Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

This is my entry in carl_lazarevic's "I'm sorry but you're just plain wrong" write-off. The idea here is to take a product where your feelings oppose the general consensus. The only rule is that my hostility toward the opposing viewpoint has to be maximum, so this should be fun. (Unless you like your reviews of Hulk Hogan movies done with a straight face, in which case you should go back to your ship, because you're probably not from this planet.)

Let us now turn to the subject of Suburban Commando, and the worldwide collision between asses and word processors that was its critical reception. Yes, this movie is underrated. Not very underrated, mind you, but a great many worthless critics unnecessarily bashed it.

Granted, it's a comedy Hulk Hogan made in 1991 (when his dumb but successful No Holds Barred was behind him and producers still imagined he could make a bankable movie star). He plays an intergalactic badass who gets stranded on Earth and does the predictable fish-out-of-water bit while fighting bad guys from outer space (with help from the obligatory friendly Earthling family). It's only natural to expect that it would suck balls!

Yet if you watch Suburban Commando with an open mind, which all the knuckle-dragging human accidents who downrated it so painfully lacked, you'll discover that it actually has laughworthy material, and even the material that fails is often stupid enough that you can make fun of it anyway, thus remaining safely entertained.

Somehow, though, nearly all the pro critics trashed it. So do most internet reviewers, as though all their "Wow, look, I'm a basement-dwelling assplug who can front $12 a month for my own lousy web domain!" troglodyte opinions are worth a constipated man's bowel movement. They're all full of it. The world should've stamped "RETURN TO SENDER" on their foreheads and crammed them back in their mothers' wombs.

For example, the apparently insane Roger Ebert wrote that Suburban Commando made him feel tired of going to the movies. Yeah, like the man who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls should be judging movies. But holy ass-ramming shit! As a professional movie reviewer with decades of experience, Ebert has seen thousands more movies than I ever will, and THIS is the one that made him tired of going to them? Had he ever seen a terrible movie before? Did he see Manos: the Hand of Fate? Leonard Part 6? What about some of the Police Academy sequels? Now those will make you rethink that "movies are worth watching" concept, and each made it to a theater during Ebert's tenure, yet he picked on the relatively painless Suburban Commando.

His crappy review is here: http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1991/10/673764.html. Notice, incidentally, that his entire review is five short paragraphs that'd barely rate a SH here, and nowhere are his problems with this movie explained (other than "it gives the Hulkster so little to do his fans may wonder why he bothered", also clearly bullshit). Most other newspaper critics were little better, yet they're somehow getting paid for it.

As for the internet shit-flingers, there's that nice 3.7 (out of 10) user rating on the Internet Movie Database, but after years of visiting that site, I've seen maybe three IMDB user comments (out of zillions) that would get above a NH here, so their opinions can deep-throat it. Actually, most IMDB user reviews for Suburban Commando were positive, so clearly the common person knows what's going on. As for the critics who have uniformly bashed the movie on their own websites, refer to my above "Wow, look, I'm a basement-dwelling assplug!" comment. Hey, it's better than picking through more of their SH-quality three-paragraph reviews.

To counterpoint all this mass idiocy, let's examine some of the movie's scenes, so that you'll see why it has at least some entertainment value and is undeserving of the abysmal ratings so many gave it.


The whole damn opening of the movie. I'd like to do a blow by blow description of this, but there's just not enough room.

Anyway, I swear Suburban Commando opens on a shot that couldn't have resembled Star Wars more if the director's life depended on it. Specifically, we scroll through space to a dull-looking planet, and suddenly a large, crappy-looking spaceship flies into view from behind, with smaller X-wing-ish fighters casually getting blown up around it.

No kidding. That the filmmakers so happily baited George Lucas (who once tried to sue the makers of Battlestar Galactica for having the nerve to make another space movie with lasers and spaceship fights) always makes me chuckle. Unfortunately, the first Star Wars looked this good 14 years prior, but this was supposed to be a comedy, and the effects were decent everywhere else, so I'll not make too much a bitch of myself on the point.

