Alphabetical Movie – Highlander

I watched Highlander a lot last year in preparation to write “Highlander: The Musical.” The show was a part of the 2011 Minnesota Fringe Festival and did pretty well.  We didn’t win any major awards but most of the people who watched it said they thought it was funny so – you know – go us.

Here’s the thing – and I know that I’m a bad geek when I say this – Highlander is not a very good movie.

Before someone puts me into a high rise with John McClane  and says “good luck,” hear me out.

Highlander is not a very good movie.  But it is an awesome movie.

Understand the difference here.  The movie is filled with boring sub-plots, fairly tepid dialogue and has a premise so full of holes, you could strain spaghetti with it.   Yeah, all of that is true.

But it also has guys fighting with swords and cutting each other’s heads off!

The importance of that fact cannot be overstated.  No matter what is wrong with the movie, the sheer weight of the “guys cutting off heads with swords” factor will completely overpowers any objections that a normal human being should have with the film.

If someone says to you “yeah, I tried to watch Highlander but Christopher Lambert is really awful.  I mean, what is with that ‘Scottish’ accent of his?”

Show them this:

While this is admittedly a lot shorter than the actual scene from the film the important factors here are that you have two guys fighting with swords in a parking lot and one of them gets his head chopped off!

Did I mention that one of them does a bunch of back flips just because he can????

This movie is the crane technique of geek films.  You cannot defend against it.

The biggest problem with Highlander II – aside from every frame of the film – is the fact that they departed from the simple formula that involves guys chopping off of each other’s heads.

Yet, inexplicably, they kept the “Highlander has sex with a woman immediately after she learns he’s immortal” part.

Nobody watches the movie for that scene.  In fact, almost everyone who has ever watched Highlander uses that scene for a bathroom break because it is just stupid.

What follows that scene?

Highlander and The Kurgan have a swordfight on top of a building and at the end of it, Highlander chops The Kurgan’s head off!!!!

As if that wasn’t bad ass enough, it turns out that the sparks flying off of their swords were caused by hooking their swords up to car batteries which regularly shocked the actors.  That “hairdo” Clancy Brown is sporting at the end of the film may have been the result of his hair falling out due to repeated electric shocks!

Sort of makes you respect Christopher Lambert a little more because he managed to take the same kind of abuse without losing his hair.

Does anyone besides me wish there was an outtake where the electricity arced from Clancy Brown’s sword to the safety pins on his neck?  That would be the holy freakin’ grail of outtakes!

You know how Woody Allen lives in New York and he loves New York so much that all of his movies (except Midnight in Paris) are set there?  Well Highlander is the kind of film Woody Allen would make if he was actually Michael Bay.

So the next time someone says to you “Highlander?  That movie is Awful,” you should respond “awful?  I think you mean awesome!”

Then chop their freakin’ head off.