Hey, guys. I haven't posted anything at all here in Creativity in a really, REALLY long time, but I thought a few weeks ago as I was sitting down for another Friday night to watch some obscure horror film called Devil's Den that I might try my hand at last at writing something snarky. Whether it ends up being good or bad, these days I seem to always have something smart to say about what's going on the screen at the moment, but it never occurs to me to actually stop and write it down. This may take a good twenty to twenty-five minutes to read, be warned, but we're going to do a play by play of the movie Devil's Den. If you disapprove, do so with tact, please. If you'd like to see more, I'll definitely consider it. I had quite a bit of fun doing this one, I must say. So, without further ado ....




Devil’s Den, a Written Review
By Sarah’s Knight


Quick! What do you get when you put Lady Deathstrike, Caspar the Friendly Ghost, and Kenan Rockmore’s Dad all together in the same movie?

….

… Well, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t have been able to venture a guess either. But apparently director Jeff Burr – the same guy who once directed Pumpkinhead II and a horrible TV movie about electrified tornadoes that aliens use as a means to take over the world – thought such a motley crew of actors would make a great vampire-slaying team in a cheesy rip-off of From Dusk ‘Till Dawn (a movie that I think sucks as it is without needing any help).

You remember vampires, right? I mean, from a time before they became brooding emo teenagers that sparkle in the sunlight rather than burning in a horrifying screaming death, surfers from California, or Ian Somerhalder. Well, Devil’s Den here, obscure a film as it apparently was, seems to promise us quite a bit of vampires from the old days, at least ones that will attack you and try to suck your blood instead of look pasty and apologize profusely for giving you rough sex. Shoot. The bloodsuckers in this movie may even look at a mirror or two and not see themselves staring back. Wouldn’t that be something?

Still, I just can’t see the latter two of these three bungling heroes doing much demon ass-kicking other than Kelly Hu, and I only say that because she’s been known to sprout claws and she has all the appearance of a beautiful Asian ninja assassin. Ken Foree is a big tough-looking black guy, sure, but, so was the bouncer in Fright Night, and he got owned immediately by the head vampire. And then there’s Devon Sawa, whose very face I hated because he got to kiss Christina Ricci in two different movies, and for god knows what reason she was one of only two celebrity crushes I remember having for quite a long time in my childhood. Personal vendetta aside, what is he going to do? Turn into a bug-eyed wisp of insubstantial marshmellow creme every time a vampire attacks? I guess we’ll see, won’t we?
____________

So, intermingling with your standard credits we see a worn station wagon traveling down an unspecified highway in a day-to-night transition to show us the two good ol’ boys inside the station wagon have been traveling for many an hour, and just as I suspected, at some point we finally cut to Devon Sawa’s character and his buddy in the passenger up close, Devon looking confused and a bit overweight since the last time I saw him, and the guy next to him turning a map over in his hands saying, “Uhhh, where are we?”

“Somewhere going East,” is all Devon says, immediately taking me back to that scene in Dumb and Dumber where Harry finally realizes that Lloyd has been traveling in the exact opposite direction from Aspen for several hundred miles.

They do a back and forth talking about some illegal smuggling operation they’re pulling over a fake aphrodisiac that Devon – the brains behind the operation, apparently, since his nervous buddy is the one expressing doubts about their getting away with it – believes a profound number of horny college students will be willing to buy from them in order to keep up with the endless supply of cheerleaders that just keep pouring out of sorority houses, … and honestly, who’s to say he won’t make a ton of money off of this scam, as ridiculous as it sounds, right? Somewhere in the conversation a donkey gets mentioned and in the next sentence after that, the nervous criminal sidekick calls Devon a sick, demented individual …. So in all honesty, I’d rather not play over that conversation again in order to understand exactly what it was about.



Pictured: The true face of degenerate perversion.


Devon suddenly stops the car and sees a tattered old sign describing beautiful dancing women in a place called Devil’s Den, and decides that they’d best lay low there for a while. If not in a sleazy strip joint in the middle of nowhere, hey, where else?

“Devil’s Den?” The nervous sidekick scoffs as they get out of the car in front of the joint. “We’re settling a bet here?” He thinks that in a locale like this there’ll be nothing but disgusting fat women still possessing only half their teeth dancing for your distinct displeasure, but going through a few doors into the main room they both see that there’s an unusually slim-bodied barrage of veritable topless hotness up on stage, instead.

Hilariously, the nervous sidekick (no, I still don’t know the name of either his or Devon’s character) asks for the keys so he can go back and grab a Power Tab from their hidden cache, even though I could swear one of them confirmed earlier that they were completely bogus and don’t work at all. Devon moves to a table and the blond-haired girl who played Chloe in the Smallville series comes by to wait on him. She asks if he’d like something to drink, and Devon just stares dully at her for a moment, mesmerized by her cleavage, before snapping to it and asking what’s on the menu. “Ummm, … beer?” She asks, as though she herself shouldn’t really know.

