Summer of Nicolas Cage Movie #13: The Ant Bully

2006 animated ant movie

Rating: 9/20 (Emma: 9/20; Abbey: 20/20)

Plot: Poor Lucas is a bullied little kid who takes out his frustrations on a colony of ants in his front yard, squirt-gunning the hell out of them and being generally menacing. Nicolas Cage ant uses a potion to shrink Lucas down to ant size so that he can learn a lesson about teamwork and being nice. As he adapts to ant culture, he has to figure out a way to save the anthill from an exterminator he hired a few days before he started living in it. Oh, snap!

Nicolas Cage, Bruce Campbell, and Ricardo Montalban? And the movie still is barely half as good as the other two CGI-ant movies? Nothing grabs you in this one. The animation is mediocre, the story is predictable, and the protagonist isn't easy to root for. He's really, probably like all children, unlikable. Like so many modern animated classics, this very clumsily attempts to appeal to adults and children, and I don't really see how it would be completely satisfying to either. There are a lot of big little action sequences with a thwomping score that was probably lifted from another animated movie, but all they managed to do was make my eyes hurt a little bit. I got bored with this very quickly. Cage, as expected, does fine voice work, but it was a waste of his time as he could have been working on a sequel to Vampire's Kiss--Vampire's Kiss II: Watch Out, Roaches, Because There's a New Vampire in Town. This is a completely soulless, headache-inducing affair that actually made me want to either a) get the old magnifying glass out and kill some ants myself or b) give the kid a few doors down an atomic wedgie and make him eat grass. Ricardo Montalban, by the way, needs more work. I think I'd rather watch those commercials where he talks about soft Corinthean leather over and over again than watch this movie again.

The Man with the Screaming Brain

2005 B-movie

Rating: 5/20

Plot: A rich guy shows up in Bulgaria for reasons I don't care to remember and, through a series of seemingly random events, is murdered by a cute gypsy woman. His cab driver is killed by the same woman. A crazy scientist procures both corpses and fuses their brains together. The rich guy and the cab driver might not agree on a lot of things, but they both wouldn't mind getting their revenge on the woman who killed them.

Bruce Campbell--nearly the modern Hollywood tall tale character that Chuck Norris has become--wrote, directed, and starred in this, a labor of love that apparently took him 19 years to go from his screaming brain to my television set. Bruce Campbell is not a very good writer. He's not a talented director. And despite what I said about his Ash in Evil Dead II being one of the greatest performances of all time, he's not a traditionally good actor at all. I'll give him credit though. The guy knows his audience and what they want. This comically pays homage to both cheapo sci-fi movies from fifty years ago and to the rest of Campbell's oeuvre, and I can imagine a lot of Evil Dead II fanboys giggling with glee while watching Bruce's titular man doing and saying just the kinds of things that Bruce Campbell's characters usually do and say. The most entertaining scene takes place in a restaurant as Bruce is adjusting to life with the cab driver's brain being fused to his own. His left hand (controlled by the right half of his brain which belonged to the cabbie) is piling salad on a plate while Bruce screams, "Gross! Gross!" and tries to fight it. A following scene involves Bruce putting his scarred head into a filthy toilet because his cranium is burning. Unfortunately, that's sort of how I felt while watching this movie. Most of the humor seems written by a man with no brain, and the story, though lifted almost directly from a variety of B-movie sources, lacks the cheap charm and unintentional comedy of the classically bad. This isn't as much of a waste of time as My Name Is Bruce but anybody in the mood for this sort of thing, unless they're a Bruce Campbell obsessive, should look elsewhere.

Evil Dead 2

1987 greatest movie ever candidate

Rating: 20/20

Plot: Ash and his girlfriend accidentally unleash evil in a secluded cabin. The evil longs for their souls, and Ash has to fight against trees, anthropomorphized decor, zombie creatures, his dead girlfriend, a deer head, and his own hand in order to save his.

Question: Is there a better performance in the history of cinema than Bruce Campbell's here? I doubt it! Once this thing gets going, it stays going. Horror-comedy chaos, quotable, a disturbing (and impossible) amount of blood, ingenious special effects, a creative visual sense. This movie's got it all! The scenes that make me want to watch this over and over again: 1) the possessed hand, 2) the scene where everything in the room starts laughing at Bruce Campbell, 3) the woodshed transformation scene, 4) the scene where the evil thing is chasing Ash through the house, 5) almost every other scene in the movie, the exception being the scene where his dead girlfriend is dancing. No, that's brilliant, too! Evil Dead 2 also has a great ending, one that really makes the lame sequel even more disappointing. This movie is and will always be a religious experience.

There will be no comments for this movie because I don't want anybody wasting their time typing about how right I am.