Script - Cinematic Quarantine: Back in Action

It lives, again. IT RIDES.

[clips of the film’s intro, with Roddy Piper arriving at a graveyard to do a drug deal]

Oh god, Doc Destructo’s doing another video on a movie again, this is probably gonna be some total wreck of an experienc-

[Billy Blanks emerges from the shadows of broad daylight to snap a man’s neck]

Oh, fuck yes.

[This movie generates about 100 bodies inside of 90 minutes, take your pick of what you want to montage here: Roddy Piper magdumping in a firefight, Piper lighting a guy’s dick on fire, Piper dropkicking a guy through a screen door, Billy Blanks spinkicking a guy through a shoji, Billy committing murder via superkick, Piper and Blanks roaring in unison as they deliver the world’s most powerful Meeting of the Minds spot]

IT’S TIME FOR A RETURN TO FORM.

BECAUSE WHILE THE SUMMER IS TOO BRIGHT FOR ME NOT TO SUFFER IN ITS LIGHT, MY WILL IS BRIGHTER STILL.

[Titlecard: WRESTLING LEGEND “ROWDY” RODDY PIPER. WORLD KARATE CHAMPION AND INVENTOR OF TAE BO BILLY BLANKS.] 

[Titlecard: “BACK IN ACTION”]

[Cinematic Quarantine]

So maybe I’m dating myself, and maybe I’m doing that pretentious thing that people who are getting older do, where they see something that they had as part of their culture that’s faded into the background as a rare form of magic in the modern era. But that’s fine, this is my channel, I can do what I want, which is why I’m saying it: the VHS Era, retrospectively, is an absolute wonder of a media landscape. It was a time where you could find pretty much anything boxed up in a VHS’ packaging, from modern releases of cinematic classics, to home releases of television favourites, to instructional videos for every subject, that occasionally even had useful advice on the tape. It was an age where media production began to scale down in terms of money and resource requirements, to the point that smaller creators could put their work on a competitive market and make money, despite not having what the big and established film and television studios had. Because in this day and age, we take it for granted how involved a process getting your face on a screen used to be. I promise I’m not going to kids-these-days yall, but it’s a simple reality: social media and tube sites make it so that just anyone that has a phone and can strike sparks with the right (or wrong) people can become a minor celebrity. A VERY minor celebrity mind, the kind that has the lifespan of a fucking mayfly when exposed under the light of scrutiny, because it turns out that they were the exact wrong person to be seeking celebrity in the first place, as they’re socially nonfunctional menaces with a main character complex and an audience willing to reenforce their worst tendencies to a frequently self-destructive end.

There’s just so many ways you can take that bar about “weirdos, not the good ones” in Meet the Grahams, you know? Not just at the scale that it was intended at, I mean.

Anyway, I got sidetracked, point is: there was this weird middle ground between the horrorshow of unfiltered and wretched real life broadcasted 24/7 online and all media being a separate subscription that exists nowadays, and the days where there were only 3 channels, the radio and the movie theater. The era that I grew up in, that stretched from the start of the 80s, all the way toward the very end of the 90s and the beginning of digital media becoming more ubiquitous than analogue- you know, what folks called the “Multimedia Age” at first, with the CD-ROM and all that.

[Super Saiyan Blue theme as the game disk for Ripper zooms toward the viewer.]

…man, I should do a video on Ripper. But that would mean I have to play Ripper…

This was the age where you needed certain things to make media, but not nearly as much as you used to. Editing suites became cheaper, you could do things with an Amiga equipped with a Video Toaster in the 90s that TV stations in the 70s and even 80s couldn’t, technology was evolving that fast and scaling down in price. With that lower cost of entry, also came a new and lucrative market: video rental, a realm where the work of a small studio that produces directly to VHS could compete with home releases of big studio pictures, and potentially earn a similar amount of profit from simply existing on a shelf in a store for people to rent out of interest or curiosity.

This is what people did before you could just click a button and watch an entire season of television at once, people, I need to impress upon those of you that are young.

And yes, I’d be lying so hard, my cap would blot out the fucking sun if I tried to say that something like Deadly Prey made as much money in the video rental market as like, Die Hard. But people could make money in this method, at least for a time, at least if they played their cards right. It worked for Cannon Films, y’know, right up until they started embezzling from their own projects, rendering their most high profile movies also among their most unwatchable.

[the final showdown from Masters of the Universe with He-Man and Skeletor fighting in an empty warehouse full of fog]

[me, screaming somewhere in the room: LOOK HOW OBVIOUSLY THEY RAN OUT OF BUDGET! LOOK!]

But money there was, and films like this are self evident: Behold, Back in Action, a movie that I could not recite the plot to you if I tried, nor could I even tell you the significance of its title. It’s a film that exists to live on a shelf in a movie rental joint and make passers by go “oooh, what’s this” with its cover. Three dollars for two days, thanks, have a good one, enjoy your lootbox of cinematic quality.

Except here’s the thing: this movie is dumb, and is script is basically a blank cheque to go from location to location on the pursuit of a cop movie revenge quest. It’s just also that they knew their priorities.

Which was blowing shit up and beating the fuck outta dudes.

[Roddy Piper grabs the villain by the head and delivers a God Tier Bulldog]

As a lifelong wrestling fan, that’s the most brutal Bulldog I’ve ever seen, and that includes the one that broke Buff Bagwell’s neck [booing SFX] LOOK I’M NOT MAKING FUN, I’M JUST SAYING-

[ECW Static Blast]

[Deus Ex Area 51 Alert Theme]

Billy Blanks, as JC Denton: HOW ABOUT I SEND YOU BACK TO THE NSF… IN A BODY BAG!