It’s her first night working there, she says – meaning if vampires suddenly crash the joint from within like in From Dusk ‘Till Dawn, then she’s responsible for it somehow – and after some flirting that I admit Devon’s being way more bold with than I’ve ever been, Cute Smallville Waitress retrns to the bar to fetch for Devon what to her own knowledge is “the kind of beer you drink from a green glass bottle”. … I know it’s just her first night on the job, but, wow, she’s not very good at this.

Meanwhile, Nervous Nick is fetching his Hope-to-Get-Lucky-Tonight Tonic, getting the cold, I’ll-slice-you-up-before-the-first-stupid-word-can-come-out-of-your-fat-mouth eye of a passing Kelly Hu as she walks all grim-faced and badass into the strip joint, and we also get a shot of Ken Foree at another table, dressed in a pimpishly purple coat and Deliverance hat, as he takes an interest in the new Asian gal entering the club. It’s like these two both came here because they suspect something’s amiss …. But of course, I’m sure both are used to working alone and take a mistrustful approach to each other off the bat when horrible blood-sucking antics go down. Why else would Lady Deathstrike be in here, anyway? Unless she’s into women, of course.


“Are you saying you’d have a problem with that, SK?!!!”


Cute Smallville Waitress returns to Devon’s table, and he slips one of the Power Tabs into a beer as he tricks her into looking the other way. He asks her to take the obviously foaming beer he just sex-spiked to the beautiful woman wearing the hood at the bar, because, well, that’s apparently our hero for this one, folks. A sleazy smuggler who won’t hesitate to take the first opportunity to drug the unsuspecting female who catches his eye into boning him.

I don’t know what the deal with Ken Forees’ acting is here, but he saunters over to Kelly Hu, who has taken front row and center right before one of the strippers, and says, in an unexpectedly wussy Southern gentlemanlike voice, “Pardon me, ma’am.”

Kelly says she’s just here to be entertained (I guess she is into women, after all), so why is the gentlemanly black guy with his stupid hat bothering her right now.

“Curiousity,” he says.

“Killed the cat,” she smartly finishes.


And apparently the Wolverine, too.


Naturally, right after this exchange they label each other to be “in the wrong place”, but Kelly just shrugs off the passive accusation with twittering eyelashes and a sideways “maybe I’m a lesbian”. Yeah, this is a lame movie so far, but I’m enjoying this particular conversation. Either way, she ultimately tells Ken to blow off so she can enjoy the D cups.

Ken returns to his booth and muses to himself that the Ice Princess he’s just met may be a b*tch, but she’s definitely not inhuman. And it’s at this moment that I noticed this strange accessory on his face ->



The heck is that? He’s just indicated that he’s out actively hunting for vampires right now, and yet he has some debilitating medical condition that necessitates him to carry a portable oxygen supply with him?

For some reason, Nervous Nick can’t seem to pull as much as a friendly smile from Cute Smallville Waitress when he comes back to join Devon and she also asks him what he’d like for a drink. Geez. He even uses the same ignorant “I like beer in a green glass bottle” line with her that his friend did and she snubs him.

A particular dancer named Jezebel is announced on stage – the same hooded chick at the bar that Devon slipped the aphrodisiac to – and the two deadbeats whose names THE MOVIE STILL HASN’T REVEALED move eagerly to the edge of the stage to see her dance up close. The strip show continues for a few minutes and I suppose it’s not bad, but then Jezebel suddenly gets frisky with Devon in the middle of her performance, and it’s as though when he had the beer sent to her that he knew she would be up there on stage and specifically target him when her arousal spike would take effect. Both Ken and Kelly – also whose character names have not been revealed yet – start to take an interest in this sexy exchange from afar, as Jezebel interrupts her own performance for the audience to pull Devon aside into a back room for a personal lapdance. Ewww.

As if knowing this is the calm before the storm, Ken sits back down into his booth after asking Cute Smallville Waitress for “any kind of beer” and keeps his eye on the door Jezebel and Devon exited through. What’s with the seeming predominating ignorance of beer brands among the customers in this place anyway? I guess I couldn’t know for sure since I’ve never been to one myself but WHAT ELSE DO YOU DRINK IN A STRIP CLUB?

Not one for secrecy or tact, Kelly enters the backstage area unopposed and starts kicking in doors with the usual dual guns raised, obviously looking for Jezebel, while Jezebel and Devon start making out outside near the dumpster. Not exactly the first idea that comes to mind as far as choosing mood-setting scenery, but whatever. Jezebel starts nipping at Devon’s neck and he pushes her away, freaking out. I swear he actually starts accusing her of being part of a government conspiracy to get the American public’s blood drawn so they can perform chemistry experiments in league with extraterrestrial aliens or something, and when Jezebel goes vampirical and attacks, Kelly rushes through the exit door to save the day.



“Tell me now, Lady! And don’t play dumb! Is Big Brother watching me this very moment?!”


As she continually shoots and the vampirized Jezebel keeps rising, Kelly asks “What the hell are these things?” What, are you serious? You don’t know? Weren’t you hear for the very reason of exterminating a possible vampire threat?

