While watching Corbin Nash, I couldn’t help but think about this one article Roger Ebert wrote about how painful it is to review bad movies for a living. At the time, I thought it was a larf. I mean, even if you ARE watching terrible movies, you’re still getting paid money to sit through them, and certainly, there are FAR worse ways to generate an income.
But now, in an age where my free time is at a premium, I totally understand what Rog was talking about. If I’m lucky, I might have a good ten hours a week of time just to myself, and I assure you, those hours are precious. So when you spend several of them watching a crappy movie and then writing about said crappy movie — you can kinda’ understand the spiritual plight of the film critic.
I could have done anything with my free time besides watch Corbin Nash, this newfangled Blade wannabe starring Smalljon Umber from Game of Thrones as a very poor man’s Wesley Snipes, and pretty much anything would’ve been time better spent.
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He’s here to kick ass and woefully overact … and he’s all out of ass to kick.
This is one of those movies that’s pretty much told entirely through flashback, so everything jumps around about every ten or fifteen minutes. There’s this New York cop named Corbin Nash and he’s your stereotypical “loose cannon on the edge, I don’t play by the rules and hardly ever wear a shirt” policeman. Well, one day Rutger Hauer waltzes on in to his favorite bar and starts telling Nash he comes from a long line of demon hunters or something. So they talk for about 10 minutes and then the old dude gives him … a World Series Championship ring.
Fast forward a year and this stripper in an orange wig is treating Corbin Nash, who apparently went to L.A. and got royally messed up having karate matches with vampires. Now we’re rewinding the tape to six months ago. There’s this goth, crossdressing psycho killer right out of The Silence of the Lambs (played by, of all people, Corey Feldman) stalking a hooker and yeah, they do the deed right then and there on the hood of Feldman’s car. Only thing is, instead of paying the prostitute for her services, Corey takes a chomp out of her neck instead.
Then we cut back to Corbin Nash getting his wounds licked (not literally, because that would be kind of gross) and the stripper takes her wig off and reveals herself to be … uh, some random woman who saved a Corbin Nash at a bar once. Then he goes out and beats up a dude’s car with a baseball bat and punches the driver a couple of times.
Then Corbin Nash goes to talk to Malcolm McDowell, who is some blind sage dude who knows that Los Angeles is secretly overrun with devil worshipers and blood suckers (and no, not the regular kinds you find in Hollywood, either.) Then the goth transvestite vampire throws Corbin Nash into a jail cell. Then they put a bag over his head and force him down a dark hallway. Then he has a kickboxing contest with some guy for no real reason whatsoever. Then Feldman slow dances with some guy with a giant scar on his forehead, then there’s ANOTHER pro ‘rasslin match, this time inside a barbed wire ring, and it ends with one demon getting its jugular torn open like a half-priced enchilada.
Malcolm McDowell, seen here REALLY wishing he would’ve saved up more money for retirement.
And then there’s a lot of plot getting in the way of the story, and then it’s time for the grand finale where Nash shaves a baseball bat into a spike, puts on some brass knux and spends the last 15 minutes of the flick turning the living dead into the just plain dead.
Let’s hit the highlights, why don’t we? We’ve got 21 dead bodies. Ten breasts. Multiple neck bitings. One strip club battle royale. Multiple barbed wire ‘rasslin matches. Stomach carving. Throat stabbing. Gratuitous boxing training montage. Gratuitous lap dancing. Body bag fu. Baseball bat fu. Brass knuckles fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place — WAY too much exposition fu.
Starring Dean S. Jagger as the titular character, whose catchphrases include “Who am I? That’s a good question” and “You ever hear of the occult?”; Malcolm McDowell as a character listed in the final credits as “Blind Prophet” (spoiler: the character is a prophet, who is blind); Rutger Hauer as “Stranger” (yeah, coming up with character names really isn’t the screenwriters’ strong suit, it appears); and Corey Feldman as the gender-bending vampire leader Queeny, who is pretty much the only good thing about the whole damned movie.
Directed by Ben (The Paddy Lincoln Gang) Jagger, who also co-wrote he movie alongside sibling/star Dean S. Jagger and Christopher P. Taylor.
Corbin Nash will be in select theaters, on VOD, and DigitalHD starting April 20th.
WICKED RATING: 3/10
Diretor(s): Ben Jagger
Write(s): Ben Jagger, Dean S. Jagger, Christopher P. Taylor
Stars: Dean S. Jagger, Corey Feldman, Malcolm McDowell, Rutger Hauer
Release date: April 20, 2018
Studio/Production Co: Gravitas Ventures
Language: English
Length: 100 minutes
Subgenre: Vampire, Supernatural, Action, Superhero
