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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.
This is the punchingest of all possible Punching Days, where we look back on all the best punches of 2021. There was jab! Roundhouse! Oh man, you guys remember left straight? Holy shit, uppercut – this was your year!
There’s such an exciting backstory to this one, and we can’t wait to tell it. It started in the Golden Age of cinema when Hollywood whip legend, Lash Laru– CONK!
Self-Improvement, Self-Defense, Self-Help, Self-Care for Girls and Women
Liddy found a book about lady madness which ended up also being about lady martial arts after its author photocopied a different book and added it to the end of the first one. You will for be enjoying this book, book, book for girls (c) 2021 Original Books Publishing & Human Traffic.
Dave Seeger had one idea: Karate. This idea scraped against every last corner of his brain, adding elements of non-Karate to its bubbling Karate mass until all of it burst from his mind in the form of an action movie kid’s cartoon screwball comedy. It’s both everything and only Karate. It’s Sister Sensei from the creators of Karate Rap.
Unshattered Love: The Novelization of Shatterhand
A cybernetic man punches through bullets and enemies. His world explodes. A man turns his story into a book. His world also explodes. In the end, every shatter punch is a love story.
Malibu Comics’ Street Fighter – The Comic
If you’re familiar with the ’90s, you know there was no failure condition for adapting video game source material. We all agreed, as a people, if your TV show, comic book, or movie was based on a game, it could be any combination of terrible and deranged ideas. Malibu comics set out to prove that wrong and here’s the crazy thing– they did!
Folks: the time has come. Thereâs been discussion of these on the podcast, and on the Discord, and in the martial arts pit Seanbaby lords over on weekends and alternate Fridays. Itâs time for an article-shaped look at a real garment called⌠Kicking Jeans.
Behold that description. And behold this hyperlink! You can visit that web store right now! You can purchase your own pair*, and experience them firsthand**, and toss this blog in a friggin trash can***!
*As of this writing, Kicking Jeans are only available in adult menâs sizes.
**As of this writing, Kicking Jeans are unavailable in every waist size above 29. I wanted to buy a pair and test them in real life and write about that. But I am too big.
***Your computer or phone is dirty now! Ha ha ha. Ha ha!
âKicking Jeansâ are jeans designed for doing regular stuff and doing martial arts. Which martial arts, you ask? âMultipleâ, they reply, because they havenât finished googling âmartial arts style namesâ and need to stall for time.
Kicking Jeans are the Model T of pants. Theyâre from decades ago (the 1970s), theyâre proudly sold in one color (blue), and they make a statement (such as âhi-yaaaâ). But maybe itâs more accurate to call Kicking Jeans the impractical, over-optimistic convertible of pants. From their debut in August 1977, âKickinâ Jeansâ sold themselves as more than clothing. They sold themselves as the gateway to a dream lifestyle.
Special thanks to Shawn Robare and the now-defunct website Branded In The ’80s for preserving screencaps of these vintage ads.
âFinally, blue jeans you can kick in.â Finally. Finally! Finally thereâs a product that lets you toggle between walking (boo) and kicking (FINALLY). Do you own a bright red sports car? If you did, you could toggle between obligatory errands and a breezy babe-magnetizing joyride. Kickinâ Jeans make that same promise, in a legs sense. Theyâre not a unique sales pitch. They are a unique modeling task, challenging clotheshorses to achieve âdisco casualâ and âIâm dressed optimally for this pummelingâ within the same magazine spread.
Hey computer: enhance! Because that advertisement features the most squicky word Iâve learned in a long time.
Thatâs right: âgusset.â The word âgussetâ is the central pillar of Kicking Jeans descriptions. Various ads trumpet a âslim gussetâ, âexclusive gussetâ, âhidden gussetâ, and other flashy synonyms for âwe let the crotch out by adding a humongous fabric quadrilateral.â
Iâve read the word âgussetâ a dozen times now. Iâve learned itâs a pants thing. I still feel like it means âturkey genitalia.â
Also, âgussetâ might be the only consistent word in these ads. Even the jeansâ name went through a few rebrands. As you saw above, they changed names when Literally Chuck Norris became their spokesman. Norris repped âAction Jeansâ, and also repped the same product as âKarate Jeansâ. In those ads, Chuck demonstrates the pantsâ ability to encompass the entire adult male yin and yang of âKarate Masterâ and âA Second Guy Incapable Of Relaxing.â
The company also turned to an array of spokeskickers beyond Norris. They hired not one but two Ernie Reyeses.