Devon and Kelly rush back inside and bar the way behind them, and Devon thanks her for saving him, revealing his identity as a felon by shouting that giving Jezebel just one pill shouldn’t have had THAT particular effect on her. They go back to the main room to announce that ugly monsters are out in the alleyway. When Kelly tells Devon to shut up and stop interrupting her because she’s trying to announce the danger without freaking out everyone in the room, Devon does that wide-eyed look-over-the-other-person’s head thing and says shakily, “Well, now might be a good time to freak out.” And of course, this is when all the strippers in the room reveal their beastly faces and start chowing down on every male in the vicinity. The feral way they’re attacking and growling, I’m now not actually sure whether these are supposed to be vampires or werewolves that we’re dealing with.

While just about every one of the other patrons get jumped immediately, thankfully Kelly is one to never run out of bullets or kung-fu moves, and Devon manages to stay alive by sticking close by her and swinging a two by four around like he actually knows what he’s doing with it. Ken gets jumped while he’s still sitting at his booth but produces a shotgun clear out of his ass and blows the were-vampire chick attacking him away. Honestly, he’s giving a good performance with his cheesy bar-fighter laughs and devilish grins while changing up his fighting tactics of shooting a boomstick that naturally has an inexhaustive supply of bullets and Mike-Tyson clocking anyone rushing at him upside the head. All the while, Devon keeps trying to coax his friend Nervous Nick over to him, but the guy can’t seem to catch a break finding a clear path to him. Finally Nervous Nick stumbles head-on into one of the beastly strippers, who makes short work of him by putting one hand through his torso and tearing out his heart. So far I’m accusing this movie of blatantly ripping off From Dusk ‘Till Dawn plot-setup-wise, but the fight in the strip joint seems original on it’s own enough barring the fact that of the two criminals who wandered into the bar, one of them gets killed while the brains of the pair will survive.



And I use that phrase “brains of the pair” very liberally.


Devon tries to go to help him out of sheer human reaction to vainly save a dying friend, but for some reason Kelly finds the time to drop her defense by putting one of her guns to his head and yelling at him to cover her back or else she’ll kill him herself. What? You’ve demonstrated some pretty sweet anti-monster moves yourself and you need this lugnut to watch your back?

The fight ends after another minute or two with Kelly and Devon aiming to go through a certain door while fending off everything that comes at them, and at the very least Ken on the other side of the room has the courtesy to run out of bullets and then produce a sword he had hidden underneath his pimp jacket this whole time in order to keep fighting while covering Cute Smallville Waitress as she stands there and looks all damsel-in-distressy. By this time all four of these people are the only humans left alive in the place, and they unite at an exit door while most of the remaining vampire strippers turn their attention away and busy themselves munching on the humans already downed, howling all the while. I guess they are werewolves, too, at the same time somehow. … Actually other than Jezebel taking her first bite out of Devon’s neck, no one’s displayed any other staples of vampirehood, and Devon didn’t even turn, so maybe maybe I was wholely wrong about the vampire part. Hunh. I guess the plot summary I read before choosing to write about this movie lied to me.

Devon admires Ken’s sword for a while after he uses it on one of the strippers right in front of him (*snicker*) and Kelly asks them to take the conversation elsewhere. The four survivors retreat into the small dressing room behind them, and bar it. FINALLY after thirty minutes of filmtime we learn some of these characters’ names. Devon’s character introduces himself as Quinn, and Ken’s character, the Big Black Guy stereotype, is Leonard. “f*ckin’ vampires,” Quinn huffs in a tizzy. “I can’t believe it. VAMPIRES in a strip club.” It’s been done at least once before, dude; it’s not THAT unbelievable. I’m sure the director was aware of that, too. Well, are they vampires or werewolves, movie?! You can’t have both!

Kelly Hu (she hasn’t given her character’s name yet) reasons that this might not be the case, because while she certainly didn’t miss the teeth and claws on those strippers who attacked them, it looked like they were more eating everybody rather than recharging their hemoglobin supply. Quickly turning into the signature team member who does nothing but babble on in fright and expresses his terror through perpetual argumentation, Quinn asks how does she know, for has she even ever seen a vampire before? Kelly Hu hasn’t, but Leonard has, and he claims that Kelly is right.

She deduces that Leonard must have come here looking specifically to fight these kinds of creatures, whatever they are, and Leonard retorts that maybe Kelly Hu did as well. “Yeah,” she admits. “Just not this kind of fight.”

“So what are they then?” CWS chick, who’s been silent ever since the fight started, finally speaks up.

“…. Ghouls,” Leonard says simply.

Huh?

“They’re not as hard to kill as vampires,” he goes on. “They are flesh-eaters who have sold their soul to Beezlebub.”

