MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE BLADE TRINITY

This month's Foyeurism follows the theme of ultra low budget movies about superpowered heroes. But first, the greatest zero hero of them all: Poochinski. You may remember this failed NBC television pilot from the July 2008 Foyeurism. You may have seen the clip from the show I uploaded to YouTube, which then got picked up by G4TV's "Attack of the Show". Now you can watch the entire 22-minute pilot, uploaded to YouTube in three installments. If you haven't experienced the might, the majesty, the sheer awesomeness of "Poochinski" then now is your chance to correct this wrong in your life. If NBC was smart they'd reboot this show for their fall schedule. Not like they have anything better to air.

 

ZERO HEROES

 

To this day I still find myself a bit perplexed by the knowledge a couple insiders who used to work for The Asylum once told me of the company's policy against producing comic book superhero movie mockbusters despite SPIDER-MAN, IRON MAN, THE DARK KNIGHT, and so on cleaning up at the box office. Even these ex-Asylum employees never understood why they passed on such projects since doing mockbusters of mega-blockbuster superhero flicks sounds like a license to print money. How hard would it be to make THE INCREDIBLE BULK? There was an INCREDIBLE HULK show on TV for years that just painted a bodybuilder green. Just hire a bodybuilder, paint him blue, and have some average Joe turn into him whenever he feels sad - instant mockbuster. Nope. Not the Asylum. They'll film a 90-minute nature walk and market it as an Indiana Jones mockbuster but draw the line at dressing a guy up in a costume and having him fight crime.

Who will pick up the Asylum's slack? Enter Halcyon International Pictures and no-budget mega-producer David Sterling. They were willing to produce superhero mockbusters for pennies on the dollar. They dare fill the void the Asylum leaves open and do so with shooting budgets a fraction of the average Asylum knock-off. They were bold enough to give us Metal Man and The Black Knight. Can you guess what two superheroes they're ripping off? Think hard.

First on the ol' chopping block, METAL MAN...

Good scientist creates a superpowered helmet. Bad guys want the high-tech metallic helmet for nefarious purposes. Good scientist is killed but the helmet winds up on the head of his reluctant assistant. You can fill in the rest of the blanks. Alright, if you insist, I will fill in the some of the remaining blanks.

Reggie Bannister of the PHANTASM films busts out a near fu manchu mustache to play Dr. Arthur Blake, the helmet's creator. Blake's mostly a pacifist, deplores the glorification of warfare, and does not want his technology falling in the hands of someone that will use it solely as a weapon. And this helmet's non-weaponized practical applications are what again?

Dr. Blake's wealthy corporate benefactor, Sebastian, cares only about getting the revolutionary microchip in the helmet to manufacture for weapons. Sebastian is always in a business suit, always looks very stern, and always looks like he could make money on the side working as Billy Bob Thornton's stand-in. In terms of supervillainy, this Sebastian guy is less Lex Luthor and more along the lines of a bad guy from a lost episode of Automan. His generic rent-a-goons wouldn't even pass muster as henchmen on an old episode of Baretta.

Dr. Blake is accidentally killed when he tussles with Sebastian over the helmet. Blake will get knocked softly to the floor and begin acting like someone suffering from massive head trauma, a wound that will later be described as looking like his head was bashed in despite no visible head wound being present.

Years back I was coming out of a friend's house; there was a three step drop that I missed in the dark. I landed directly on my knees. Hurt like hell but I was uninjured. I told a doctor about it during a routine check-up a few weeks later and he was amazed I didn't suffer any serious leg injuries from the fall given how I landed. That fall was a million times worse than Dr. Blake's fatal "I've fallen and I can't get up!"

But being a genius Dr. Blake was prepared for Sebastian's interloping. His fail-safe involves a helper named Kyle. The movie works hard with a dream girl named Julie and Dr. Blake's kidnapped daughter Marissa to convince us Kyle is straight. I'm not buying it. Something about Kyle's appearance and manner of speaking brought to mind a less flamboyantly gay Perez Hilton.