On the huge ship, an obvious evil overlord (William Ball, who appeared only in this movie and sadly died of a heart attack the same year) is gloating to a hostage, who is the president of the nearby planet. We learn the overlord's name is Suitor, which is such a damn silly name for a bad guy that I'm mildly impressed everyone could say it with a straight face. It's exactly what I'm talking about when I said this movie is so dumb that you can make fun of it anyway. The two exchange some disposable villain/hostage banter ("I won't order my people to give up everything they know to serve a sadistic, egotistical, homicidal maniac!" "I don't think of myself as egotistical. Proud, maybe..."), before an alarm sounds and Suitor mutters "Ramsey..."

We cut to Shep Ramsey's (Hulk Hogan) feet, strutting down a corridor in silly-looking plastic armor, with black-clad goons falling left and right around them. Naturally, they're powerless to stop him, despite having guns themselves and outnumbering him. Jesus, idiots, just shoot at his head! You'll see in a minute he doesn't have armor there! Then again, they're evil henchmen in a bad sf movie, so they probably couldn't hit the ground with their piss in three tries.

What I like here are the goons' expressions of total helplessness as they uselessly try to attack him or run. It's some of the best acting you'll ever see from extras, and (combined with Hulk's lazy strutting) gives the sequence kind of a one-sided feel that's idiot-funny.

Most of the pro critics who reviewed this movie didn't realize that's how it was supposed to be funny, but they suck so much that every streetwalker in Las Vegas is taking notes, because I thought it kinda worked (despite how Hulk makes a couple lame puns while battling his way into an elevator, and doing that thing where you climb up, grab one cable and cut it, sending the elevator hurtling to the bottom as you go to the top).

We cut back to Suitor just in time to see a door explode and Hulk strut in. Now it's downright silly, because everyone seems to have forgotten their lasers, forcing Hulk to manhandle a couple more goons, backfisting one and throwing another through a display full of skulls. It's at this point that I noticed the goons have white ponytails, for reasons only the bad movie gods could know.

Unfortunately for Hulk, a couple of goons with black wrestler masks subdue him with a sledgehammer, making it look like he's defeated. Suitor says "Really, Shep, I had expected much better from you." Naturally, Hulk gets the obligatory second wind, makes his best war face, and grabs the masked goons by the throats, forcing them backwards.

I'm not some badass master of close combat (yet), but I can say that a one-handed choke hold on its own is about the lamest possible attack. It would be easy for the victim to kick you in the groin, for example, or jab your eyes, or pin your hand and then torque your arm so that they can smash your elbow with their other forearm. Suitor apparently isn't big on any kind of combat training, though, because the masked goons just make faces at Hulk until he slams them into a bulkhead. Amazingly, this is enough to knock them out.

At this point, logic finally tries to intrude on the movie, as yet another goon holds a laser to Hulk's head while he's distracted. Wow! If he had just remembered he had a laser earlier, this might have ended a couple seconds after the door exploded.

Still, this movie being what it is, logic gives up after a mere moment's effort, for Suitor says "No! He's mine!", pulling out his own gun. You would think Suitor would be happy just letting his nemesis die by any means possible, but noooo. Naturally, this idiocy allows the president to pull a razor-edged card from his sleeve and hurl it at the distracted Suitor, cutting the villain's hand off. Perhaps next time, he'll learn the value of handcuffs.

Meanwhile, he's enraged. His eyes turn yellow, and a clawed reptilian hand pops out of his wrist-stump. Hulk yells for the president to run, but the man shares the bad guys' instincts for self-preservation, and just sits there. Suitor grabs him by the throat and growls "The negotiations have ended!" in his best "monster" voice. So the negotiation process was that spaceship battle that was already half-assedly raging outside?