[Billy beats the fuck out of dog, with DX sound effects for every kick]

[ECW Static Blast]

You see this guy?

[guy gets killed]

That was Roddy Piper’s friend and partner. That’s about as much as you need to know for this plot, also Billy Blanks is looking for his sister, who works with this villain who killed the guy Piper liked. Got it? Good. Check this shit out.

[VIOLENCE]

Now you know why this movie exists, a film that plays to its strength: it features a genuinely talented martial artist and a maniacally charismatic man whose ‘fuck it, we ball’ athleticism could be described as the blueprint for Chris Farley, unleashed in a pro wrestling ring, it puts them in a box with stuntmen, and then it shakes the box. What results is two absolute lunatics smoking on that bloodlust pack like you seldom see in a film, a movie where the violence comes from a genuine place of happy-angry exertion of pent-up ferocity, rather than, for example, the high-caliber ballistic Saw-trap that is a Death Wish movie. You cannot tell me there isn’t a giddy joy to the violence in this movie, because in the same fight where Roddy Piper bites a motherfucker, he then proceeds to menace him with a tanto, backing him up onto a patio barbecue, and when he relents and begs for mercy, he drops the knife and LIGHTS HIS DICK AND BALLS ON FIRE WITH THE GAS GRILL.

[CDi Ganon DIE; CJ from San Andreas on-fire screaming noises as the Lava Reef Zone melody plays]

Look you know me: I’m Doc Destructo, the modern model of restraint. I have self-control, sometimes, but also, I’m an adult, and if I want to? I can buy two candy bars instead of one.

[Piper burns the guy again; Marleek’s Birth of a Winner plays, specifically BALLS BATTY AND DICK and HARASSMENT ALARMS DISTRESS LOL IM SCARED] 

God I missed making videos like this. Which is actually why I’m making this one. See, I get depressed during summers, no joke- something something night creature something something mutant, I can’t take the bright, it drains me. My best method of cracking a depression is creativity, and me coming upon this movie one day and doing a rewatch made me say: oh yeah, this dumb thing- what an easy recommend, and also, what an incredibly exploitable canvas.

[People getting blown apart with Half-Life sound effects. Billy Blanks spinkicks a man with Ryu sound effects. Donkey Kong sound effects as Roddy Piper mauls a villain. Tyler 1 screams with Billy Blanks’ killface.]

Stop making that face, Billy. Stop making that face, Billy. Stop making that face, Billy. Billy, stop making that face. BILLY.

[Bodies explode from Billy’s double-Uzi gunfire and they make grineer and corpus death screams from Warframe]

It honestly feels weird lauding a movie like this, as it’s sort of like complimenting the construction of an unfinished building that still looks like really solid work. This isn’t art, it’s a framework for it, in the same way a dummy you dress in gothic armour isn’t a knight, it just looks like one when you stand it in a castle hallway. But it’s also just so alarmingly competent in the ways that it is, the highest octane possible for the budget they had, working with the very barest concept of “PIPER. BLANKS. THEY’RE COPS.” They didn’t try to make Jurassic Park, nor did they try to make Heat, they instead made shlock that fully understands that it’s shlock, right down to the fact it has goddamned minibosses.

[the Huge Guy emerges from the crowd; James from Deadlock grumbling “Ooooooh, Big Show hungryyyyyyyyy.” as Crank It Up plays in the background]

You can’t tell me this isn’t the movie you’d get if Sega commissioned a film adaptation of, like, E-SWAT. That’s just what this shit is, you can practically see the ‘GO!’ arrow in the top corner of the screen whenever all the bad guys are dead in a given scene.

Like, again, I’m just gonna play this clip of Billy and Roddy crushing these guy’s skulls again, because what even the holy hell-

[You know what you have to do, which is play this like Captain Marvel hurling a man to his death off an INCREDIBLY TALL BUILDING]

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a WWF Hardcore match, something that’s ugly and stupid but in entertaining and funny ways that are also completely genuine in their intent and objective. This movie is trying to get a rise out of you, even if it’s potently generic elsewhere, because it would not have stuff like this in it:

[Billy explodes the Large Man as he holds a literal red barrel; James from Deadlock says “I WANT A TURKEY SANDWICH” as Crank it Up plays in the background]

And this:

[heavily-tagged car explodes with the force of a supernova as a Half-Life scientist screams from inside]

And this:

[the whole dumb villain death]

Did I mention the part where these guys get their coconuts crisped in fast forward by a pair of screaming burly men?

[just rapid fire the guys getting their skulls crushed, you know you want to]

Do I recommend this movie? Yep. Is it a must watch? No. But it is very easy to find, it’s just up on Youtube in totality, enjoy! Really ultimately I just wanted to make a video that outlines the sort spark you could find in a random VHS box, the actual reality of the era of VHS: that even something that seems generic and actually is quite generic can still have a strange level of effort and gumption, for sheer sake of people wanting to make a good product despite the limits of their capabilities. This isn’t some shit instantly forgettable fiasco that was shot on digital and rides off the force of some influencer who never should have had a camera turned on them, this is people trying and actually managing to give bang for the buck specifically because they tried.

It’s the sort of thing to leave a person feeling weirdly good. It’s how the world should work.