Metal Man's favorite super power: the sonic roofie

The whole time Sebastian and his thugs were in the lab looking for the helmet little did they know the helmet was already on Kyle's head (along with the matching full body armor that makes "Metal Man" look like an anorexic VR Trooper) and Kyle was tucked away inside the same room within an experimental freeze chamber testing the environmental stability of the suit. Kyle thinks he's assisting Dr. Blake in an experiment to test the helmet unaware that the good scientist has just irrevocably altered his life by turning him into a permanent guinea pig.

You see once the helmet is locked on someone's head it stays on forever. Forever! Without him knowing it, without giving him any warning what he was about to do to him, Dr. Blake has trapped him inside this experimental helmet forever in which he will for the remainder of his existence he will only be able to eat or drink by plugging this tube into a neck port that feeds him a foul-tasting nutrient paste to keep his physical body alive. He should be ready to kill Dr. Blake for doing this to him if he wasn't already dead. After a momentary freak out he'll quickly come to accept his fate for the greater good. Dr. Blake tells Kyle he chose him after careful screening because of his good moral standing and nobility. This doesn't speak so well of Dr. Blake's moral standing and nobility. Was he not actively searching for an unsuspecting guinea pig and putting Kyle in the helmet a premeditated decision, not a last minute bit of desperation to keep the helmet out of the wrong hands? Jerk.

Dr. Jerk may be dead but his jerkface will always be there to assist Kyle having programmed his personality somehow into the helmet to guide Kyle and offer sage advice. An image of the doc's mug appears in Kyle's field of vision as sort of an on-screen tutorial, like that cat that used to come with Windows Word program. I always switched that annoying thing off. Kyle would be best to do the same.

Metal Man's superpowers:

Bulletproof armor - But absorbing the damage greatly drains his powers.

Stealth mode - Helmet and armor can become invisible so you just see Kyle in his permanently attired, never able to wash, holy mother of god how terrible will the funk be after a few years, street clothes. This allows him to walk around looking normal, until you touch him and realize the armor is still there.

Shield mode - A force field surrounds him. Not entirely sure why he needs this if he's already bulletproof.

Invisible mode - Makes him and anyone or anything he's touching invisible.

Healing powers - He can heal people with a single touch. How? Like Swamp Thing. Talk about the filmmakers overreaching. You don't see Iron Man curing lepers with a wave of his hand.

Rocket launcher - Can fire mini-rockets from his shoulders. So much for Dr. Blake’s anti-weaponry stance.

Kung fu - Kyle suddenly knows kung-fu. Not very good kung fu, but kung fu nonetheless. Was this programmed into him MATRIX-style? All this kung fu prowess and still Metal Man will spend much of the time battling foes in clumsy wrestling matches.

Force fields, rocket launchers, invisibility, healing touch: all of Metal Man's superpowers useless in his effort to locate his missing car keys. Now there's something you rarely see in a supehero flick.

Dr. Blake died to make absolute certain that an invention capable of bulletproof armor, stealth mode, force field, and rocket launcher never fell into the hands of someone wanting to use it as a weapon, and the only way to stop the bad guy is to use its weaponry that was not intended for warfare to fight back. I'll spot him the god-like healing touch but only if he agrees to explain the non-violent applications of the rocket launcher.

Yet despite all those powers, to travel Kyle from place-to-place, Kyle still has to get behind the wheel of his station wagon and drive from place to place looking like a cut-rate Iron Man knock-off heading to a children’s birthday party. We'll see him flying in a cheap throwaway digital effect shot during the closing credits, but for the duration of the film we'll be treated to the uproarious image of a power-armored superhero puttering around in a minivan or station wagon. There he is in full regalia casually loading and unloading boxes from the car trunk.

Images you never see in a superhero movie #67

For the next hour Sebastian schemes to get the protoype helmet he stole working and when that fails, he plots to decapitate Metal Man. Meanwhile, Metal Man has a series of skirmishes with random foes in cramped living rooms, parking lots, and front lawns. The best is saved for the very end when Sebastian unveils his secret weapon against Metal Man:

MECHA TERROR~!