You might think the goon with the laser would take the opportunity to give Hulk another orifice, but he, too, just stands there, and I don't think he's even looking in Hulk's direction before he gets punched down. This, too, is idiot-funny. Instead of grabbing the goon's laser, Hulk flees the scene for some unknowable reason and flies down a chute with rocket boots, planting bombs on the walls as he goes. The bombs blink ominously (red lights, of course), and Hulk makes it to an escape pod just in time. He growls at the pod's controls as he furiously punches buttons, trying to get it to do...something. That makes sense, at least - I wouldn't expect Suitor to have user-friendly escape pods.

Hulk returns to his ship. His superior officer appears on a viewscreen and praises him for defeating Suitor, which is weird, considering the viewscreen just popped up and Hulk didn't say anything yet. The superior would've been embarrassed if Hulk had to admit he actually failed. Anyway, Hulk asks what's next, and the superior admits that with the evil general out of the way, things are peaceful. This leads to one genuinely good bit:

HULK: "You gotta have something on your books. Maybe a terrorist extermination?"
SUPERIOR: "No."
HULK: (clearly reaching) "Galactic narc duty?"
SUPERIOR: "Uh uh."
HULK: (flippant) "Okay, how about a big bug hunt with creatures that bleed acid?"

I know most bad movie reviewers would invoke the much-tested "Don't remind us of much better movies" criticism here, but this actually amused me. If humanity were an interstellar culture, we probably WOULD have soldiers making sarcastic Alien references like that, so it's nice to see that here.

In more dialog that isn't worth recapping, the superior wishy-washily chews Hulk out for slipping and letting the president die. Whatever. The superior tells Hulk he's been working too hard: "Anyone in your position would be a little...stressed out." If you guessed that this causes Hulk to shout "I'm not stressed out!" and smash a console with his fist, give yourself a hand. Unsurprisingly, this causes Hulk's ship to go out of control, and the superior orders him to land somewhere nice and out of the way to recharge his power console (which will take six weeks if he only uses enough power to not be "traceable"). Which is weird, as the console was smashed, so I'd think he'd be repairing it instead of recharging it, but whatever.

Gee, I wonder which planet is closest. Earth! At detecting this, Hulk groans. "Earthlings. I hate Earthlings." Then just spend six weeks on Mars, bigot. It's practically next door, and the only lame-ass Earth stuff is the wreckage from all our failed space probes.

Overall, it's not a terrible opening. You'll notice that the genuinely funny bits are outnumbered by the funny-cause-they're-stupid/careless bits, but the important thing is that I wasn't bored.


That goddamned song for the opening credits. During the excruciatingly long sequence that introduces the Half-Assed Family Who Ultimately Teach Our Hero That Earth Isn't So Bad, we get an unbelievably crappy song. The main vocalist sounds like a Negro gospel singer who is deliberately trying to sound homosexually effeminate. Oh, and the lyrics suck. "Such a nice place to live...but I wouldn't want to visit"? You can cram that up your ass and light it. The song isn't as terrible as some I've heard (have you checked out what Vanilla Ice has been doing lately?), but you'll still grit your teeth and hiss "End! End!" under your breath.

Oh, and "If I ask for the raise and don't get it, where does that leave us?" when the family's father, Charlie Wilcox (Christopher Lloyd!), is pressured by his wife Jenny (Shelly Duvall!) to ask for a raise. Uh, right where you are now, so why not ask? It's sad to see Christopher Lloyd reduced to these kinds of one-note roles (if you're wondering, his big trait is being particularly lacking in the balls department). Ah, hell with it, I've stopped caring already - that song is still playing over the dialogue. It's still easy to make fun of, though.


Where Hulk's ship lands. Or more exactly, where it crashes through the ceiling of. This place...I can only describe it as an abandoned disco rink. This seems like a good place to hide a spaceship, as no one in their right mind would go there. Then again, those who DO go there will be certifiably insane. Meanwhile, let's generously assume that Hulk's ship flew in just too damn fast for little Earth things like, oh, witnesses and radar to have caught it.