Quinn looks at him like he’s an idiot, and I have to admit I myself in all the history of my childhood hauntings and frightmares have never heard this mythos attached to the particular species of monster known as a ghoul. “Who the hell is Beezlebub?” He queries with a hilarious are-you-from-this-planet look on his face. Why, he’s the Prince of Darkness, Quinn, the Lord of the Flies, the Demon of Demons!

“The Devil,” Leonard answers after a pause. “More or less.” Fair enough. Even the Bible isn’t clear on whether Beezlebub and Satan are exactly the same or not. But either way, he says, it’s not important, just that you and your girlfriend over here are safe.

“My name’s Kaitlyn,” Kelly Hu’s character sneers. “And I’m not his girlfriend.” And looking at Quinn, even in this dire situation I can see why she’d take the time to adamantly deny that claim.

“I may seem hard up but I’m not THAT hard up,” Quinn says, obviously having taken particular offense to the fact that Kaitlyn so rudely put a gun to his head five minutes ago.



“I would never bone that.”


“Too bad, you too seem like a really cute couple,” CWS chick concedes. Well, if nothing else, the dialogue in this movie is entertaining me.

So anyway, the rest ask Leonard to fill them in on what’s going on, and he explains that Ghouls are much like wild animals such as lions and tigers in that they simply like to eat people (which the scriptwriter probably would have rethought if he’d made a brief stop at Wikipedia or seen a few minutes of the Discovery Channel, as I’m pretty darn sure nearly every animal in the wild is known to attack humans more out of fear than anything else), but conventional means like Kaitlyn’s guns won’t normally kill them. The best way is to starve them out. And Leonard’s purpose here was to hunt down one Ghoul in particular, but he wasn’t expecting that he/she had turned so many others into Ghouls also. This begs the question of how one can be turned into a Ghoul if a star fact of what makes a Ghoul is that one sell his soul to Satan, but if it has anything to do with nibbling on a human, then how come Quinn didn’t turn into one when Jezebel visibly bit into his neck out in the alleyway? And come to think, where the hell did the wound on his neck go just now, anyway?

“I just came here for a lapdance,” Quinn whines. “Was that too much to ask?”

“Should’ve stuck with masturbation,” Leonard says, and walks over to the door to hear for a sign of whether the Ghouls on the other side are still around or not.

For a while we just see the four survivors hanging out in the dressing room with intermingling shots of the Ghouls outside eating up intestines like Twizzlers and pawing at each other like a pack of adorable lion cubs.

“So how do you know so much about Japanese swords?” Leonard asks Quinn while he polishes the blade. I … uh … didn’t know that Quinn knew anything about them, really. When he ever give that indication?

“Because I was a fan of Ado Richi,” Quinn says. Or at least that’s what I thought I heard. “Watched every movie of his. Awesome samurai, and he was blind to boot!”

“Baddest motherfuckin’ black man ever,” Leonard agrees enthusiastically. So then in their sudden fanwankery the two start dreaming up possible scenarios of what this Ado Richi guy or whatever would do if he’d encountered the same situation they were in, … and the movie SHOWS it. Like, this blind guy – who by the way is clearly NOT black-skinned – in a martial arts outfit and wearing a katana is seen walking into the strip club and remaining cool drinking sake at the bar while the strippers reveal themselves to be Ghouls all around his immediate vicinity, then making a joke about how it’s great he can’t actually see for how the girls crowding menacingly around him must be so terribly ugly, and then going to town cleaving sh*t up. Okay, I said a while ago that the dialogue was amusing me considering this movie is pretty clearly meant to not be taken seriously, but now we need to move this thing along.



Left: “What’ll it be, Stranger?”

Right: “Don’t ask me. This is someone else’s fantasy.”


“And then finally Ado Richi’s sword arm gets weary fighting them,” Kaitlyn amusingly finishes the dream sequence for the two wankers, drawing a frown from them both. “And they gang up on him and eat him alive. … The End.” (And the words “The End” actually come onscreen as we see Ado Richi’s demise. Hah.)

“You suck at telling stories,” Quinn narrows his eyes at her.

“It was a stupid story,” she quips.

“Hey, we’re just passing time,” Leonard says in his defense, and as much as I’d like to say the last three minutes of the movie did seem ridiculous even for a story about flesh-eaters in a strip club, that explanation for the stupid conversation over this Ado Richi guy and his heroism is plausible enough. What else are they going to do to entertain themselves right now?

By the way, at some point while CWS chick was questioning who Ado Richi is I caught a good view of what the words on her neckchain spell out. It’s Candy, so I will assume that to be her character’s name.

Candy wanders over to the door and observes that it got quiet outside, so the four decide to risk coming on back out, sword and guns ready. There’s nothing but overturned tables and gore everywhere, with an interesting shot of a severed hand of what I assume belonged to the DJ still laying flat on a spinning record. Kaitlyn brings it to Leonard’s attention that she saw a tunnel of some sort in one of the rooms down the hall as she was so rudely interrupting private lap dances earlier, and Leonard assumes this must be a lair where the Ghouls retreated to after feeding.He tells the others to go on outside and leave in their cars, while he intends to stay behind and slay the leader of the Ghouls as he intended to all along, which of course prompts the others to insist on going with him or, more ideally, drag him along and come back in the morning with a rocket launcher to waste the entire place. But Leonard is adamant on finishing this job right now in order to prevent potentially more human lives from being wasted, and in reply Quinn does this weird childish gag where he groans and looks the other way while making a “blecch!” sound with his tongue out, like he was a five year-old who believes he just got cooties touching a female classmate. Apparently he’s not one to stomach Leonard’s display of selfless heroism.

