0.999999999 Bolls

We all know the old adage.  There should have been only one.  For many, there was only one, as they refuse to acknowlege any part of the Highlander franchise after the original 1986 movie.  I thought the first sequel (or anything set after the events of the original film for that matter) was a mistake, as Highlander was a complete story with a definite end.  There wasn’t supposed to be anything after it.  If they really wanted to capitalize on its popularity, they should have done prequels, focusing perhaps on Ramirez’s 2,000 year lifetime.  Plenty of material there for a screenwriter to put together.  But no, they had to do a sequel.  Then a television series.  Then another sequel.  Then they gave us a sequel tying in the television series.

Now, I liked the television series for quite a while, but I could reconcile it by telling myself it happened before Connor McLeod’s final battle with the Kurgan.  In fact, the series finale I wrote in my head had Duncan facing the Kurgan, and the latter taking his head, giving Connor all the more reason to take him out.  And my series finale, I must say, was brilliantly conceived, and would have brought Clancy Brown back is one of the greatest film villains ever.  But it was not to be, and I finally lost interest in the series itself.

Which brings us to now.  And to Highlander: The CrappeningSource.  I’ve said before that I am a completist with film franchises.  Once I see one, I have an unholy compulsion to watch the rest, no matter how painful.  I saw all the Mimic movies (rented them all one afternoon, as a matter of fact).  One weekend I watched every Hellraiser movie to date.  I even tried to watch Lake Placid 2, though it was so awful I couldn’t finish it.  So today I sat down and subjected myself to latest turd in a long series of bowel-blasting sequels.

I knew I was in trouble during the trailers before I even hit the DVD menu.  There was one for a new, totally remastered (in HD no less) two-disc special edition of Highlander II: The Quickening.  The logic of that baffles me.  That movie was absolutely godawful.  I felt robbed when I saw it opening weekend in the theaters, double so when I watched the director’s cut DVD later in hopes that the director had been forced to cut out everything that might have made it make sense (no such luck).  So instead of an awesome new release of the original Highlander (which I would actually buy, to replace my aging VHS tape) they bring us the sequel, but with all new digital visual and audio effects.  What that told me was that the people bringing me the latest installment thought Highlander II was a brilliant film worth pushing out yet again.  In other words, they didn’t have two brain cells to knock together.

So, Highlander: The Source. The plot was pretty simple.  There’s this Source from whence all the immortals’ power came.  Periodically bands of immortals have tried to get to it, but have always been defeated.  Now we’re in the end times, when society is tearing itself apart, and some mystical force is yanking the very planets out of their orbits to form some kind of alignment with the “central star of our galaxy.”  This will apparently bathe us in cosmic rays of untold power, which sounds like a bad thing, although that effect never referenced again.  A group of four immortals (who I disliked sufficiently I couldn’t be bothered to remember their names) are looking for the Source, which is bound up in that alignment somehow.  Their pointman, though, is thwarted by the Guardian of the Source, whose magic power is the time-lapse shaky-cam.  Joy.  We’re watching a music video.

So they try to enlist good, old Duncan McLeod through his old friend, the Watcher Joe.  Joe gave up being a Watcher when he interfered in Duncan having his ass handed to him by the Guardian, and later died for his troubles.  And because the script said that was motivation for Duncan to go after the Source.  Additional motivation came from Duncan’s estranged wife, who left him a while back because he couldn’t provide her with children (immortals are sterile).  Her desire for children wasn’t all that strong, though, since she didn’t go have any, it was just enough to make a plot point.  Anyway, she’s having visions of the Source and the cosmic alignment and what have you, and she’s going along with the merry band to find the source, so Duncan tags along too.

They all gather at some monastery where some Elder has hidden himself away.  He is Exposition Guy, and spins them a grand yarn of being part of a band who went after the source millennia ago.  Only two of the original party made it to the Source, and both were cursed.  He was cursed with some kind of skin condition that makes him rot away without ever dying, kind of like immortal leprosy.  The other was cursed to become the new Guardian of the Source.  Dun dun dun! <queue dramatic gopher>

The Guardian shows up at the proper dramatic moment and kills Joe right in front of Duncan.  Because he’s all evil and stuff and wants to make our hero suffer.  He somehow avoided kicking any puppies throughout the movie, but he was a bad caricature of the Kurgan (like all Highlander sequel villains).  He also broke Duncan’s katana, which he got from clansman Connor a while back, giving it the dubious distinction of being the only character to have been in all of the movies.  After the Guardian escapes, the merry band of immortals and wife all trot off across the post-apocalyptic world to find the Source.

The Source turns out to be on the Island of Stock Post-Apocalyptic Punk Cannibals.  They fight through there, along the way learning that they really do lose their immortality as they get closer to the source.  They’re captured by more cannibals, but the Guardian shows up to rescue Mrs. Plot-Device McLeod and take her to the Source, I guess to give Duncan more reason to follow along.  The immortals escape, one to get killed by the Guardian, another to abandon the quest to Duncan, as he was destined to be the One.  And Duncan, of course, makes it to the Source.

There we get the expected Climactic Final Battle Between Good and Evil, as always.  At the Source, Duncan also gains the stop-motion shaky-cam ability, which thrilled me anew, and they fight a blurry battle.  This climaxes with Duncan literally fighting a circle around the Guardian so fast that the Guardian is screwed into the ground like a cartoon character.  Seriously.  I wish I were joking, but I’m not.  Duncan refuses to take his head, and thus passes the Source’s test and wins.

At this point they make one of the worst decisions in the long, long string if ill-advised actions that has led us to even have this movie to torture us.  They literally recap THE ENTIRE FILM over the course of a few minutes.  that’s right, they actually use a voiceover and a series of flashbacks to the very movie we’ve supposedly been watching all this time to tell us the story we’ve just seen.  This would be the point I went from being pained by what I had made myself endure to being enraged and wanting a pound of flesh in exchange for the time I’d just wasted.  I literally could have jumped to this final scene and had the whole movie told to me in less time than it took you to read this recap.  And frankly, if I’d known I could have, I would have.

In the end, if you care, it turns out the Source made Duncan fertile, and Mrs. Plot-Device McLeod is having his baby.  Hooray or something.  Happy endings all around.

Let’s not forget that throughout this little gem of a picture, we’ve been tormented by godawful covers of the Queen songs from the original Highlander.  Part of what made that original movie work so very well, at least for me, was that every single piece of music in the entire thing was performed by Queen.  Right down to the song on the jukebox in the bar in one scene.  “Princes of the Universe” and the “Kurgan’s Theme” perfectly gave us the feel for the action adventure, and the haunting “Who Wants to Live Forever,” for my money the best track in the entire movie, did more to set the scene for the death of Connor’s wife than the movie itself.  I love that song, and I was apoplectic with rage when they played an absolutely hideous cover of it over the closing credits.

So, yeah, I watched this steaming pile of excrement so you don’t have to.  And I have to give it a massive 0.999999999 on the the Boll Scale for the way it went beyond being such a bad sequel and actively defiled the memory of the original picture.  At least Highlander II had the excuse that it was a sci-fi script that had nothing to do with Highlander that was edited into the franchise.  This piece of offal was actually written to be part of the Highlander canon.

I never thought I’d say it, but this movie made look a little more favorably on Highlander II.   And that should be sufficient to consign everyone involved to the lowest circle of Hell.