The Hyper-Violent 1991 Christopher Walken Vehicle McBain is a Deranged Delight — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

One of things that I love most about this column is discovering amazing new cult movies through you. The patrons who’ve chosen this option have a good feel for what I will enjoy watching and writing about and have hand-selected a fascinating, wildly entertaining and sometimes just plain wild selection of movies for me to experience on your behalf in exchange for the cold hard cash needed to keep this website afloat.

I’m talking movies like the exquisitely stupid 1991 Christopher Walken bloodbath McBain, which I was previously only vaguely aware of due to it sharing the name of the Arnold Schwarzenegger-like action hero from Simpsons.

McBain shares a whole lot more than just the titular name with The Simpsons. A Cobra/Miami Connection-level exercise in gleefully oblivious self-parody, McBain plays like an accidental 100 minute long version of a 30 seconds Simpsons spoof of the ultimate b-movie celebration of unhinged, unapologetic blood lust.

Writer-director James Glickenhaus’ (The Exterminator) bazooka-powered celebration of explosions and gunfire is pornographic in its non-stop violence and just plain pornographic if you get your jollies watching anonymous extras die en masse in a blaze of machine gun fire.

The middle-aged heroes/death machines of McBain aren’t just suspiciously deadly and all-powerful; they’re 5 Rambos. A country the size of Columbia is no match for the combined talents of these weekend warriors with a mission and a vengeance.

McBain is the most Cannon movie Cannon never made. It’s a bonkers action extravaganza that succeeds through bleary, bloody excess, a pyromaniac’s zeal for explosions and gunfire and a bizarrely ethereal lead performance from one of film’s all-time great weirdoes in a role he’s uniquely ill-suited for.

We begin on the last day of Vietnam, when some AMERICAN HEROES spot some of their countrymen in a P.O.W camp and swoop in to save them. Walken is introduced in a cage fight with a wild-eyed Bolo Yeung lookalike.

Then, in a set-piece that silently but powerfully conveys, “USA! USA! USA!” the American heroes spring MCBAIN from his prison camp hell. Then Santos (Chick Vennera) wins McBain undying loyalty by saving his life. The two form the kind of bond that can only be shared by a heroic man’s man and the man he kept from getting stabbed to death by a dude he recently fought in a prison camp cage match.

So when Santos is coldly murdered, on national television no less, twenty years later by El Presidente (Victor Argo), the evil dictator of Columbia, just because he was trying to take over the country, Santos’ fiery sister Christina (Maria Conchito Alonso) travels to New York to recruit McBain, now working as a humble steelworker, to defeat El Presidente and implement a constitutional democracy with free elections in its place in her brother’s name.

After Christina shares the impossibly lurid story of how fiendish El Presidente and his drug lord cohort got the entire populace of Columbia addicted to cocaine so that they all started skipping work and abandoning their children McBain pauses meaningfully, sips daintily from a cup of cappuccino, then launches into an anecdote that begins, “When I was 17…I went to this famous concert…Woodstock.”

If I was not already in love with McBain before, this moment won my eternal adoration. Hearing those words come out of Christopher Walken’s mouth in those extremely imitable Walken rhythms filled me with child-like delight, as did the bizarre speech that follows, where he discusses what happened at the famous concert Woodstock that he went to when he was seventeen.

Christopher Walken’s McBain, being, like, a far out hippie, man, before he discovered his passion and genius for killing people, got to the famous musical mud bath and even though he didn’t have any food or shelter he had a groovy time because of all the music, love and dope.

Then McBain read a reporter who said that the dark side to the most celebrated music festival in American history is that 500,000 people were living in the mud but they were so stoned and happy that they didn’t care.

The titular murder maniac at first thought that the reporter was a square, a stone-cold bummer and a joy kill who didn’t get the spirit of Aquarius. But then McBain realized the truth of the journalist’s words: if drugs make you accept, even enjoy, living in squalor, with nothing in the way of creature comforts, then shouldn’t everyone involved in the drug trade be murdered with a machine gun or bazooka launcher?

I’m not exactly sure how McBain makes the leap from, “I had a great time at Woodstock smoking reefer sticks and making out with pretty girls” to “I must murder all of the bad people in South America because they’ve gotten the children all hooked on cocaine” but McBain nevertheless seizes upon this opportunity to get back into the mass slaughter business.

