The Pitch: Lethal Weapon 2 meets Hot Shots! meets Men at Work
Price of Admission: $3.25
When: February 15, 1993 at 1:20 pm
My Age: 12
Quote: Suicide, huh? She must have caught herself by surprise. - Samuel L. Jackson
I just thought of a great band name. Here's how we'd open the show, "Hello Toledo, we're the Early Nineties Emilios." This would be followed by me inquiring, "Golf clap?" And then the audience would respond with a restrained, "Golf clap." Which would then give way to a mighty chorus of "quack, quack, quack, quack..." as we kicked into our obligatory song off the new album.
Early 90's Emilio is my favorite era of Emilio. Young Guns II, Mighty Ducks, and Loaded Weapon 1 are some great movies to see at 12 years old. You got your Western genre piece. Your sports underdog story. And your guy's guy action movie parody. So pretty much a doomed loner who's not that good of an athlete who sits in the corner and mocks the jocks. Just your average 12 year old.
Other Emilio eras are his early cult period where he co-starred in flicks like Tex, The Outsiders, Maximum Overdrive and the definitive cult classic Repo Man. There was his Brat Pack phase which included The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, and the first Young Guns. His newest era seems to be as a neo-Robert Altman with his recent directed piece Bobby and his in-production movie The Public.
I haven't seen Loaded Weapon 1 in quite some time, but my memories of it are that it was one of the better parody movies. Along with the Hot Shots! movies and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, it was part of that early 90's joke-a-minute making fun of movies that actually had more hits than misses. Since then, we've been inundated with the lazy Scary Movie and Epic Movie/Meet the Spartans franchises that think mimicking some famous movie scene verbatim with shitty actors constitutes hilarity. Where's the twist? Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz have thankfully breathed new life into the genre parody pic.
Loaded Weapon 1 borrowed heavily from the Lethal Weapon plots. The synopsis: End-of-his-rope cop , Emilio, is teamed up with by-the-book cop, Samuel L. After Samuel L.'s main squeeze (Whoopi fucking Goldberg) turns up dead, the partners trace it down to an illegal Girl Scout cookie drug operation.
They encounter the femme fatale. First played by the awkward, pipsqueaky secretary from TV's Moonlighting, she luckily puts her hair down and magically transforms into the beautiful Kathy Ireland.) The Sports Illustrated cover model was tops in my budding adolescence. I even went so far as to have her poster up in my room, albeit hidden under a corny poster of egg puns.) The cops take in Jon Lovitz as their version of Pesci's Leo Getz. There's a money laundering joke, where money is actually in a washing machine. Finally, it's uncovered that General Morters, as played by William Shatner, is the ringleader behind this operation. Big action brouhaha and it ends.
There are some nice cameos by Bruce Willis revisiting his John McClane role as the target of mistaken helicopter attack at his beach trailer. Emilio's bro, Charlie Sheen, shows up as a valet who gets car bombed seconds later. Scotty from Star Trek, Ken Ober the host of MTV's Remote Conrol, Corey Feldman, and the two guys from CHiPs. Best of all, though, is the guy who played Proctor in the Police Academy movies, playing a cop who uses Head & Shoulders at the station. (It's tingling. That means it's working.) Incidentally, the director of this movie also directed my two favorite Police Academy movies, PA 3 & 4. Sadly, Tackleberry doesn't make an appearance.
I had a friend that every time we played multi-player Mario Kart tournaments would trash talk in bad cliches. Looking through some of the memorable quotes off of IMDb, this exchange between Shatner and Denis Leary resonated with me.
Gen. Morters: Where's the microfilm, Mike?
Mike McCracken: I don't know, I gave it to York. I thought she was one of your men.
Gen. Morters: Act in haste, repent in leisure.
Mike McCracken: But he who hesitates is lost.
Gen. Morters: Never judge a book by its cover.
Mike McCracken: What you see is what you get.
Gen. Morters: Loose lips, sink ships...
Mike McCracken: Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing or fighting, my friend.
[Gen. Morters, cornered, looks to Mr. Jigsaw]
Mike McCracken: [Mr. Jigsaw consults Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, shakes his head]
Gen. Morters: Sorry Mike, no good.
Mike McCracken: I don't know, I gave it to York. I thought she was one of your men.
Gen. Morters: Act in haste, repent in leisure.
Mike McCracken: But he who hesitates is lost.
Gen. Morters: Never judge a book by its cover.
Mike McCracken: What you see is what you get.
Gen. Morters: Loose lips, sink ships...
Mike McCracken: Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing or fighting, my friend.
[Gen. Morters, cornered, looks to Mr. Jigsaw]
Mike McCracken: [Mr. Jigsaw consults Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, shakes his head]
Gen. Morters: Sorry Mike, no good.
Up Next: There are no poker tells when you're playing against the Man Without a Face.