I know that ad feels dated now. Back in the day, America didnât have Big Government telling Job Creators they couldnât sell Violence Pants to School Children.
Kicking Jeans also hired somebody called âBill âSuperfootâ Wallaceâ to spokesleg.
I wish Iâd learned about this person sooner. He combines DB Cooper’s face with Braveheart‘s main character’s name. For all I know he is immortal and is all three men. Please: let me have that headcanon. I like it. Itâs fun to imagine him kicking open the door of a hijacked plane, shouting a Scottish âhi-yaa.â Also, I need any distraction I can get right now. Whenever my brain idles, it goes full Amadeus on new alt meanings for âgusset.â
Today, Kicking Jeans apparently lack the juice to keep the Celeb Train rolling. But I want to celebrate their modern models (âmod-delsâ?). The new no-names are no less striking. Such as this guy, whoâs trying to strike you with his fists even though heâs already kicking you.
If an action photo of âMr. Clean Trying To Aneurysmâ didnât sell you on these pants, nothing will. This blog is over. And if youâll excuse me, Iâve got a date in Seanbabyâs martial arts pit. I sure hope they start offering Kicking Jeans in my size before the big fight!
Alex Schmidt is a Kickin’ Brained writer, Jeopardy! champion, and creator of the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast.
There are reasons giant robots show up again and again in our fables and legends. One, theyâre big enough that they donât have to listen to what their mom tells them to do. Two, they let someone engage in physical combat even if that someone has incredibly soft hands and is sitting in a comfortable chair. End of list. Thatâs all they need, and donât let anyone ever try to justify these things more to you – they make no sense physically, mechanically, or tactically. They are completely and solely a power fantasy treasured by children and underdeveloped men, and I love them so much.
Which is why I was shocked and angered that Robot Jox hadn’t been discussed on this site yet. “I’ll get to fixing that,” I said from my comfortable chair.
Robot Jox is a very late ’80s movie about robot combat that was made by a film studio with nowhere near enough money or robots to actually do such a thing. You can be forgiven for having never heard of it, because the studio actually went bankrupt while making it, leaving no money for the part of the process of âtelling peopleâ theyâd made a movie about giant robots. It was in and out of theatres so fast it was effectively a straight to video release, but again, they forgot to tell people they made the videos too, so itâs really just turtles all the way down here.
The other reason you can forgive yourself – honestly stop beating yourself up, this isnât worth it – for having never heard of Robot Jox is because itâs not actually that good. And itâs not even that bad. It has none of the defining qualities of a cult classic, and is instead just a cruddy movie that has been made with a shocking degree of professionalism. I mean that! Using modeling clay, a mostly empty room, and the best actors within arms reach, these people actually managed to tell a story about giant robots. Well done them, and itâs a shame you will forget the movie as you are watching it. So take my soft hand and join me as we celebrate its feats.
Robot Jox takes place in the future, as you’d expect, in a period just after a nuclear war. War is now outlawed – which is so smart, we should do that – and now all disputes between the two superpowers are settled in one-on-one fights between building-sized robots. The robot fights, which are kind of the whole point of this movie, are all done in stop motion, which is crude but surprisingly effective. Despite everything, the big cool fighting robots look like big cool fighting robots, in a way that modern Transformers movies can’t pull off, so much so that it seems almost churlish to point out the number of wires visible in the scenes.
Our hero is named Achilles, and if you were thinking this is the movie setting him up as someone with a fatal flaw that will be exposed at a critical juncture, stop. Just stop. This movie isn’t that clever. You’re only hurting yourself. Achilles is nothing more or less than the best pilot the Americans have, thanks to⌠some personal qualities he must have, theyâre not really mentioned. There’s a lot of martial arts training, that’s for sure.