Mecha Terror: a menacing green humanoid robot hybrid of the Green Goblin, a toy robot, and something out of Kaiju Big Battel. I have never seen a state-of-the-art battle droid created by a super rich villain that looked more like some junky robot created in teenager’s garage. Metal Man and Mecha Terror have their all-too-brief epic smackdown on a horse farm of all places. Two warring titans in cheap power armor performing kung fu and forgetting most of the time that they each have super powers that were meant to be used in battle such as this. A deflected rocket blows a random single engine play out of the sky. Such moments of we're-broke-so-we-might-as-well-go-for-broke filmmaking are what METAL MAN could have benefited from more of.

You have to admire the ambition even as you shake your head at the cheapness. There’s plenty of low rent entertaining goofiness if you can tolerate the vast sea of monotonous dialogue you must navigate to find these islands of schlocky fun. I'm afraid METAL MAN is still no BLACK COUGAR. Then again, BLACK COUGAR didn't end with a man and woman in metal helmets showing their affection for one another by rubbing their helmets together like horny robot Eskimos.

There's nothing wrong with THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS that couldn't be solved with a little fire. Burn it. Burn every existing print of it. Burn the DVDs. Burn the hard drives on which the digital files are stored. Burn the cameras with which it was filmed while you're at it. If they struck a print, strike a match. Just burn it. Burn it out of existence. Leave only the trailer behind, the trailer that others will discover on YouTube for years to come and think, "That looks like utter crap but it might be entertaining crap. I have to see this. A shame the film was lost in a fire." Burn it and leave only the trailer for people to contemplate what a movie it might have been had it not been lost to time rather than allowing people like myself to actually see the film in its entirety and wish that it had been.

Every so often I come across a film that makes me pause to reevaluate every other bad review I've given recently. THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS - I hesitate to even call this a movie. This... This... I do not know what this was. Remember the scene in ED WOOD when the studio executive watches GLEN OR GLENDA and thinks the movie is a prank being played on him by another exec? That's how I felt watching THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS, except I wasn't laughing. Unconscionable that anyone would have the audacity to consider this film releasable.

The plot is razor thin and yet I had no idea what was going on half the time. Characters constantly engage in one vague conversation after another that I believe pertained to the plot, and an endless series of watching-paint-dry conversations is what you want when you watch a superhero flick, is it not? Let me take a moment to recount to you what happens in the first 45-minutes of THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS.

Nothing.

Okay, we can move on. It takes about 45-minutes before our hero Evan Grail dons the Black Knight costume for the first time - a home-made Batman costume with a mask designed to look like a medieval black knight helmet. Grail rides a motorcycle down a street (a stock shot repeated a multitude of times from then on), walks down a short flight of stairs, messes with a laptop, punches a guy wearing a ski mask in the face several times, and that's it. That is what constitutes action in this superhero flick.

The only other action prior involves a bewildering opening sequence of a man and woman in what are supposed to be Black Knight costumes that looks nothing like Black Knight costumes, more like a really crummy Batman & Robin costume (from the Joel Schumacher movie, no less), dispatching with a bad guy or two before getting suicide bombed by the last remaining villain. We will learn later that this was Evan Grail's mom and dad. We will learn this about a half-hour later when the extended director's cut of this little-by-way-of-action sequence is repeated.

Am I am wrong to have expected more action than this from a comic book-style superhero flick about a vigilante that dresses up like a black knight in order to thwart a group of villains plotting to unleash a deadly plague? I fully understand this movie was made for roughly the equivalent of The Asylum's catering budget. I get that. They still made this movie and expect people like you and me to watch it, presumably to be entertained. Am I wrong to expect such a film to entertain and amuse me on some level? The makers of THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS are certainly wrong for having produced an 80+ minute superhero flick with less than two-minutes of action. They are wrong for having made a movie with a script as simple-minded as it is bafflingly vague. They are wrong for loading their cartoonish mockbuster with endless conversations about nothing of interest. To anyone reading this involved with the production, I realize you had nothing to work with. Well, guess what, that's what you made - nothing. Way to go, bucko.