“If the leader dies, as she was the one who sold her soul to the Darkness, then the others die, too. … At least, that’s what they told me,” Leonard insists, prompting both myself and Quinn to ask at approximately the same time, “Who the hell is ‘they’?!”

Quinn’s finally had enough, and turns to go, wishing Leonard the best of luck. But then Kaitlyn gets the better of his conscience by saying while he can still hear that she’ll help Leonard do this thing. Candy pipes up and says she’s coming as well, as repayment for Leonard’s protecting her during the fight earlier.

“Honey, this one’s armed and knows how to fight,” Leonard says awkwardly to the waitress whose first night on the job has recently become her last. “You’re … you know, a lot more innocent. I don’t want you to involve yourself.”

Candy puts her hands on her hips and retorts, “What? You think I can’t be of help in this just because I have big boobs?”

“I was NOT thinking about your boobs,” Leonard groans.



You weren’t?


“Sure, you weren’t,” Candy throws her head back and looks away.

“Well, they are pretty big,” Kaitlyn observes, turning up her nose. … Jealous? (All the while Quinn keeps looking back and forth with a sigh and throwing his hands up as though he can’t make up his mind.)

Finally, Candy wins the argument by defiantly claiming that she feels safe with Leonard because he was able to protect her, but Leonard agrees only on the condition that she runs away at his command the moment things go bad.

“Tunnel of death,” Quinn points at the curtains toward the back of the main room, then to the doors leading out. “Doorway to freedom.”

Kaitlyn asks if the death of his friend Nervous Nick earlier doesn’t move him to want to fight, but Quinn argues that, hey, he already did fight once, and that was to stay alive. Why forfeit that now? “Well, go if you want,” Kaitlyn finalizes. And Leonard agrees by more calmly telling him that he doesn’t need to stay if he doesn’t want to, in that tone that really says he’s a douche in their eyes if he backs out now.

Quinn leaves.

Kaitlyn directs the others to the tunnel while Quinn notices his friend’s corpse by the very front door. He apologizes for getting him killed by coming to this joint in the name of pure horniness in the first place, but doesn’t make it all the way down the front steps outside before he realizes that if he leaves now, he’ll live forever with the shame that a bunch of B-cup strippers who just happen to have teeth and fangs did his fighting spirit in. So he turns and joins the others back inside just as they are approaching the huge and obvious mouth of a cave that stands right there in the middle of the club where any drunken idiot could just wander in if he felt compelled to leave the dance room for any reason. Kaitlyn and Leonard share that secret smile that says they knew they had Quinn by the balls all along, and so promising to Quinn that they leave the place as soon as the vigilante business of slaying the Queen of the Ghouls is done, the four proceed down a cavernous hallway with Quinn in the lead.

The voice audio really craps out for a moment or two here right when Leonard asks Quinn why he chose to come back and help as they proceed down the tunnel, so I can’t be sure if I heard him right, but I think Quinn replied with “squirrels” as an answer. I was incredulous at this, but then the movie confirms it by having Quinn state again a short while later as they’re still walking along with a fully understandable “Squirrels!” What the hell?

I thought it was pretty stupid for Quinn to be walking so briskly several yards ahead of the others at a time like this when the Ghouls could be keeping shop around just any corner, and sure enough when he trudges way ahead into a circular room whose cavernous walls are tinged with a bright red light from who knows where – probably just there for sheer effect – and he barely hears Leonard shout in a whisper for him to stop and don’t move a muscle, Quinn looks down as the mist dissipates a little to find the bodies of the slumbering Ghouls all around him. After glancing about Leonard arbitrarily picks one of the Ghouls lying quite peacefully near the far wall as the head honcho to kill, and Quinn looks back and says, “Hey! What the hell should I do?!” Not be a completely oblivious bastard to the imminent the next time you choose to walk into a lair of flesh-eating monsters, you asshat.


“Ohh, man! I did NOT see that one coming!”


The three at the edge of the tunnel mouth tiptoe cautiously into the larger room toward their target, with Kelly going to Quinn’s back ready to fight in case the plan goes awry, and Leonard raising his sword over what he assumes to be the head Ghoul. How much you want to make a bet that the waitress suddenly sneezes loudly by accident and screws the whole thing up?