Though McBain wracks up the body count of a medium-sized war over the course of McBain he can’t overthrow the government of a military strong man by himself. No, in order to triumph he needs four of the other middle-aged men he served in Nam with. These elite killers and killer elite include muscle-bound Eastland (Steve James), Dr. Dalton (Jay Patterson), a doctor who gets his groove back when he takes a break from saving lives and starts taking them, Frank Bruce (Michael Ironside), who is rich as fuck but can’t resist the opportunity to kill Columbians with his old friends and finally Gil (Thomas G. Waites).

These forty something veterans could go for a hunting weekend or overthrow the corrupt government of a foreign country. One would be more relaxing, but only the toppling-a-South-American regime involves killing an unlimited number of brown-skinned people. So the Nam pals decide to raise some money so they can raise some hell and start wracking up kills.

They hit up a drug den, guns blazing, and literally kill everybody in their path, instantly and incontestably, leaving a long trail of anonymous corpses in their wake. These lunatics kill and kill and kill and then kill some more until they reach the boss at the end of the level, mid-level coke kingpin Papo (Luis Guzman, so much better than the material requires), who speaks for the audience when he complains, “You guys sure killed a lot of people for a little money!” which is infinitely more reasonable and humane than anything our psychotic, sociopathic “heroes” say.

That includes Gil’s indignant response to Papo, an enraged, “People? Who gives a fuck about people like that? Or people like you for that matter!”

It might seem incredibly racist for Gil to talk about the brown-skinned drug trade workers they’d just killed with machine guns as sub-human and unworthy of consideration or respect but he’s an equal opportunity killer who thinks everyone should be murdered, regardless of skin color or sexual orientation.

McBain and his war buddies make a little money killing all those drug dealers and some more threatening a mob kingpin and then it’s off to glamorous Columbia to show the Columbians what war is all about.

Movies about war sometimes take the stance that war is bad. Not McBain. It is of the mindset that war is fucking awesome because you get to kill all the bad guys with rocket launchers and machine guns and then they blow up all good and it’s like pow, pow, pow, pow, pow!

Movies about revenge similarly promote the idea that vengeance is futile and counter-productive, and leads to soul-sickness and emptiness, not satisfaction. Not McBain. It thinks that revenge is fucking awesome, and you should DEFINITELY do it and don’t worry about the children or families of the people you assassinate. They’ll get over it and you’ll get the life-long satisfaction of having killed a bunch of people whose names you’ll never even know.

McBain lastly subscribes to the notion that there’s no such thing as gratuitous violence. It challenges the conventional wisdom that a movie has to be something more than just an endless succession of gleeful slaughter.

McBain feels like a video game in its structure, its action set-pieces and in its utter disregard for the sanctity of human life. Hundreds of people die in McBain. With the exception of noble, heroic Santos, whose death is the catalyst for so much righteous bloodshed, every death in McBain is designed to inspire either no response whatsoever or fist-pumping in jingoistic celebration that the bad guys got blown up good.

McBain is so over the top in its gleeful brutality that it’s hard not to see it as intentionally campy and ridiculous.

It is, after all, a movie that gives Christopher Walken both a personal body count in the mid-twenties and dialogue like, “If you took the weight of the population of Washington D.C, and turned it into gold, it would be worth less than the annual worldwide drug trade. The dollar amount of the worldwide arms trade is four times that.”

Wow, I’d never thought of it like that! And I never will because that makes no sense. Yet in the crazy, upside down, fever dream b-movie fantasy world of McBain it’s wonderfully par for the course.

These bros turned gods of war make their way through Columbia in a haze of righteous slaughter until they’re face to face with the big boss, El Presidente, with the whole world watching and rooting for might to make right.

McBain is a hoot and a half, a delirious exercise in crazed machismo that shares with ambitious serial killers a sick obsession with killing as many people as possible.

I’m not sure whether the people who brought this story to life thought they were making Christopher Walken’s Death Wish 3 or a proto-Hobo With a Shotgun. I can’t tell if the elements of parody and sledgehammer satire are intentional. But it ultimately doesn’t matter when a movie delivers the b-movies thrills with the ferocity and consistency McBain does.

So if you’re looking for an insanely violent, wildly irresponsible good-bad camp classic to help pass the time remember the name McBain. In animated and live action form, he brings the laughs as well as the bloodshed.

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