That stupid jumpsuit guy. The first scene where Hulk walks down the street, he's still in his goofy space armor, so people are staring at him. A trio of ladies even laughs. I don't know if I would laugh at someone Hulk Hogan's size, even if he IS walking around with an expression that indicates he's been working on the same bowel movement for ten years. Whatever. He sees another woman whose money was eaten by a vending machine, and resolves the issue by punching the machine, causing it to spill change onto the sidewalk.

NOW we get to the thing I always notice: a guy looks at Hulk and quips "Guess you don't shop off the rack much, do you, huh, buddy?" This man is hypocritically decked in a bright mustard-yellow jumpsuit himself. Sadly, Hulk isn't familiar enough with Earth's styles to quip back "Jesus! What the hell planet are you from?".


Don't worry, it's a bad movie, law and order suck anyway. After the lame jumpsuit guy is another stab at humor. Hulk is dismayed to find a dog locked in a truck under the glaring sun, while its moron owner is eating and telling it to shut up. A scene cut later, the man is bound in the truck (and naked and muzzled), the dog is eating his meal, and Hulk is walking off wearing his clothes. It's idiot-funny because Hulk passed at least one cop walking down the street. It would be great to live in a bad movie, because you can terrorize people who suck all day and the cops never do anything unless the script wants them to.


Oh, that means you suck, too. The first time Wilcox tries to drive into his driveway, he can't because some old-style narrow race cars are in the way. He shouts at their greasy redneck owners next door, which, of course, accomplishes nothing. Thus, he's forced to park across the street, resulting in almost having his car door smashed off by a speeding muscle car before he jumps back in and closes it in terror. As he crosses the street, he's almost roadkilled by yet another car, this one going slowly enough for the driver to quip "Wake up, jerk!" Also idiot-funny in its heavy-handedness. See, it demonstrates that, despite the aforementioned coplessness, it would really suck to be in a bad movie, because if you have a character problem, pretty much the entire world of the movie will point it out at every opportunity.


Wilcox's crazy old man neighbor. As Wilcox walks up his driveway, he's berated by another neighbor, a drunken old man sitting in the shell of a jeep. This character's insanity amuses me.

OLD MAN: "Weak strategy, Wilcox! Should've opened the door wider! Always deal from strength!"
WILCOX: (whining) "They would've ripped the door off, colonel!"
OLD MAN: "Not likely! They wouldn't want to bruise their little hot rod! Even if they did, it'd be worth it! Let the little bastards eat some steel for a change! It's what you call an acceptable loss!"
WILCOX: (mindlessly hurries inside)
OLD MAN: "Your car door is one! Your freedom is not!"


The one moment in all of cinema history where Shelly Duvall slaps Christopher Lloyd in the ass. In one scene, Wilcox collapses on a couch, and his wife tries to come on to him, even going as far as wearing a slut-tastic curly red wig. You would think that sex would be the best thing to distract you from your lack of manliness (if you're actually a man, that is), but evidently Wilcox doesn't think, as he shrugs her off. Still, her disappointment leads up to the one moment in all of cinema history where Shelly Duvall slaps Christopher Lloyd in the ass. For real!

Anyway, this is also the scene where we learn she's converted his beloved workshop into a rentable apartment, so he won't have to keep pussyfooting around about that raise. (No, she doesn't actually use the word "pussyfooting", but that would've been cool. Then again, I have never failed to laugh hysterically when Eliot screams "It wasn't anything like that, penis breath!" in ET, so take that with a grain of salt.) That necessary plot element in place, Hulk shows up literally within the minute.