But actually Leonard’s target just suddenly wakes up on her own and scares him off with a menacing growl (he still clearly had the advantage of surprise and could have finished her easily), and the others rise as well. Honestly, seeing as how they are completely surrounded in this fairly tiny area by about fifteen of these Ghouls, I don’t see how even with Kaitlyn’s guns – which have done nothing more than mildly annoy the monsters so far – and Leonard’s demon-cleaving katana were not all four of the survivors converged on and munched clear into oblivion in about ten seconds. But for some reason during the next minute or so of fighting, the Ghouls just seem to sort of circle warily around their potential human prey with hands held out a little, diving in half-heartedly for a nip one at a time, which enables the four humans to fend them off and escape back down the tunnel. There’s two or three of those stock tiger growl noises you’ve probably heard hundreds of times in movies and commercials that the Ghouls make as they chase our four heroes, too. Along the way Quinn and Kaitlyn separate from Leonard who’s got Candy hilariously slung over his shoulder like he was King Koopa carrying off Princess Peach as they’re running away, and eventually the latter two hole up in one of the rooms back in the backstage hallway.

Somehow Quinn and Kaitlyn are still in the tunnel hall. When they stop after seemingly losing their pursuers, for some reason Quinn takes the time to – teasingly or not, I can’t tell – chastise a “tough girl” like Kaitlyn for her needing to stop and rest after running for such a short amount of time. He asks her what it is she does for a living anyway if she wasn’t here to do some monster slaying like Leonard was in the first place, and of course we get the whole reticent-loner-who-walks-the empty-street-on-the-boulevard-of-broken-dreams bit from Kaitlyn in reply. “Well, I just thought I’d get to know a little more about the woman whom my life has been dependent upon for the last couple of hours,” Quinn says, feelings hurt.

Cut back to Leonard and Candy who stupidly put their ears to the door after some silence. The Ghouls are still outside, now trying to kick the door down.

Not knowing where the other two escaped to, Quinn and Kaitlyn contemplate going on and leaving, only to come back with the Marines in the morning. Kaitlyn says no one with military authority will believe them about this, so Quinn asks if she can still hook him up with that rocket launcher he previously suggested. Kaityln smiles and concedes that she can, which I guess is supposed to give us a vague hint as to the shady stuff she’s up to in her typical life back in civilization. Ninja gunman doing secret vigilante work for the American government outside of the publicly disclosed law, perhaps?

When asked by Candy why he knows so much about the monsters they’re fighting (even though he really doesn’t seem to), Leonard finally explains that he works for an organization devoted to keeping the demon populace in the world down. He says that they’d been tracking “the Queen” of the Ghouls for a long time, and finally ended in this rat’s ass backwoods area of the Southwest, so he figured the strip joint would be a good guess as to her specific location. You mean the screenwriter thought that such a sleazy place would be ideal considering it’s unoriginal, Leonard, but, well, that’s as far into an explanation as we’re going to get, folks.

As they walk outside of the tunnels to the side of a dirt road underneath open sky, Quinn taps into his spiritual side a bit by calling up to “Buddha, Allah, or God, whoever’s looking down on me right now” in order to hedge his bets for survival. Kaitlyn warns that the forest they’re about to trek through for help may be dangerous with all of the mountain lions and stuff, and to be honest unless that’s her attempt at dumb humor to lighten the situation then I honestly had no idea that animals with the term “mountain” in their common names were known to be roaming a completely different geographical location, but the movie takes the opportunity to once again bring up Quinn’s seeming fear of squirrels, as Kaitlyn also mentions that they’d be around but she has no idea why Quinn would fear squirrels more than lions. I really don’t get it.

They’re interrupted by a single Ghoul who comes running out of the tunnel after them and merely smacks Quinn across the face, knocking him to the ground, even though he just stood there with a look on his face that clearly said “eat me”. FINALLY after about another fifty shots Kaitlyn runs out of ammo and resorts to tae kwon do with the barrels of her handguns for extra punch, and I have to admit she looks pretty cool doing it. All she can do is hold off the Ghoul that way, so Quinn finds a large branch and tosses it to her, whereupon she goes nuts repeatedly slamming it into the fallen Ghoul’s head while screaming your typical catfight obscenities.



“This one’s for Allah!”


Kaitlyn comes to her senses after a while and runs off a ways, as if she were embarrassed that a guy saw her act crazy like that. When Quinn finds her catching her breath on a large rock, he compliments her apparent knack for kicking ass. “Never met a girl like you before,” he says.

“What, are you hitting on me?” Kaitlyn says with a disgusted look. (Mag ladies, you would be, as well.)

Quinn defends himself that he’s merely saying he’s not used to being around girls like her, just the cheap kinds like the ones in the strip club (only without the flesh-eating part). But Kaitlyn says she shouldn’t be put up on a pedestal, because, after all, she’s an assassin working for the government in order to purge lowly wanted criminals like Quinn from the planet. In fact, she was looking specifically for him this time. Gee, who would have seen that one coming?

Quinn wonders at this, and to prove her sincerity Kaitlyn pulls a gun on him (obviously she reloaded some time off-screen). “So, you saved me in the alleyway earlier only to kill me?” He says. “All I was doing was smuggling some Spanish Fly. Come on!”

