Machete

Blades, babes, guns, nuns (oh, and nurses).

From time to time — in a way that is prob­a­bly beyond the bounds of all known psy­chi­atric analy­sis — I har­bour a desire to see an actress put to one side her 2009 grad­u­a­tion from the Uni­ver­sity of Hous­ton (with a bachelor’s degree in Advertising/Public Rela­tions and a Minor in Math­e­mat­ics), take all her clothes off, and pull a mobile phone out of her muff.

For a while, it seemed that this desire would go unsated. Luck­ily, I rented a lit­tle film called Machete. And, well, you can guess the rest. It’s like Robert Rodriguez had a direct line to my brain. A lit­tle wor­ry­ing, perhaps.

And I do won­der how long it’ll be before some­one makes a movie where an actress grad­u­at­ing from Oxford pulls an iPad out of her bum hole.

DeNiro: “Hey, look! My favourite movie, Lawn­mower Man, is on TV!”

Robert, if you’re listening…

Machete stars Danny Trejo, made most famous by his turn as a knife throw­ing maniac in Des­per­ado. Danny is the go to guy if you need a big, scary Mex­i­can. Mainly because he’s a big, scary Mex­i­can (he was born in Cal­i­for­nia, but who cares?).

The film is a spin-off from one of the joke trail­ers that played out before the Grind­house dou­ble bill of Death Proof and Planet Ter­ror. What sur­prised me most, when scour­ing IMDB, is that the Machete char­ac­ter is also in all four of the Spy Kids movies.

Hav­ing not seen any of them, it bog­gles my mind how that plays out. When the Spy Kids race to res­cue their par­ents, do they arrive to find their dad’s head sliced off, and Danny Trejo enjoy­ing some alone time with Carla Gug­ino in a hot tub?

Prob­a­bly not. So for that rea­son, I will never watch a Spy Kids film.

Nope, instead, Machete wit­nesses the grue­some death of his wife at the hands of a drug lord played by Steven Sea­gal. This all hap­pens in the open­ing scene, a bru­tal dis­play of gore and dis­mem­ber­ment, com­plete with shock B-movie edit­ing, and grainy, scratch filled camerawork.

Once that scene is done and dusted, the fake film scratches dis­ap­pear (a bit like they did in Death Proof). A bit dis­ap­point­ing, but I sup­pose their rea­sons might be that it becomes dis­tract­ing after a while.

Fol­low­ing the death of his wife, Machete resur­faces three years later, and is hired to killer a sen­a­tor. But is every­thing as it seems?

They’re behind you, Michelle.

Of course not. From hereon, the plot broad­ens in scope. Some might say things become a bit mud­dled at this point, pos­si­bly weak­en­ing the revenge plot­line. In a way, it does, and it doesn’t. B-movies tend to have one major fail­ing: their plots are hap­haz­ard, and take an “every­thing but the kitchen sink” approach.

Where a com­pe­tent film might be more stream­lined, a B-movie will over­com­pen­sate. They might pack in more scenes, more char­ac­ters, more action, any­thing to try to paper over the cracks.

Whether by acci­dent or design, Machete is guilty of this. And yet this is at least one rea­son why it works. It’s aping the ama­teur­ish energy of the best B-movies. For all its ultra-violence, gra­tu­itous nudity and out­right cyn­i­cism, it has an oddly inno­cent charm to it.

The other rea­son is that the film has a pretty big ros­ter of stars. Lohan, John­son, DeNiro, Alba, Rodriquez (who even makes eye patches look sexy), they’re all clearly enjoy­ing them­selves which helps to ele­vate the movie to another level. The stand­outs, how­ever, are the two who have long wal­lowed in B-movie hell them­selves. Danny Trejo is good in the strong, cen­tral role. And Jeff Fahey, chew­ing the scenery with rel­ish as a sleazy bad guy, is quite sim­ply awesome.

Machete is born from a love, not a hatred, of trashy B-movies. And it shows.

Now, where’s my iPad? Erm, oh…