling scroll of intense violence, like a list of every sitcom catchphrase written in angel’s blood. It would be the internal monologue of a shark. So the fact that someone managed to wring 250 pages out of that should be cause for alarm – either it will be the worst book ever written, or it will actually open a gate to Hell.

But 1995’s DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver is toweringly unique among creep fiction, a bold piece of art that dares to ask, “What if the hit computer game about a nameless freight train murdering his way through Hell was both upsettingly horny and weirdly Christian?” Like Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also, I think those phrases are redundant.

The copy I’d purchased way back during the Clinton years had long ago been lost to whatever Bookmobile donation pile I’d abandoned it to, so in order to revisit it for this column, I had to purchase a new copy. And by “new,” I mean “obviously illegal.” 

This new version (available on Amazon Dot Com!) has the kind of offset type and blurry cover art that can only be achieved by sending low-resolution PDFs to a print-on-demand service. Indeed, according to the sole line of publication data on the back page, my copy was literally printed the day I ordered it, in Las Vegas. Also, it cost $16, roughly three times as much as the copy I bought 27 years ago. Paperback fiction abides by strict codes, one of which reads, “If a book is taller than normal, it is 300% more expensive.” I can only hope the habit I funded with this purchase is a cool one, like cocaine. Or motocross.

I bring all that up to try and set the worst possible stage for you that I can before we embark on this journey. It’s only fair, because the book itself does the exact same thing when you crack open its throbbing cover and are assaulted by this probable felony:

Now, when I read this back in 1995, I didn’t have a smartphone or the internet, so the only way I was going to crack this nut was if I heaved my ass onto my bicycle and pedaled to the library, and guess what the fuck I wasn’t about to do for the dedication page in the DOOM novel. Consequently, I had no idea what this meant, and just assumed these were two people the authors knew personally. This is not the case.

Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, but all you really need to know about her is that in 1993, she voiced her support for NAMBLA, and has written extensively about her belief that “male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization.” And for some reason, the DOOM novel is dedicated to her with lust. Turgid, anxious lust. 

Fred Olen Ray is a film director who, when this novel was published in 1995, had mostly made softcore erotic thrillers. After this book was published, he mostly continued to make softcore erotic thrillers. Dozens of them, in fact.

This is the first fucking page of this book. The first fifteen words are a pledge of allegiance to a sex crime apologist and a Skinemax all-star. Buying it has almost certainly earned me a federal wiretap. Let’s continue wading knee-deep into the dead and see what else lies in wait for us.

We’re introduced to Marine Corporal Flynn “Fly” Taggart, a name invented by an adult in G.I. Joe pajamas. Fly is the main character – the “Doomguy” from the video game. He opens the story by telling us about a recent mission in a fictional Middle Eastern country, which means there’s no excuse for this passage:

The “torn hymen” is not a real place. These two daring authors just decided they wanted to open their book with that image, right after lustily dedicating the story to their favorite NAMBLA booster. 

Fly is a classic character – a proud Marine who doesn’t do drugs and practically seethes with friend-zoned boneration at his fellow soldier Arlene Sanders. Fly is such a proud Marine, in fact, that he devotes three paragraphs to a deranged rant about his devotion to the Corps like a kid trying to argue Santa Claus into existence:

He continues…

… and continues more…

See, now we’re getting close to what a DOOM novel should be, which is “incoherent lip-wiggling.” And there are exactly two moments in this DOOM novel that shine so brilliantly they nearly bathe the sun itself in gold:

Yes! Yes!

That’s some top-shelf gibberhooting. If DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead had been 250 pages of this, it would’ve won the Pulitzer Prize and been elected president, and all other books would have been destroyed for their inferiority.

But sadly, it was not to be. Instead, Fly spends most of the book talking about his female squadmates like the goddamn Zodiac killer:

It’s strange that the authors want me to know Arlene is hot, but not too hot. Like they’re trying to convince me that they, personally, have a shot with this make-believe person they’ve created. But don’t worry – although most of Fly’s lurking horniness is focused on Arlene, he does find time to spread it out to the only other woman we meet. Incidentally, she is a corpse, though “still cute,” when we meet her:

With “Dude” Dardier out of the way, Fly can spend the rest of the book leering at Arlene exclusively. He’s a one-woman guy, just like the authors, who were only able to include a second female character if she were stone fucking dead.

The book nearly collapses under its own freewheeling horniness at one point, when Fly briefly pauses in the middle of a medical emergency to drool over Arlene’s tits:

Her amble breasts. The authors have become so horny they have forgotten one of the most important words in the pantheon of horny fiction. 

It all leads up to an extremely chaste kiss that was meant to be steamy but comes across as deranged because Fly can’t wrap his mind around having a platonic female friend:

But just in case you thought Fly was some kind of hatchet-faced dweeb, think again, buster. He’s such a glistening fuck horse that Arlene can’t take her eyes off him. And, ok, yes, he is also a dweeb. Such a dweeb that he cannot bear to be seen naked:

You would be forgiven for expecting Fly – the Doomguy himself – to be cool and badass, and not a weirdly repressed ghoul who eye-bangs every woman he encounters while hiding his own shame like a kid who just got pantsed at the bowling alley. 