Mind you, all Hulk's done on Earth so far is walk down that street and see a flyer advertising the apartment. Where did he get the money to rent it? That prick he locked up probably didn't have enough in his wallet for an apartment. At first, it seems like a giant plot hole, but Wilcox was probably too colossal a weenie to charge him anyway. Anyway, there's another genuinely funny bit here where Hulk walks in while dangling Wilcox's two kids in either hand, growling "Are these yours?" Incidentally, getting dragged in by Hulk is about as much personality as either kid displays in the movie.


The first series of obligatory, half-assed misunderstandings. People from outer space have way too much testosterone. A mailman drops letters through the mail slot, but Hulk (who doesn't know what's going on) rushes up, grabs him, and threatens him with a knife before Jenny intervenes. Then a paperboy stupidly hits Hulk with a paper and shouts "Got you!", and she has to keep him from furiously hurling the paper back. She tries to explain to him that these people aren't threats or anything.

These bits are funny because Hulk was obviously talking out of his ass earlier - how does he know if he hates Earth if he knows so little about how things work here? I also like Hulk's gleeful delivery of the line "Got you, smartass!" after he beans the paperboy anyway.


When the bounty hunters are introduced. There were so many problems with this scene it was easily idiot-funny. After Suitor (oh wow, he isn't dead after all, never saw THAT coming) figures out that Hulk is on Earth, the world-conquering psychopath retaliates by...sending his army of minions after him, of course.

No, actually, Suitor just blows up the Earth - it's the only way to be sure!

Okay, no. What he really does in the movie is...send two bounty hunters to find him. Seriously. That's it. Ah, well, that's slightly more bounty hunters than Darth Sidious or whoever sent after Senator Amidala for thwarting the Trade Federation, and he waited ten years to even bother. And that bounty hunter was stupid enough to kill his assistant with a dart with "MADE ON CLONE PLANET" stamped on it.

Even before that, though, someone refers to Suitor as "commander", even though he's a general in other scenes. I always enjoy continuity fuck-ups. Anyway, these bounty hunters have to be the lamest bounty hunters since Bobba Fett got his ass handed to him by a blind man. They're two grubby, long-haired wrestler guys in tan overcoats (not even leather overcoats!) who would probably be mistaken for homeless people on Earth. I cower before their sheer badassness. Even better, Suitor shows them a flyer with Hulk's face on it - and it isn't even a photograph, just a drawing! What, they don't have hologram projectors in outer space or anything?

In fairness, the bounty hunter scenes actually manage to be funnier than most of Hulk's own fish-out-of-water antics. There was an earlier scene where Hulk gets pissed off at a skateboard and hurls it into orbit, and when the bounty hunters approach Earth, they detect the skateboard floating past...I always laugh at that. After they land, there's another bit that's both funny and idiot-funny at once, when they've taken a car and parked at a fast food place's order box.

ORDER BOX: Hey, dudes! Welcome to Surfin' Burger! How about the big big Gnarly Burger? We got the Wipeout Burger! We got the Dude Burger! We got the Hang Ten Burger, and the Totally Awesome Burger!
(camera pans over the bounty hunters' car, revealing a "JUST MARRIED" sign)
ORDER BOX: Whoooa! Hang on, you guys! You just got married! Whoa! This is cool! You two look so cute together! You know, we got the special Honeymoon Burger for just newlyweds like yourselves!

And then the bounty hunters finally blow it up with their lasers.

The surfer-speak is so obnoxious and excited that I can't help laughing at this, and it's even more hysterically funny to me now with the national dumbassness over the gay marriage issue. The idiot-funny part is how it's also absolutely pointless, because we have no idea WHY they'd go to a fast food place anyway. (Were they really going to order something?)


Mime violence. There's a running gag where Hulk abuses a mime. The first time, he looks at the mime and says "It must be a K-7 force field. Don't worry, I'll break you out of there" and punches him. Variations of this scene play out a couple more times during the movie, and while it gets repetitive, it raises this movie's rating by at least a star - there can never be too much violence against mimes (even violence that expects you to not notice that Hulk should know Earth doesn't have force fields).