“I thought it was strange to that they’d send me after you if that’s all you were guilty of,” Kaitlyn replies. “But to be on their hit list, you have to’ve done a pretty big-time crime. And if it’s not drug-trafficking ….” And here she goes off on a short list of other major forms of lawlessness like murder and terrorism, to which Quinn sarcastically gives his own defense on.

Finally it ends with Quinn wondering if his past acts of infidelity – to which, he says, are the only things that otherwise prove his life is uninteresting for a wanted man – are what got him in trouble, admitting that he once slept unknowingly with Senator Packwood’s wife or something, and Kaitlyn actually puts two and two together by saying this particular senator guy is the one who secured her agency’s financing, so now she’s upset that all she’s obviously been sent to bump off Quinn for is a personal vendetta, lacking any motive of justice. “Great!” Quinn says. “So I have a contract on my head all because some crusty old politician couldn’t get it up for his wife.” …. Liiiiiiiiittle too much sub-plot on this one, movie.

Kaitlyn defends her actions saying she only meant all these years to take down major villains for the greater good of society, terrorists and kingpins and all that, but now she has no idea how many other fairly innocent people are dead by her hand because of nothing more than personal grudges held by people in positions of power, so she feels a bit serial killer-scummy right now.

“Flesh-eaters, assassins, big black dudes with Japanese swords, and seeing my own friend dying in front of me. Well, this is a pretty messed-up day!” Quinn finalizes, throwing his hands up, just as the severed head of the Ghoul Kaitlyn killed earlier rolls its way over to them and starts nipping at Quinn’s heels. As if the actress herself wasn’t sure how she was supposed to react to this on-camera, Kaitlyn just stands with a lip-curled expression of bemusement watching as Quinn panics and limps around with the growling head held firmly onto the cuff of his jeans. He punches at it repeatedly for a while, and then, when it finally comes loose into his hands, he points off into the distance and kicks himself a field goal.

Still not knowing that the Ghouls have left the hallway, Leonard and Candy continue to keep shop in the room they barricaded several minutes ago. “How much longer they gonna wait us out? The sun’ll be up soon,” Candy complains. She tries to convince Leonard to venture out of the room because, hey, what about those other demon hunters he works with, huh? Won’t they come to the rescue by now? As this movie’s dialogue was probably never meant to be taken seriously, Leonard replies that there’s not a lot of his kind to be clustered so closely around, because it ain’t the most popular line of work, and even if half the organization’s manpower wasn’t still devoted to the werewolf crises in Bulgaria right now (hah), he doubts there is a single comrade of his anywhere within the same state right now. “Werewolves, you say?” Candy says with mock disgust.



“I know, right?! I couldn’t believe the sh*t that’s going down in Bulgaria right now, either!”


So Leonard finally decides to go for it, but as he unsheaths his sword and rips open the door, Candy gets his attention from behind with a cartoon-alienish voice, revealing herself to be the Queen of the Ghouls all along. Well, hunh, I must admit, she totally had me there after that damsel-like earnestness in her statement earlier how she wanted to stay with Leonard because he protected her during the bar fight. ‘Might want to be more careful with that myself or it could get me killed some day IRL. Who’s to say a murderous demon with super-fake-looking prosthetics isn’t lurking behind the puppy-eyed earnest face of the next cute girl with lovely breasts that I save from a dangerous situation?

Anyway, for some reason, even though he stood ready with his sword the entire time Candy was bragging about how she’s going to get even with him for killing her monster sister in Egypt many years ago, Candy gets the jump on Leonard before he can swing and she chews into his arms and throat, just as Kaitlyn and Quinn hear the commotion from the main room and come running to save him. Goblin Girl bolts past the two as they come through the doorway and notice what she’s become, so, safe for the moment, they lay a wounded Leonard to rest on a sofa. “You okay?” Quinn asks.

“Do I look okay?” Leonard demands as best as he can considering you can now see his vocal box with the naked eye, for the moment bringing back that more feverish high pitch in his voice that I’m much more used to hearing from him in the Kenan and Kel show whenever Kel does something to annoy him. I wonder if it was done purposefully.

So Leonard explains that Candy was waiting to attack him until after she made sure that more hunters like Leonard and Kaitlyn weren’t coming as backup, and he tells them to flee the place while they still can; by now it’s a lost cause. To right her assumed past wrongs, Kaitlyn takes this as an opportunity to play hero of the day, and she admonishes Quinn to get Leonard out and find some help while she goes on alone to take down the Queen. Actually, “admonishes” is a rather delicate word for how she deals with the situation. I think “get the f*ck out and don’t try to stop me” was more like it.