A word about the actors: They’re all doing their jobs. They are actors, and they are acting, and I want to be clear that this movie is not bad because of them. They are probably doing more with the material than the material has done for them, and for that we should all be grateful. That said, it is impossible not to notice how they all look like store brand versions of other actors. The hero is clearly a cheaper Jean-Claude Van Damme, his buddy is 90% of John Goodman, etc.
Plot wise, there is no plot. Achilles, and his Russian foe, Alexander, are nominally fighting over the rights to Alaska, but this so beside the point that it’s almost insulting to mention, I’m sorry I did that to you. No, if this movie is about anything, itâs a character study of Achilles, the man with few if any identifying qualities. Let’s break it down, regardless: Achilles initially wants to fight Alexander because Alexander stepped on his friend. (In the lingo of the movie, this is not known as “Joxing Off,” which is a large missed opportunity.) Anyways, THAT’S A GOOD REASON. Achilles is going to fuck Alexander up, he is pumped up, and so are his friends.
And then they fight in⌠well they fight in a small studio where men carefully pose robots like dolls. But the small studio is made up to look like a desert. Which makes sense, you’d want to keep the building sized murderbots away from people, except there are actually people there.
But there is safety glass, and boy youâd hate to guess what might happen if that glass wasnât there when a 200 ton robot sits down on it.
That’s right, in the very first full fight we see, a building sized robot smashes into hundreds of people, killing them.
Anyways, now Achilles is sad, and he doesn’t want to fight, and we get to the “middle” of the movie where there is no fighting. Thereâs just nothing but dialog and character building and other things which lean on the strengths of the script, which, again, aren’t there. Here, look at this bullshit.
This isnât just a screenshot. The director very carefully framed this shot for several seconds. Why did he laboriously set up this image of someone making the world’s most famously easy origami model? Has the director done this because an origami motif is about to unfold here, just like I did within this very sentence?
Iâm not even sure if thatâs racist or just lazy! There’s more. The guy named Tex wears a cowboy hat.
Also, for some reason all the Robot Jox – American and Russian – all hang out together in this one bar.
Does this make any sense? No. But they needed a fucking place to do some dialog and no robot fights, and this room was available, so here we go. Put on your jumpsuits, everyone.
The whole middle of the movie is like this. Sure thereâs a love interest, and clones, and betrayal, and none of it fucking matters, because thereâs no robots. I want to be clear this isnât just me and my soft hands angry about the lack of toys, you can feel the movie itself contemptuously plodding through all this, angry that it couldnât just sell 43 seconds of stop motion robot fighting as a full movie, but not wanting to put in the hard yards to make the rest of the film.
The robot fights resume eventually, thank fuck, and there’s explosions and robots joxxing all over each other. But by this point you can sense theyâd gone so long with no robots that they had to cram all their robot ideas into what remained if the movie’s – hang on I’m going to look up the actual number to get this right – hahahhahhahahahhahhahahhhahhhhhahhhhhha 85 minute running time.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. So Alexander has robot joxxed into an advantageous position, and in his massive, arachnid-like robot, now looms over Achilles.
It’s a pretty serious situation, but however you think Achilles is going to respond to this, you’re wrong.
Because Achilles responds by leaping into space.
Physics talk. Going to space is super hard and requires all sorts of rockets and fuel tanks and math, none of which are present on these robots at all. At no point has anyone mentioned off-hand, “oh yeah, these things can go to space, it’s a thing that happens sometimes.” Never happens. But here he just fucken up and goes to space, I’m guessing solely because someone thought it looked cool. It’s incredibly insulting if you know anything about space at all, and that actually gives a big hint about who this movie is for, mainly 5 year old children. Because six year olds will know enough about space travel to know this can’t happen.
Anyways, it seems Alexander can also go into space, so he does, and while there shoots Achilles in the foot. Then they return to Earth. Like exactly where they started from. The whole thing was somehow more pointless than the 60 minutes in the movie that weren’t robots fighting.