Not only is he a weird, repressed ghoul, but he is technically the most repressed ghoul in the entire galaxy, because this story takes place in space. For instance, the authors thread a subtle anti-drug message throughout the book by casting Fly as a passive aggressive version of McGruff the Crime Dog:

After bragging about getting grease-butter deep in an old-movie orgy, Fly confesses to the time he got hopped up on the magic of Halloween:

He’s so straight edge he even has a problem with demon massacre-enhancing drugs:

Synthetic adrenaline, not even once:

Now, the Doomguy from the video game has eaten so much bath salts that he qualifies as a controlled substance. He doesn’t do drugs because they stopped working on him. Fly, on the other hand, is a nerd who is scared of needles and burns cocaine fields for the CIA. Cool. That’s much better. Having two guys write this book really paid off.

There’s two important reveals in this passage. One, that Fly – and, by extension, the authors – thinks shitty jokes are funny. “Take my name to heart and become a Human Fly”? How dare you. If a child told that joke at a talent show, you would boo that child. You’d have to.

Two, Fly – and, by extension, the authors – hates sicko nightclubs. The tunnel in question in that passage is a normal tunnel, with flickering lights. So the word “sicko” is just describing how Fly feels about nightclubs. Which makes sense, because he – and, by extension, the authors – is a huge nerd.

“The big silly got itself stuck,” says the Hell marine about his 19,721st kill.

Oh, thank fuck. For a second I thought he was serious about the pear tree. What a joke! What a perfectly timed explanation for that joke!

This isn’t really a joke, unless you count the authors’ genuine belief that the word “Indian” is what is problematic about that phrase.

When you’re MADLibbing an alien planet name, you can pick anything. Xorblop, Zantagg IV, whatever. To let your mind wander and have it land directly on the planet “Pornos” is as psychologically revealing as the phrase “Native American giver.”

And just in case you thought jarheads were muscle-bound jocks who think books are a thing you knock out of a dweeb’s hands – which is an experience the authors definitely had, along with several kids who bought this terrible DOOM novel – Fly and Arlene make book jokes. Because they’re strong and cool and they read:

Fly is a genius, instantly and perfectly adopting new vocabulary. “This situation has got eldritch… am I saying that right? Elll-der-itch? Right, all that elstridge is coming out my ass.”

But don’t worry – Fly’s bizarre repression still manages to shine through all these zingers thanks to disturbing acts of borderline sexual violence!

“My eldritch was rock hard, but from excitement, not for his still cute buttless corpse, which making love to would be a cosmic sin. ‘Just say no to sex with this demon, Arlene.’ I told my amble-chested pal. In Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.”

The authors seem to be doing their best to get me to stop reading this book, which is why they thoughtfully throw in a few easter eggs for fans of the game, AKA the only people who would ever purchase a DOOM novel in 1995.

Haha, what a gorm! What a useless, fleshy gorm!

That line is a reference to a cheat code in the game. But you’d probably never be able to tell, because it’s so badass.

There aren’t actually any dick levers in the game. But there should be. And hey! Another opportunity for barely restrained horniness to burst back into the story like a loose circus bear.

At one point, the authors slap the pause button on the action to do some quick swastika rehabilitation:

The marines continue their desperate speculation…

The only people who would include this in a DOOM novel are people trying to convince you it’s okay to own shit with swastikas on it. 

This passage also contains the most unexpected reveal of the entire novel – Fly is extremely Christian, and is essentially trying to convert Arlene. In other words, the authors are extremely Christian. Or, at least, they’re pushing an extremely Christian worldview. Also, they notably change the monsters from literal Hell demons to aliens pretending to be Hell demons. Why would aliens pretend to be demons? To scare Earthlings. It’s genius. Also, writing a book about aliens won’t upset Jesus.

Fly constantly mentions going to Catholic school as a kid, and as the novel progresses he begins to slip more and more into it until he is all but quoting scripture. In this novel, Doomguy is a cool youth pastor who is really good at sports and doesn’t do drugs and reads awesome books, and is desperately, ragingly horny inside his mind at all times:

“We might as well play Adam and Eve and… name all the beasts,” is the hardest you can possibly bail on a pickup line. It’s like saying, “We should get out of these wet clothes and… then meet back here from the separate rooms we went to, in Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.”

This is what world-class world-building looks like.

Reminder – this “not huge fan” of morbid jokes fired a machine gun into a monster’s anus and called it a rectal suppository. I suppose if he’d called it a Christ Blast or The Last Suppository, it would’ve been in poor taste.

In the end, Fly’s god-bothering horniness turns Arlene into a believer:

I cannot believe this is the DOOM novel. Two dudes got together and turned DOOM into a bizarre Christian action movie telling kids not to do drugs. It’s like a Left Behind novel dictated by Mr. T, except it sucks. 