We are first introduced to Evan Grail in prison, ala Bruce Wayne at the opening of BATMAN BEGINS. It appears they just sat the actor in a corner of a white room, shot him behind a wooden banister, and expected us to believe this was a jail cell. Somewhere in heaven Ed Wood smiles. Somewhere in my living room I attempt to suffocate myself with a pillow.

Grail is finally being recruited to take his rightful place as the latest incarnate of the Black Knight. He's going to straighten his life out and take up the cause of his forefathers - I think. I couldn't tell.

Word of advice to filmmakers: don't film half your movie with the boom mic next to an air conditioning unit. Maybe I just had a bad DVD? Given the film less professional than most YouTube videos, I honestly couldn't tell. I just know that often it sounded like the actors weren't mic'd properly. One moment everything sounded fine and the next I kept waiting to hear the director yell, "Hey! Turn that thing off! We're trying to shoot a movie here!" The older gentleman in the Alfred the Butler role, the character that explains more than anyone else, he must have had an air conditioning unit in his mouth because I hardly understood a single word he spoke.

The villains - all four of them - are known simply as “The Council”. They intend to unleash a potentially world-ending plague. How this benefits their cause I did not discern. What exactly their cause was I also did not concern. Could have been because the writing was lousy or it might have been that damn air conditioner again. What does it matter? The Council is evil. Evil people do stuff like this.

So supervillainous is this lot their foot soldiers are guys dressed in black wearing black ski masks. Even the henchmen manning laptops are sitting there in their ski masks looking like old timey burglars just waiting for Dick Tracy to bust them.

The main villain is Simon Darth. Yeah, they went there. They didn’t even make him a costumed villain like The Joker or The Riddler but they dared name him Simon Darth. Must have decided it would sound too silly to name him Mark Vader or Bob Satan. Simon Darth, a young guy dressed like a gay mobster that should have been the winner of the 1998 All Valley Blonde Scott Wolf Look-A-Like Tournament, is the son of a deceased Council member and being groomed to fill his late father’s seat. Simon is a cocky brat more interested in taking over The Council than in taking part in whatever it is The Council does, from the looks of things primarily sitting it a cramped room smoking cigarettes. Simon Darth is more like the villain in a community college stage production of THE SKULLS than he is a comic book supervillain.

But enough about the bad guys; they and their treachery come secondary to Evan Grail's romancing of a cute redhead whose corporation The Council is doing something insidious with that I never quite picked up on. The only upshot of being forced to eavesdrop on their dinner dates comes in the form of one of the dumbest lines of dialogue I have ever heard. No hyperbole there; during dinner he actually says to her, "I love your smile. You're like a walking Aquafresh commercial."

Fire. Fire is this film's only salvation – and mine.

Finally, in the last ten minutes, long past the point any living thing could possibly care, the filmmakers remember they are making an action movie and actually have the hero fight some bad guys. The Black Knight defeats a lady ninja by choking her to death with a pair of nunchuks and then has his ultimate showdown with Simon Darth in what I believe may have been the parking lot of a country flea market. That superhero in crouching position preparing to spring into action pose doesn't look nearly as cool when atop a station wagon in broad daylight. Darth kicks the Black Knight's butt until our hero heroically snaps Darth's neck. I will give the director points for the strangeness of this death scene. His neck broken, dead on his feet, Darth just stands there fully erect with his head slumping to his side as if he has fallen asleep until the Black Knight jumping back spin kicks his face. I think it would have been cooler if he’d just left him standing there dead on his feet; that would have freaked out there crime scene investigation unit.

