Recon 2020: The Caprini Massacre

Having survived the world's slowest zombie children, the Sarge and his band of merry morons settle in to the main part of the movie, namely stumbling aimlessly around big empty warehouses and fighting a cavalcade of lame and/or inexplicable monsters. The marines' witty banter and harrowing combat can only really be captured by the following dramatic re-enactment:

SGT. SHARPE: Alright men, we could be facing anything down there, so let's get ready to rock!

[SHARPE takes a giant swig of liquor, then HITS on the female pilot so hard she can't see straight.]

SGT. GUMS: (wearing goalie helmet stolen from a batch of San Jose Sharks rejected irregular merchandise en route to the incinerator) Get a load of that shit, Sarge!

SGT. SHARPE: Stow that shit, Gums!

[CUT to hallway full of indistinguishable JUNK for ¾ of a second.]

CORP. FISTULA: This place is giving me the creeps like a snake on fire with a mouthful of spider assholes, Sarge!

[A robot which looks like ED-209's retarded cousin appears, and the marines BLOW IT THE FUCK UP.]

SGT. PIBB: Sergeant Sharpe is one cool customer. I wonder if he'll give me his autograph?

[A mouth-breathing secondhand cyborg with half of a Radio Shack glued to his head appears. He assaults the marines with remote-controlled cars and a lasso made of speaker wire.]

PVT. JIZZY: Fuck, Sarge, that's some fucked-up, crap-assed bullshit fuck-turds, hooah?

[The marines fight against an army of tiny cockroaches by shooting them with assault rifles. The cockroaches explode into 100 times their own body mass worth of Nickelodeon GAK(tm).]

PVT. ORKINMAN: Here at Terminex, we don't believe in coddling your roaches. Unlike those other p*ssy exterminator companies, we send a platoon of f*cking crack commandos to blast them to sh*t with flamethrowers and napal- [A 30-foot ant with a giant head suddenly grabs him from behind with its mandibles. ORKINMAN wrestles it to the ground, rips its head off with his bare hands, stuffs a grenade in its mouth, and casually tosses it behind him as he turns back to the camera to apologize for the interruption and provide us with his company's 1-800 number].

Eventually this crack team of creatives gets to the bottom of its bin of discount lead-painted plastic toys, and so our fearless bottom-feeders wander into the outside world (which is still blindingly fucking yellow for some reason) only to be ambushed by some random humans. Well, "ambushed" might be too strong a word here, given that all the new bad guys really do is shoot directly at the camera without hitting anything or anyone while their leader (a man who looks like Joss Whedon had a baby with Ben Gibbard) does donuts on his dune buggy of doom. The marines retreat into the warehouse and begin a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, featuring a split-screen montage that would make Kiefer Sutherland vomit up his gall bladder in jealousy:

After what feels like several months, the pointless combat and dune-buggy stunts finally come to an end, Joss Gibbard is defeated, and Sharpe finally gets the chance to ask the squad's female pilot "Howboutthatdate?" Oh, and some aliens follow them home to set up the sequel, which we're pretty much obligated to suffer through now that we've started down this path.

Recon 2020 is a fine movie, assuming you can put up with acting that rivals pornographic parody movies based on Planet of the Apes. If your ability to suspend disbelief extends to werewolves that look like escapees from a budget production of Cats and spaceships that would have been soundly rejected from an alpha build of the original Wing Commander game, then you'll love Recon 2020! Just don't inflict it on any of us normal people, please.

– Garrett "Hydrogen" Neil and Sean "Trillaphon" Neil (@trillaphon)