Another Pandemonium Movie Review

* A note. I used to do a radio comedy program on my local NPR station. It was "The Pandemonium Midnight Uprising," and I did a weekly movie review in the person of Rhona Remora. A remora is a fish that sticks (literally, via a patch of like, backwards pointing scales on the top of their heads) to sharks. When the sharks swim, the remoras go along for the ride. When the sharks eat, the remoras get the leftovers. A very little imagination can take you to where I was when I named this character. Anyway, as much as I loved doing Rhona (she has a high, very nasal New York accent, via Brooklyn) she finally went to the cutting room floor when Pande ended. But after seeing a movie this weekend, I had to bring her back. Take it away, Rhona. Cue the cheesy intro music:

Hiya, Rhona Remora here with another Pandemonium Movie Review.

This week I went to see "Once Upon a Time in Mexico." This should not be confused with "Once Upon a Time in the West." Or, for that matter with "Once Upon a Time in America","Lagaan, Once Upon a Time in India", "Once Upon a Time in the Midlands", or even "Once Upon a Time in Beruit."

I'd been told that this "Once Upon a Time" was a sort of remake of the great Clint Eastwood classic, "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly". By sort of I guess they meant that it was a film. I had just seen TGTBTU on cable, so I remembered the plot. There was a lot of money. The good guy (Clint, of course) knew where it was and was going to steal it from the dead guy. The bad guy (Lee Van Cleef) didn't know where it was, but he had the good guy captive and was going to kill him after he had stolen the money from the dead guy, and then steal the money from Clint. The ugly guy (Eli Wallach) was along for comic/violence relief since he was never going to get the money from anyone: good, bad or dead.

There was none of that in OUTIM. Well, no. There was money, and two of the Mariachis got it, one of them was The Drunk, and the other was The Kid. There was plenty of ugly, with both Willem Dafoe and Mickey (O, my god, what happened to his face?) Roarke. Neither of them live, or get the money.

Antonio Banderas gets the money, but then he throws it off the roof of a building so the villagers can grab it. I think. Maybe. Or maybe the money is blowing around in the village square because the building it was in blew up. Hard to tell, because pretty much everything in this movie either blows up or gets shot up.

Even the predictable fruit cart chase ends up not with a fruit cart crash, but with a massacre of harmless fruit. Watermelons exploding from armour piercing bullets. Bananas spattering. Unidentifiable pulp and juice everywhere.

Johnny Depp plays a CIA agent and Ruben Blades a retired FBI agent. They both take a lot of lead. Neither one gets any money, but Ruben gets Mickey Roarke's chihuahua. Depp gets the girl, but she turns out to be bad, and so he gets to turn her into one of the dead.

There's a cameo appearance by someone I think is the director's grandmother. In the middle of one of the never-ending gun fights, an older woman in a military uniform unlike any of the other military uniforms, steps out of a doorway and plugs away with a shotgun. She appears in no other scene. Maybe they were smoking in the cutting room, and she belongs in one of the other "Once Upon a Times."

But that was the movie. Lots of blowing up stuff, lots of bullets flying, lots of body count and a really gross thing happens to Depp. Maybe this should have been called the Pretty, the Dead and the Missing Plot.

Until next week, this is Rhona Remora saying: Remember, in the dark, they ain't all alike.