And it’s weirdly horny, did I mention that? Like, weirdly horny. Kids probably shouldn’t read this. I definitely shouldn’t have.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy turning Quake into an erotic VeggieTales novella.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Raw Deal’s Fake Death

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Into the Silververse

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Wilford Brimley’s Hard Target 🌭

1993’s Hard Target is a film of many distinctions. 

Pictured here.

It is John Woo’s 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 film’s 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 McDonald’s order into a 3-D printer. It is the longest a film has ever made us think about Lance Henriksen’s 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 “French.” (See also: Universal Soldier) Chance is an unhoused day laborer with a Military Backstory™, 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 Damme’s 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 Woo’s 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 couldn’t 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 didn’t believe me, and the cops were mad I’d called.

Other standout moments do not directly threaten any wildlife, but are arguably ten times as violent. For instance, every member of Lance Henriksen’s crew looks like they went to at least one high school dance in their 20s.

There’s 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 Damme’s Cajun uncle, Uncle Duvee, played with felonious enthusiasm by Wilford Brimley. It’s 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. It’s best to let Uncle Duvee speak for himself in the only way he knows how – 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 Henriksen’s men. He takes refuge with Uncle Duvee, who raised him from a tiny Belgian orphan into a bountiful roundhouse dispenser. Don’t worry, the movie doesn’t 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 Duvee’s 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. It’s 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 “Sitch”, against the villains. They have a rapport that suggests they’ve either done this before or they’ve spent considerable time preparing for this eventuality.

In addition to dispensing bleary-eyed wisdom about the times in a man’s 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, “Good whiskey makes de jack rabbit slap de bear.” 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 doesn’t 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 coward’s 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 aunt’s television. But the arrow was deflected by Duvee’s 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 isn’t helping his Belgian nephew kill The Mummy and Lance Henriksen? We’re 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 Duvee’s life based on his interests – 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 don’t care that Wilford Brimley has been dead since 2020. Uncle Duvee wouldn’t 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.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, who like de swamp beah dun gon an et hisself a gatuh and now he duh legendurry GATUHBEAH.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Aliens vs. Predator Will Kill Your Mom

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: The Fashion of Marked for Death 🌭

The first thing you must understand about Steven Seagal’s Marked for Death is that Steven Seagal grifted his movie career into existence by giving one of Hollywood’s most powerful agents a karate lesson.

The second thing you must understand about Steven Seagal’s Marked for Death is that it features no martial arts whatsoever.

The final thing you must understand about Steven Seagal’s 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 – 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 Seagal’s filmography. However, Steven Seagal eats way more pizza.

To the second point – 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 – the good parts never come and you are too bored to call the police. 

To the third point – 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 Seagal’s 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 Seagal’s 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, we’re 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 aren’t 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 Seagal’s 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. It’s 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 Seagal’s 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 “a little league jacket” or “a coat for children.” He’s 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 – ridiculous, but subtle enough to bluff his way onto the judge’s 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 can’t 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 goon’s 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 “the Danny Tanner.” 

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 – he’s 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 – “I’ve just killed a woman. I’ve lied, I’ve slept with informants, I’ve taken drugs, I’ve 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.” 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 Jason’s legs were severed at the knee. It’s like Peter Jason is watching Kong scale the Empire State Building. Steven Seagal has claimed to be 6’5”, and while he’s visibly a tall guy, there is no way he is as tall as an NBA shooting guard. Even if he were, Peter Jason is 5’11”, 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 sister’s 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. That’s 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. He’s dressed like a supporting character on The Sopranos.

The football coach is Steven Seagal’s old friend Keith David. He takes Keith David out to a bar, where “all the ugly girls used to work.” 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. That’s a lot of cocaine, man. Too much, one might argue.

Steven Seagal’s “going out for drinks” 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-old’s 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 “with violence.” 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 Seagal’s involvement, drive by his sister’s 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 Death™. 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 “go find another trick” using his “cool action guy” 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 sister’s house to discover a sinister voodoo spell, and this scene’s 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 he’s 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 Seagal’s 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 David’s Dodge Ramcharger and dispensing vigilante justice, a phrase here meaning “indiscriminately firing guns in the suburbs.”

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 he’s never shit upon his pants. “You wanna kill her?” he taunts, telegraphing the incoming wrist lock like Western Union. “Go ahead and kill her, I don’t care. I don’t know her, I don’t know her at all.” 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 bitchin’ 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 “hello” 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 Screwface’s 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 doesn’t 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 guy’s 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 Screwface’s 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, Screwface’s twin brother appears for a final boss fight. It turns out that Screwface wasn’t 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 he’s going to drop it. He looks like he’s posing for the cover of a terrible NES game.

The sword fight ends almost as quickly as it began. Steven Seagal gouges Screwface 2’s eyes out, breaks him over his knee like Bane, and throws him down an elevator shaft to be impaled on a chest-hollowing spike. 

It’s 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.