Suburban Commando (1991)

A couple of months ago, I reviewed No Holds Barred, a movie that was supposed to turn iconic pro wrestler Hulk Hogan into a movie star. I say "supposed to" because, well, it didn't. No Holds Barred was a crappy little movie that is "Exhibit A" in the argument that Hogan should never, ever do anything outside of pro wrestling.

But I guess Hogan was unaware of that argument at the time, because he was apparently bitten by the acting bug during the first half of the '90s. I don't know why, but he ended up starring in a few movies and a syndicated TV show. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. Why he kept getting acting jobs, I have no idea. But out of all the things Hogan appeared in after No Holds Barred, the best (or more accurately, the least worst) was Suburban Commando. It is, in all honesty, proves that just because you can make a movie doesn't mean you should make a movie.

Shep Ramsey (Hogan) is an intergalactic bounty hunter who, after a particularly fierce battle with the villainous General Suitor (William Ball), is forced to land on Earth to repair his damaged spaceship. The repairs will take up to six weeks, so Shep is stuck here until then.

To bide his time, he rents a room from a meek architect named Charlie Wilcox (Christopher Lloyd). Though Charlie's wife, Jenny (Shelley Duvall), is open to letting their new tenant stay with them, Charlie is put off by Shep's odd behavior. When he discovers Shep's ship and battle armor, Charlie not only realizes that Shep is an alien, but he accidentally generates a signal that allows General Suitor and his goons to find Shep. So thanks to Charlie's screw-up, Shep will have to fight a war to save our planet and possibly the universe itself.

There is nothing I could say that could possibly make Suburban Commando sound like a good movie. You just can't polish a turd. And really, that's all Suburban Commando is: a great big steaming pile of crap. To be a bad movie is one thing, but it isn't even an entertaining bad movie. I could almost forgive Suburban Commando for being a bad movie as long as it was entertaining. But it's not. It's a waste of time, of effort, and of perfectly good brain cells that died while I watched this movie.

At the helm of this disaster is Burt Kennedy, who spent practically all of his 30-year career directing Westerns. Suburban Commando was his last movie, and if it were me, I probably would have quit making movies after this stinker too. In watching the movie, I got the feeling that Kennedy just didn't care. The movie looks like he put forth little to no effort at all, as if he couldn't be bothered to even try making a movie that didn't suck. The movie looks sub-generic, with lame cinematography and cheaply-done special effects. The movie is annoying to look at, to tell you the truth. The soundtrack doesn't help anything, either. Full of awful, groan-inducing songs and a cheesy score composed by David Michael Frank, listening to the movie is as bothersome as looking at it.

And the screenplay is even worse! Written by Frank Cappello, the script is embarrassing. Everything about it is so terrible that I cannot imagine that an adult of sound mind wrote it. There's no way that can be possible. The writing is so banal, and the comedy is so horrible and unfunny, that it had to have been written by a 10-year-old with no cognizance of his or her own lack of talent. How a professional screenwriter could come up with this and actually be satisfied with putting their name on it and having it turned into a theatrically released movie escapes me. Did Cappello have nobody to tell him how much his script sucked? He'd have to be out of his mind to think any of this actually worked. The characters aren't even one-dimensional, none of the jokes are funny, the dialogue is crap, and frankly, just thinking about it makes my head hurt.

It's made even worse by how bad the acting is. There isn't a single performance from anyone in front of the camera that could be called good. I don't know how they managed to rope Christopher Lloyd and Shelley Duvall into this movie, but it appears that they've both realized just how bad it is. However, they approach it differently. Lloyd chooses to overact like his life depended on it, not so much chewing the scenery as swallowing it whole. He's actually pretty funny at times, I must admit, but he's fighting an uphill battle in that regard.

Duvall, on the other hand, plays her role like a deer in headlights. It's as if she can't believe she actually signed on for this movie, like her brain simply cannot process just how bad the material is. I was practically expecting her to fully realize the scope of Suburban Commando's crappiness and lose her mind by the end of the movie. It would have made for a far more interesting climax, to say the least.

But there is just no matching Hulk Hogan in terms of sheer awful acting. I thought he was bad in No Holds Barred, but wow. Hogan has exactly zero acting ability. None. Frankly, I want to find the person who convinced Hogan he could be a movie star and punch them in the nose. It's frustrating to watch Hogan try to be an actor when he's clearly failing at it. Nearly twenty years after the fact, Hogan's performance in Suburban Commando is still one of the worst things I've personally seen.

I knew going in that Suburban Commando sucked, so I'm not surprised by that. I saw it on TV when I was a kid, and I remember thinking that it sucked way back then, too. But then again, outside of a few rare exceptions, nearly every movie New Line Cinema released during the transition from the '80s to the '90s was pretty bad. Suburban Commando is not one of those exceptions. The fact that a movie studio actually bought the script, hired actors (and Hulk Hogan) to play its characters and a crew to build the sets, create the wardrobe and props and effects, and people to actually record this thing on film before releasing it to theaters is depressing. Suburban Commando is an unrepentantly bad movie that is not funny, exciting, or even tolerable. So yeah, I'm going to give it one star out of five, and even that's being generous. I said before that it was the best of Hogan's movies to be released after No Holds Barred, but I'd hate to see the worst. Watching Mr. Nanny or Santa With Muscles would probably be bad for my health.

Final Rating: *