The robot fight, which now seems almost absurd to still be continuing, continues. Achilles, now in a robot less a foot, transforms into a kind of tank thing, which one, ok, and two, means this whole time he had been piloting both a robot and a rocket, and both a robot and a tank. Which seems like a lot. It also means he now has to scoot along the battlefield like a dog with anal gland problems.
He scoots underneath the crotch of Alexander. Alexander’s crotch unfolds a chainsaw.
What happens next isn’t as sexual as it could have been, which is just tremendous news all around. I don’t think I could have written this article if it had. Eventually both robots get destroyed, and Achilles and Alexander fight with sticks for a bit, and then they very rapidly decide to stop and be friends instead. Then they do this.
Credits roll, movie over, quest complete. This movie is fucking done with itself.
In short, you have never seen anything like Robot Jox, because movies are normally made by people who know how to make movies. So what happened here? Like who the fuck wrote this thing?
Wait. What? Joe Haldeman is a Hugo and Nebula award winning author. His whole thing is writing incredible stories, usually grounded and sober ones that illustrate the costs of warfare and the toll it takes on the people who fight in them, themes not so much absent from Robot Jox as much as they are actively refuted. War, violence, and Robot Joxing, in the movieâs mind, is awesome, and has few downsides.
It seems that while Haldeman tried to write something sane and grounded, as he does, the people paying for the claymation crossed all that shit out. Every day, this whole movie must have been one long, exhausting argument between grounded realism and producers shouting LOL, ADD MORE JOX TO THE ROBOTS, JOE. PUT A CHAINSAW WHERE ONE’S DICK WOULD BE.
Recast in that light, you can kind of see Haldeman’s influence here. There’s a bit about Achilles having a contract that some jerk in a suit tries to screw him on terms, which is a very Haldeman kinda plot point, which lasts entire seconds before the movie gives up on it. And the villain, Alexander, is mostly evil, like 90 or 95% evil as these things are measured, but beneath the scenes and the dialog and the robots abruptly going to space, you can kind of sense he’s trapped in the same kind of situation as Achilles. To be clear, drawing parallels between the protagonist and villain isn’t precisely advanced screenwriting, I think a lot of Mad Libs actually set this up for you, but it’s something.
And that spectacularly inappropriate ass pat? I forgot! I TOTALLY FORGOT. That’s a fucking plot point. My same ass-grabbing guy at one point uncovers an imposter by patting them on their ass. He detected the ass was different! They set that up so well!
Yeah, yeah, you can kind of sketch out a better story with the pieces here. A trophy fighter with no choice to fight, risking his life so that no-one else has to risk anything, standing across the battlefield from someone in the same situation. Does he escape, or allow himself to be replaced with one of the test tube people, bred to never even be able to understand the hell of their existence? (I skipped past this; it seems important now.)
But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think that movie ever existed. We can’t retcon Robot Jox into a hidden gem; this movie is literally one person smashing action figures together and another person trying to give those action figures lines grounded in a place deeper than ‘JOX FOR ROBOTS.’
Iâm going to be honest with you – gestures for you to come closer to my comfortable chair – when I first remembered Robot Jox, I was like âOh great, Iâll be able to talk about how awesome this movie is, or failing that, how awful it is. I canât possibly lose!â And then I watched it, and reader, I lost. Robot Jox isnât amazing or terrible, it is the most profoundly C- movie that has ever existed.
Which made me realize every movie must have gone through something like this, a thousand arguments and compromises made between people who hate each other. It’s a miracle we ever get anything as artistically cohesive as Citizen Kane or Caged Heat. In fact, nearly everything must have gone through something like this. How many fistfights erupted about the kerning on the font on your bag of Doritos? We are surrounded by the work of people, some of them talented – but far more who arenât – some of whom cared – but far more who spent their days staring at the ceiling, silently mouthing âFuuuuuuuuuuck, letâs just finish this.â
What Iâm saying is the whole world is filled with people making Robot Jox.
So letâs try to all acknowledge how basically adequate that is.