"What game?" The most idiotic scene in the movie has Hulk wandering into an arcade and beating a game that some kid is losing, prompting everyone to cheer and say "So, you must play this game a lot", only for Hulk to seriously reply "Game? What game?"

Holy shit. People from outer space don't know what video games are? As usual, though, it's easy to make fun of. Hulk's dialog before he takes over for the kid establishes that it's some kind of space game ("Then launch photon torpedoes!" "You're crazy! Dragos absorbs photons to get more power!" "Impossible, I thought only Xennites could do that!"), but in the brief shots of the screen, it's obviously some kind of Afterburner-type game, with a quite Earthly jet fighter flying over an ocean. Hooray for more carelessness!


The bit that even morons who hated this movie laughed at. Wilcox is again blocked from his driveway by his greasy neighbors' cars. This time, though, Hulk is there to push them out of the way with his massive strength, prompting the greasers to walk up to him in a threatening manner.

GREASER 1: (irate) "Hey! Goldilocks! You got any idea how much these cars are worth?! Thirty thousand bucks! You got any idea what we gonna do to you if we find one itty-bitty scratch on them? ANY idea?!"
HULK: (flippant) "Let me guess. First you're gonna pound my face, break every bone in my body, then you're gonna drag me across a gravel road, and feed my remains to a warthog. Is that about right?"
GREASER 1: "What are you, nuts? This is the nineties. We're gonna sue you. We're gonna get you for willful destruction of property - "
GREASER 2: "Yeah!"
GREASER 1: "- mental anguish - "
GREASER 2: "That's giving it to him!"
GREASER 1: "- loss of work hours...when we get through with you, you ain't gonna have a dime left to your name!"
GREASER 2: "You'll be hearing from our attorney."

They walk off, leaving a bewildered Hulk to say "What kind of world is this?" It's a good joke. If there had been more social commentary like this, the movie might have done better.


By now, you probably have some idea of what this movie's like, and it won't be necessary to go into the ending. No, Wilcox's family doesn't have to help Hulk finish recharging his ship, fight the bounty hunters, and fend off Suitor (when he appears for absolutely no reason and of course ends up changing into his full lizard-monster form), nor does Wilcox finally gain some balls - oh, wait, that's exactly it. (Actually, the end has another great bit, where Suitor has Hulk at gunpoint, and begins the obligatory gloating about his now inevitable rise back to power. Hulk replies "So this is how you're gonna do me in? By boring me to death with speeches?" After all the stupid gloating villain speeches I've seen in crappy sf stories, I've always wanted to hear a quip like that.)

Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), the DVD itself is more or less crap, as far as the overall effort that went into it goes. I don't care about things like picture quality - features matter more to me, and here you get shafted. It's nice that both the widescreen and fullscreen versions of the movie were included, but the mind-blowing assortment of extras are...the surprisingly slow trailer and that "Pick That Flick" game where you have to guess which movie different screencaps are from. Yay.

In all fairness, though, I wouldn't blame the director or stars if they were trying to forget this movie ever happened, so I'm not surprised they didn't turn up for commentaries. It barely made $7 million at the box office, and Hulk's appearance alone probably ate up more than that, so how much effort was I expecting? I should be surprised it even made it to DVD. It's not like they were trying to get away with charging $30 for it, anyway - even before it hit the bargain bin, it was only $10.

Overall, I give Suburban Commando a mild recommendation, because it's so cheap and some of the material works. Plus the acting and cinematography aren't bad, like you'd expect them to be - many ragged on Hulk's rough, constipated acting style, but at least his harshness keeps him from being nauseatingly likeable. Suburban Commando isn't great, or even actually good, but compared to some of the brain-challenged crap Hulk Hogan ended up starring in (Mr. Nanny, Santa With Muscles, wrestling in general, blah blah blah vomit), it's quite painless and amusing.

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12