Kind of a perfect metaphor for the movie – THE BLACK NIGHT RETURNS is dead on arrival and all it does is just there hanging limp. METAL MAN had some creativity to it, some sparks of life; the makers of METAL MAN may have been in over their heads but they at least tried. THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS delivers all the excitement of blank screen but with actual people saying and doing things. By the halfway mark my brain was so anesthetized you could have begun performing major surgery on me and I would have felt nothing I was so numb.

We will probably never get another adventure of Evan Grail, the Black Knight. We will never get that sequel introducing his young ward sidekick, Squire, and hear him utter "Holy grail!" That's a-okay with me. THE BLACK KNIGHT RETURNS made me want to yell a two-word phrase that began with "holy".

Fire. Burn it. Flame is the cleanser.

Hulk Hogan's disembodied head.

Sporting a god-like beard and crown of leaves.

Floating in the water of a toilet bowl.

Perhaps the greatest image I have ever seen in a motion picture.

Perhaps a perfect metaphor for the current state of Hulkamania.

I will not soon forget the visual of Hulk Hogan's godly head projected inside of a toilet bowl.

I will not soon forget watching LITTLE HERCULES. Epic train wreck cinema at its finest.

As the old saying goes, a picture's worth a 1000 flushes

You may have heard about the filming of LITTLE HERCULES (in 3D, where available) when it was featured on an episode of "Hogan Knows Best" back in 2006. I hope not. That would mean you watched "Hogan Knows Best". 2006: That should tell you how long this modern movie classic has gone unreleased. Having viewed firsthand what an editing holocaust the movie is and the overreliance on confusing voiceover narration to bridge story gaps, I would speculate that the production ran out of money prior to completion and were forced to assemble the film in post as best they could. Something clearly went down behind the scenes.

The delay could also have to do with the controversy surrounding the stars. For starters, the Hogan family's public meltdown: Hulk and Linda Hogan's ugly divorce, son Nick doing a prison stint after his reckless driving left a friend a permanent vegetable, and daughter Brooke doing whatever it is she does that keeps her semi-famous You might be less familiar with the trouble surrounding the film's title star, Richard Sandrak, nicknamed" Little Hercules" in real-life for being a ripped bodybuilder who could press over 200 pounds at the age of 8. Pretty much believed his dad was slipping him steroids and I believe his dad is currently in prison for spousal abuse.

Hulk Hogan stars as the Greek God Zeus. Nick Hogan method acts in a small supporting role as a cocky douchebag. Brooke Hogan makes a mercifully brief appearance as a not-so-talented performer on stage at the school dance. If Linda Hogan is in the movie anywhere I did not notice. The very appearance of Nick Hogan's name in the opening credits is also the source of unintentional humor. His name shares the screen with that of the gimmicked moniker of a co-starring rapper:

NICK HOGAN
2 KRAYZE

Not sure why seeing that made me laugh so hard but it did.

What a cast of thespians the producers somehow managed to wrangle for this magnum opus: Hulk Hogan, Robin Givens, Judd Nelson, John Heard, David Naughton, Elliot Gould, Diane Venora, and Paul "The Big Show" Wight. An amazing cast all things considered. Even more amazing is that Hulk Hogan gives the best performance in the film.

Hulk Hogan... Best actor in a movie... Stop and contemplate that for a moment.

After ripping off the intro to CLASH OF THE TITANS, LITTLE HERCULES opens with pre-teen, slightly effeminate, pouty-faced, Hercules daydreaming about sword fighting kung fu thugs while being schooled on Mount Olympus by Socrates (Elliot Gould, his beard can only be described as hobo-riffic). The favorite acting technique of Gould - once one of the biggest box office stars of the Seventies and a former Oscar nominee - will be to do the old Macauley Culkin HOME ALONE hands-on-the-cheeks-mouth-wide-open face whenever trouble arises. Gould also provides the voiceover narration in a voice so monotone he sounds like a hostage being forced to read his ransom note.

"Really, kid, I was one of the top stars of the Seventies. Married to Barbra Streisand. Nominated for Best Actor. I don't know what happened. Now I'm stuck appearing in this crap. No offence."

