Despiser

After preparing for their attack by sitting around a campfire and drinking, the crew hops in their two stolen cars and heads across a gigantic bridge that goes over a sea of lumpy orange crap that’s supposed to be lava or something. And this bridge is a whole lot longer than it looks, because after a good two minutes of speeding across it and alternating shots of them shooting at the Shadow Men with magical bullets that can make a car flip end over end, they haven’t even made it to the middle yet. After one of the Shadow Men’s cars flips over sideways and blocks the bridge behind them, another Shadow Man drives up behind them in a car with a built-in rocket launcher. What, you might ask, happened to the car that blocked the bridge behind them and shouldn’t have let anybody else drive through? I have no idea how it magically disappeared, and I really don’t care at this point.

I'm pretty sure that pixellated pumpkin goop is supposed to be lava.When the Shadow Man fires his rocket, the same magical force that made the car disappear makes his rocket jump up into the air, fly past one of the Gordon Crew’s cars, fly past the other one, land way in front of both cars and somehow destroy a chunk of the bridge in front of Gordon’s car but behind the other car. After Gordon stops his car, the evil Shadow Man helpfully solves the mystery of what happened to the other car that was blocking the bridge – it didn’t disappear, it simply warped a half-mile down the bridge! And it timed this warping so that Gordon’s car could drive right past without it being there, but the following car that’s five seconds behind them has to shoot a rocket at it and knock it out of the way! Makes sense to me! The Shadow Man’s car proceeds to smash into their parked car, kill Carl and plummet into the lava. But after Gordon pulls Carl out of the destroyed car, the Shadow Man, who just fell into the lava a minute ago, walks up and initiates the stupidest fight scene ever captured on film.

Shadow Man: Come, Gordon. I got a bone I wanna pick with you.
Gordon: Yeah? (grips gun) I got a topic…I’d like you to shed some light on!
Shadow Man: Oh yeah? What’s that?
Gordon: Dying. (shoots Shadow Man)
Shadow Man: AIEEAEAEEAEAAAA! (dies)

...I don't know. I just don't know.After the other two crew members come back and pay their respects to Carl by dumping gasoline on him and lighting him on fire, the three remaining crew members finish their trek across the bridge and walk through the open front door into the Despiser’s secret fortress, which looks like a smoky laser tag arena with random wires strewn all over the place. Gordon naturally responds by looking around and saying “This whole place is wired….ready to go.” After they look around for about ten seconds, a bunch of Shadow Men show up out of nowhere and start chanting “Gordon…free us. Free us. Free us. Free us,” and Gordon’s squadmate responds by turning to him and saying “Can you, Gordon? Can you free them? Can you free us?” Fortunately Gordon doesn’t get a chance to reply because the proceeding are interrupted by the voice of the Despiser telling everyone to shut up. For some reason this convinces all the Shadow Men to stop asking Gordon for help and instead pull out weapons and attack him. Gordon and the other two guys shoot their guns empty, realize there are way too many for them to possibly kill, and escape by crawling through a nearby tube that the Despiser set designer stole from the Kids’ Playplace at the local McDonalds.

This leads the group of three to the final showdown with the Despiser, in a small room with a bridge over pools of water and walls made of vacuum cleaner tubes. After they notice a counter that is counting down to detonate all the missiles, and stand around arguing instead of disabling it, a spiky tentacle comes out of nowhere and kills one of the three remaining crew members in a horribly pathetic CG shot. After that we get our first glimpse of the Despiser, a giant brown creature who looks like a cross between a hydralisk and a retarded crosseyed ant. He reaches a tentacle out and picks up Gordon, who casually pulls a gun and shoots him in the eye. After Gordon gets dropped in the water, and lazily climbs back out, the Despiser holds up Gordon’s wife, who is imprisoned in a blue computer-generated cage that her arm keeps clipping right through the side of. The Despiser asks Gordon how to get out of purgatory, and Gordon gets angry and screams “There is no way out! This is PURGATORY!” This pisses the Despiser off, so he calls Gordon a liar and throws his wife at him.

Nuclear launch detected.After dodging the flying wife and leaving her in the water to drown, Gordon totally shows the Despiser who’s boss by yelling “See that? You don’t have enough bombs to escape! If I detonate them now…” and then decides he’s too much of a badass to finish the sentence. I don’t know how he knew the Despiser didn’t have enough, but hey, I’m not one to ask difficult questions. A dozen more Shadow Men show up and try to attack Gordon, but his one remaining friend pulls his gun and shoots most of them, then kills the last two with fancy martial arts moves.

The Despiser throws a temper tantrum and starts ripping wires down from the ceiling while Gordon runs over to the missile timer as it counts “3…2…1…” then the shot cuts away and you hear it start verbally counting down from ten. I honestly don’t know what the hell Gordon is trying to do here. Didn’t he just say that he wants the missiles to explode? And didn't the Despiser say earlier that he doesn't have enough missiles yet to blow a hole in purgatory or whatever it is he's trying to do? Christ. Well, for whatever reason, Gordon aborts the countdown, then his one remaining friend tosses him a grenade just before getting killed by the Shadow Men. He takes the grenade, walks over to his wife floating in the cage, and holds the grenade up to her so she can pull the pin. Once she does, he casually gets up and walks up to the Despiser, who’s been spending the last 30 seconds standing in place and saying things like “I will unleash a tempest the likes of which your world has never seen!!” Gordon, holding the grenade that the pin was pulled from several seconds ago, bravely stands up to the Despiser and says “Not if I can help it!” The Despiser responds “Oh, and what are you going to do about it, little man?” At this point it’s been a good 15 seconds since the pin was pulled from the grenade, but that doesn’t seem to bother Gordon as he says “…this!” and throws the grenade out the window. It lands right in the middle of all the missiles the Despiser has collected, blows them all up and saves everyone. Yay.

So what did I learn from watching this 100-minute session of cinematic sodomy? Well, I thought no CG-based movie could possibly look worse than The Lawnmower Man, but I was wrong. I also thought no movie could have a stupider plot than The Lawnmower Man, but I was wrong about that too. Hell, I didn’t think any CG-based sci-fi movie could be worse than The Lawnmower Man period, but the pure shittitude of Despiser managed to outshine The Lawnmower Man in just about every way. Making that horrible movie look good stands as Despiser’s one and only achievement.

– Taylor "Psychosis" Bell