Quinn stares after her as she leaves and Leonard just sort of gives him a look like “you’re really going to try to argue with Lady Deathstrike?”, but then he pulls Quinn over to tell him to get out and warn the public of the Ghouls in the area since at this point he’s probably going to be the only person around alive enough to do it. Leonard says that, worse yet, Kaitlyn is likely to turn into another Ghoul just from confronting the Queen, seeing as, though she hasn’t sold her soul or anything, she’s already got the killer instinct inside of her, and Ghouls just thrive on that kind of sh*t. He sums it all up with, “these women who turned were willingly on the road to Hell, but they still need someone to point them the way”, which if it made sense concerning Kaitlyn’s character or how the Ghouls seem to broaden the numbers of their species, that statement might actually sound cool. “In any event, this is a strip club,” Leonard continues. “You think it’s a coincidence the plague of hell-bound flesh-eating demons begins here?” Which I think was a subtle pulpit message of making horny guys feel really, really guilty for finding some pleasure in oggling breasts in their free time.

Anyways …. “I’m gonna send you back to Hell,” Kaitlyn gives Candy the evil eye when she finds the waitress-turned-werewolf-bitch back down in the tunnels. And Candy’s all, “pshw, you’re coming with me when I go.”

So she challenges Kaitlyn’s human capacity to do noble things in the name of Good and uses it as a lever for guilting the vigilante into losing her fighting spirit and just submitting to the Evil – presumed hypocrisy brow beating from the obvious villain of the two, justice verses personal ideals, how worthless it is to cling to convictions in the face of obvious defeat, who’s got the bigger bra size, you know the routine.

So this soul-playing goes on for a few until Quinn hears Kaitlyn’s tortured scream, and when Leonard mopes about how he’s probably had it and it’s also likely over for Kaitlyn – her life and her soul – Quinn finally grows a pair and sets the world on fire with an admittedly impressive speech about human courage and stop-moping-shut-the-hell-up-it’s-not-over-and-why-do-you-insist-on-just-pissing-it-all-away-when-it’s-not-even-the-worst-you’ve-ever-been-through. Hunh. Well, well, aren’t we suddenly the little deadbeat adulterous swindler who could? “I’m not leaving with a damn suitcase full of Spanish Fly after everything I’ve seen tonight!” He does a patented Mint stomp and unsheathes Leonard’s sword, asking – more like telling – if he can borrow it.

Sure enough, Quinn finds Kaitlyn halfway transformed into a Ghoul, and she pins him to the ground while Candy watches from nearby, asking him how it feels to be her first victim. Considering how often she’s had to watch his ass all throughout the night so far, Quinn just shouts back in her face, “The irony is literally slaying me!” Hah! Get it?



Stirba Werewolf b*tch!


Kaitlyn persists that she’s evil now and there’s no going back, but Quinn seriously scores some points with his character here (and performance on behalf of the actor himself, I must admit) by just coolly refuting everything she says: no, he’s not going to die; no, she’s not going to kill him; and yes, what she’s going to do now is regain control of herself and do the right thing by protecting him once again and kicking Queenie’s ass over there. “Okay, so yeah, you’re a little bit uglier,” he smarts off. “But nothing on the inside has changed! You’re one of the good guys, and that’s just the way it is.”

Of course, when we see Kaitlyn’s face after these inspiring words, it’s all human and pretty and snarky-Asian again, so Quinn sits himself comfortably down nearby and asks for popcorn for the show before it starts. Candy roars in defiance that Kaitlyn still belongs to her and goes on the attack, whereupon she is promptly handed a severe ass-kicking by the ninja chick’s mystical 10th-degree black belt hands. In fact, Candy doesn’t score a single hit the entire fight. Normally, I’d be severely averse to this, as I can’t stand fights where weakling bad guys get crushed so easily by our beefy, bulging action heroes, but in this case I have to say it fit well with the light-hearted direction here. For one, Kelly Hu isn’t exactly cut out for Iron Man tryouts with her petite stature, and more importantly, I can’t help but think it funny that all Kaitlyn needed to become Super Woman for the moment was a Care Bears be-yourself speech from the hollow-eyed straw-haired dipshit with the suitcase full of Spanish Fly who came to this joint for beer and boobs to start off the movie. And it’s amusing to see him variably mock the frustrated Candy as she keeps getting knocked around and lands somewhere near him (“Hey, Kaitlyn! We need to hurry this up! There’s a guy bleeding heavily upstairs!”). Kaitlyn herself even does that silent come-get-some hand gesture that you see in many cheesy martial arts flicks, with the added bonus of her middle finger standing out mid-wave. So, yeah.

Anyway, she finally picks up the katana Quinn brought for her and shears Candy’s head clean off. And together she and Quinn walk off into the sunset. (“I should have eaten you when I was still in that Ghoul state a few minutes ago.”)

Becoming our silliest trio of knuckleheaded demon slayers yet in movie history, we see the three some months later approaching a large stone dwelling in the middle of the woods at night. Quinn’s finally got the rocket launcher he asked for earlier, and after a strange argument about why Japanese swords are useless in this day and age when you have RPG’s, and which of the two guys present – Leonard or Quinn – has less stamina in bed according to some girl named Daphne (don’t ask), a hideout full of werewolves gets blown to smithereens. The last thing we hear is “… Damn squirrels.”


…………..




… I still don’t get it.