Hulk Hogan as Zeus is just Hulk Hogan being Hulk Hogan dialed up a notch while adorned in a toga and crown of leaves - the role he was born to play. Diane Venora appeared to be genuinely enjoying herself camping it up as Hera, wife of Zeus, stepmother of Hercules, and leader of the Alliance to End Hercamania. Zeus is upset because his son talks about wanting to go down to earth and learn how to dance like us mortals. Hera would love to see Herc gone for good.

"Spare the thunderbolt, spoil the child" is one of their corniest lines.

Enter Zeus' arch-nemesis, the Babylonian god Marduk ("The Big Show" Paul Wight, looking like a grown-up Bamm Bamm Rubble in his ancient garb). Who knew there was such animosity between Mount Olympus and Babylon even up into the 21st century? Do they not realize this is A.D. territory? Did they somehow miss out on the whole Jesus thing? Marduk and Zeus should be hanging out with Odin, Ra, Quetzalcoatl, Ahura Mazda, and Raiden reminiscing about the good old B.C. days.

Hercules uses their minor skirmish as an opportunity to hop into a magic whirlpool and shield surf his way into a Burbank, California swimming pool. Immediately befriends Curtis, an African-American kid always on the verge of speaking in some sort of 21st century form of jive, raising the ire of Nick Hogan's fauxhawk in the process. Curtis has never heard of Hercules or the Greek Gods before. His poor education clearly explains why the public school he attends is being shutdown.

Robin Givens is Curtis' mom. She mocks young Hercules for being a 12-year old boy who doesn't know what a cell phone is. This from a 40+ year old lawyer who also has never heard of Hercules or Mount Olympus and will take days to learn such information researching books on the subject matter that you and I could find in seconds with a mere Google search. Robin Givens will no longer be going to the head of the class.

Herc said he wanted to learn to dance. This is resolved and then forgotten about in one brief scene. Herc falls for a cute girl. This goes nowhere. The school track team has never won a championship in 24 years and this will be their last chance because the school is closing down. Hercules astounds the coaches with his super strength. I'm sure you can guess where this is headed. Not entirely. Even winning the track meet won't keep the school open. Should have put on a dance show at a recreation center instead.

John Heard (the dad from Home Alone) & David Naughton (the American Werewolf in London) are the track coaches. Heard is a real trooper giving his all to a barely written role. He'll give Herc a big speech about how there is more to strength than just possessing physical strength, ironically, making a steroid joke in the process. Naughton comes across like he was carpooling with Heard that day and they offered him a few bucks if he'd stand next to him and recite a few meaningless lines.

Judd Nelson... Oh, lord, Judd Nelson. Why Judd Nelson, why? Judd Nelson then shows up doing whatever it is he calls acting these days. With his Thomas Dolby glasses and emotionally detached idiosyncrasies, it's as his acting style is that of a nihilistic European artist minus the accent. Makes for strange dialogue exchanges considering his role is that of the piano-playing school dean and we're supposed to believe that Dana would find herself attracted to this weirdo.

About this point is when LITTLE HERCULES goes from insanely idiotic kiddy claptrap to full-tilt must-be-seen-to-be-believed astonishment.

Dana invites Dean Reynolds (Judd Nelson) over for dinner. He declines due to being too busy. That scene ends and immediately fades to him having dinner with Dana, Curtis and Hercules. Gould's nonsensical narration explains, "Dean Reynolds found a way to attend Dana's dinner. Maybe it was because of Hercules. Or... maybe… it was because of something else." Send your answers on a postcard to...

In lieu of mortal combat, Zeus and Marduk gamble ultimate control on their ethereal realms on the most convoluted wager since the PHANTOM MENACE pod race bet. At first the bet is over how many days Hercules can survive in the mortal realm. Then it gets tied into his success on the track team. Zeus appears in the toilet to inform Hercules that he is only allowed to use his super strength to his advantage four times. Six superhuman feats of strength to follow, Hercules sadly states, "That's three." No point counting; Zeus strips him of all his super strength anyway for reasons unrelated to the wager.

Remember, if the referee doesn't see it, it's not illegal.

Marduk arrives at the school under the guise of new assistant track team coach Arnold Potter. A pointless plot twist other than to set-up an astounding scene in which Hera conspires with Marduk inside of a gas station quickie mart; she's dressed in her Olympian gown and he's attired much like Steven Seagal and stuffing a burrito into his mouth (also much like Steven Seagal); everyone else in the store frozen in time to ensure no one interrupts their scheming.

Zeus will then arrive on earth still in his Olympian attire stomping about the school parking lot where he happens upon Marduk. Words cannot fully convey the sheer awesomeness of the schlocktacular smackdown that follows. Transcribing their ludicrous trash talk into print would also fail to convey how incredible their bombastic delivery of this gibberish is. They fling each other about the parking lot and then collide with such force they magically teleport to the barren lava-covered hellhole that is Babylon. Imagine what a green screen volcanic arena landscape in a PBS production of MORTAL KOMBAT would look like and then envision these two standing in front of it in costume charging and choking one another. Sumo monster trucks atop Cobo Hall have nothing on this clash of the titans.

Robin Givens has her own catfight with Hera in the school gymnasium. You would think Hera would win this hand's down because she's a superpowered goddess, but Dana is sassy and a little PG-rated Jerry Springer smack talking is all it takes to even the odds.

When Hulk Hogan shows up on your doorstep wearing a toga and a crown of leaves, angrily yelling about being the god of Mount Olympus and demanding you return Hercules' magical power sword, don't argue with him.

The finale is built around the big track meet. A powerless Hercules, Curtis, and two female cheerleaders are the only members of their school's team and only Hercules actually competes. Nick Hogan is now the leader of the rival track team. Do high schools even have archery as part of their track & field competitions? Voiceover informs us that Hercules wins several competitions that we are never shown. There's a cutaway to Judd Nelson in the stands commenting to Robin Givens that he has no idea what is going on. That had to have been an ad lib.

Marduk returns again as track coach Arnold Potter, now claiming to be the coach for the "Babylon School", accompanying an Asian teen we've never seen before dressed like a Yu Yu Hakusho character, demanding Hercules face his student one-on-one. Hercules accepts Marduk's challenge, appears to be walking out onto the track, but is then shown walking into the locker room to get a pep talk from dad and Hera, no explanation behind her change of heart. Hercules then states he's ready to go face his teenage Babylonian rival and heads off back out to the field only to walk into the gym instead where Marduk for some reason decides to ambush him. Hercules bench-pressing Paul Wight makes for quite the silly visual.

Who can forget the Wrestlemania when Big Show got military press slammed by HHH's Mini-Me?

Marduk is then declared "vanquished" via voiceover, except Marduk is then seen and heard on the sidelines cheering on his apprentice during what Socrates heralds as "the greatest battle the heavens had seen in a billion years between Olympus and Babylon".

It's a foot race, folks. The greatest battle between Olympus and Babylon, the greatest battle the heavens had seen in a billion years, the final showdown to decide the fates of these two immortal realms, is a foot race not all that dissimilar to Gabe Kaplan and Robert Conrad's famous foot race that decided 1976's Battle of the Network Stars.

SPOILER ALERT!!! Hercules wins after cheating thanks to Zeus giving him back his super powers allowing him to run at superhuman speed. A good life lesson for all the kids watching. SPOILER OVER!!!

LITTLE HERCULES with Zeus Hogan terrorist fist bumping the camera and Elliot Gould wrapping it up with a voiceover so hasty what he should have said was "And so Little Hercules... Blah. Blah. Blah. Oh, my check just cashed. Gotta run! Good night, everybody!"

To paraphrase the Iron Sheik, greatest movie I've seen all time, all my life. LITTLE HERCULES: the perfect companion piece for your BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME double feature.

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN