Welcome to B-Movie Enema, my Enemaniacs.

It’s February. What happens in February? Well, it’s the last month we all have to deal with winter… if you aren’t in places like Miami or, I dunno, Calgary. That’s a good thing. It’s also the month that is basically dominated, at least in the first half of the month, by the lovey-dovey bullshit that is Valentine’s Day. That’s not such a great thing. It’s a Hallmark holiday. You should celebrate love and what have you every day…? Eh. Anyway, when it comes to Valentine’s Day, you do get those Conversation Hearts, and that’s a good thing.

But the best part of February is that on February 11, every goddamn year, I turn a year older. I get more and more detached from marketing campaigns. I get more and more gray, in the handsome, distinguished way. I get to have lunch with my dad at one of my favorite restaurants. And I get a lot of messages wishing me a good one. I used to not be a big fan of my birthday, but, dammit, I’ve kinda grown to like it the older I get.

So, for my own birthday, I’m celebrating here at B-Movie Enema with something I’ve been known to do from time to time. I’ve done it for Alyssa Milano, Phoebe Cates, and Jacqueline Lovell. It’s time to do what I’ve should have done a loooooong time ago, and do it for someone I’ve got a very long history with – Melissa Joan Hart. Yes, it’s Melissa Joan Hart Month for February! And we start with her in a supporting role in 2001’s Backflash.

Why Melissa Joan Hart? I mean, aside from the Hart/heart February/Valentine’s Day thing? And, I suppose, the explanation I’m about to go through, but let’s get back on track here. Let’s hop into my time machine and make two stops in the timeline of one Geoffrey Robert Arbuckle.

The first stop is the early 90s. At this point in my teenage years, it was rather customary for my dad and me to go to my grandparents each Sunday. While we visited with his parents, we’d have lunch (sometimes we’d go out, but most of the time, it was my grandma making lunch after she came home from church). After lunch, my dad would do laundry while visiting with my grandpa, and I largely spent time with my grandma and their dog, a Golden Retriever runt, Tuffy. I’d do chores for my grandma for a few bucks, but what was the most common activity was to watch TV. In all the years my dad and I went there on Sundays, my most core memories of watching TV were when I’d watch classic Doctor Who episodes on our PBS station in Indianapolis, WFYI. But, a little later, Doctor Who was on a different night, so I would turn on Nickelodeon.

This is where I first met Clarissa Darling, played by Melissa Joan Hart, on the show most young Gen-Xers and older Millennials would all have fairly pleasant memories of – Clarissa Explains It All. I definitely found myself pretty infatuated with Clarissa and, naturally, Melissa Joan Hart. I remember definitely liking to think how cool it would be to be her buddy who had access to her room by way of a ladder into her window any time he wanted. That guy was awesome. That situation is awesome. Now, come on, everybody. I was going through puberty. OF COURSE, I was going to think about how awesome that would be.

While most of the kids in 8th and 9th grade knew about Clarissa Explains It All, we need to now move about five years into the future. I’m in college. It’s 1996. I’m living at home, and I needed to work while taking classes at IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis). Due to my job at the video store, V-H One Video, I needed to be smart about how I would take classes. Mostly, I took courses that I would only go one time a week to class. That meant longer classes, but only one time to worry about scheduling around. To this end, I often took Saturday morning courses. If I worked on Fridays, I wouldn’t close, so I wouldn’t have to work until after midnight and then need to be up to go downtown to school on Saturday early morning.

That meant I was home on Friday nights. That’s when I would tune into the TV and see what was on. That’s when I would be reunited with Melissa Joan Hart in her role as Sabrina Spellman on ABC’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch. In 1991, I was infatuated with Melissa. In 1996, I fell in love with her. God, I loved that show. But there was something incredibly lovable about this girl trying to deal with her witchy powers in high school and navigating the mean girl and her crush, Harvey. But MJH herself? Oh lordy, she was right up my alley in terms of girls. Blonde hair, blue eyes, shorter (as I’m kind of shorter at the very “average” 5’9)… She just seemed like the perfect girl next door.

I’m gonna leave any further discussion of our main mama of the month right there for now. I will have lots more to say about Mel throughout the month. Why I chose to kick the month off with a movie in which Mel is playing fourth fiddle in the cast is partly due to a few things I had to take into consideration. I wanted to make sure I covered enough of her filmography in all its aspects. While she was largely a TV star, she didn’t have many direct-to-video or theatrical movies where she had larger roles. She had TV movies, and I very nearly chose the Sabrina pilot movie, but I felt that wouldn’t really be appropriate for what I do around here. A lot of her movies are Hallmark movies, and I wasn’t so sure about that, as most of those are Christmas movies. I am not comfortable with touching the God’s Not Dead series.

So I went with the same methodology I went with for Alyssa Milano Month. I start with a supporting role for our dominant dame. Backflash was a movie I had caught wind of a little bit before its release. Or at least when I thought it was going to be released. If I remember correctly, the first time I heard of this movie was maybe around 2000? It was a movie that had a cast of a lot of people I would have had a lot of affection for aside from MJH. Robert Patrick, of course, was the awesome killer goo of a robot in Terminator 2. While he never really kept up with that heat through the 90s, he’s still a great character actor. We’ve got Colm Meaney of Chief O’Brien fame on TWO Star Trek series in the 90s. Michael J. Pollard is someone who consistently pops up in movies and always does great work. He was also an Oscar nominee for 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde.

The person in the cast with the most heat in 2001, by far, is Jennifer Esposito. For as much popularity as Melissa had on TV as Sabrina, and her popularity to a certain group of people on Clarissa Explains It All, she was largely a TV personality. Jennifer Esposito was just a couple of years off working on a really good Spike Lee joint, Summer of Sam. Yes, that was an ensemble cast, but she stood out. She was also a regular on Spin City on TV during this time, and, for better or worse, appeared in 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Hell, even before Backflash hit the shelves of video stores, she was in Dracula 2000 as one of Gerard Butler’s vampire bride babes alongside Jeri Ryan. If nothing else, I was watching the movie for that element.

But, damn, I’m almost 1500 words into this opening act of Melissa Joan Hart Month, and I’ve not even started talking about what happens IN the movie. So, let’s change that right now. I haven’t seen this movie before, so I’m hoping she’s got some decent part in this flick. Shit, she’s on some versions of box art and posters and banners and stuff. See?

And she’s looking good too.

The movie starts with Ray Bennett (Robert Patrick) passed out on the floor of a motel room. Ray has some cuts and scrapes to tend to before having a flashback. In the flashback, he’s working at a video store he owns and bemoans to his employee that he’s in some tough financial straits. Never mind the fact that the video store is seemingly the only damn building in the middle of this desert stretch of road, but he’s also six months on the wagon from smoking. Oh, and he’s also lonely. His employee says that he needs to meet someone, so he needs to get off his duff and get out there. Ray recognizes this and even says that “she” is out there somewhere for him.

So, let’s meet Olive Lee Klintucker (Jennifer Esposito), fresh from being released from prison.

She’s trying her hardest with a smile and a crop top to thumb a ride to anywhere. I appreciate the 90s and early 00s for constantly running out of material to complete women’s shirts. Anyway, she does eventually get a ride. Where she goes is where we ultimately meet the main reason we’re watching this movie.

C.J. (Melissa Joan Hart) is sort of doing what appears to be an autopsy. Now, sure, her hands are covered in blood. That blood is transferring to the stick of her sucker, but as she records her details of the poor S.O.B. on the slab, she’s not exactly doing scientific work. Height? “Kinda tall.” Weight? “Fat as shit.” The snicker from saying “fat as shit” is not just because it’s a funny line, but she ain’t saying that on Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

C.J. knows Olive, but she knows her as “Harley.” C.J. is a high school dropout who used to turn tricks. She now operates under a fake coroner’s license. I don’t know exactly how much she likes cutting up the dead bodies that end up under her care from, presumably, shady circumstances, but she likes the phony license because that means she can write prescriptions for drugs on a whim. She also says that every now and then she sees some “assholes” who “fucked her” back in the day, and that gives her a little bit of satisfaction.

I never knew Mel had this utterly filthy mouth before, and I think I’m falling in love all over again.

Alright, so the big bad around these parts is Tono (Mike Starr). He’s got a lot of goons and other underlings, but he’s largely unknown. His name sparks fear, but no one seems to know what he looks like… I think. That’s not exactly well spelled out by the end of the movie.

One of Tono’s underlings is Gin (Colm Meaney). He operates out of a junkyard. In that junkyard, he likes to stay in the dark and runs an A/C at full blast as much as he can and surrounds himself in Christmas decorations. So, he’s a bit of a character. Apparently, Harley and a boyfriend took a bunch of money from Tono’s outfit and out from under Gin’s watch, as he’s the guy who manages Tono’s operation’s cash flow. The extent of how much was taken was not discovered until she was already in jail. C.J. gets dead guys to hollow out and stuff money that’s been laundered or being transported between all the bad guys. She warns Harley that if she doesn’t get a move on, she’ll be stuffing cash into her body.

She almost made that sound sexy.

Naturally, Harley and Ray cross paths. He picks her up and makes small talk, having no idea exactly what he’s picked up, other than a very attractive woman. It’s not long after picking her up that he has blowout. Ray has actually never changed a tire, so Harley changes it for him. That’s kind of a fun little twist that the hot girl has to change the tire for the guy best known for playing a Terminator.

Ray softens Harley up enough to go to a diner for something to eat. However, he learns that she went to jail and that, indeed, Harley is not really her name. She’s also well out of this dweeb’s league. He doesn’t really swear. He chastises her for smoking because he can get sick from secondhand smoke. He doesn’t know how to change a tire. He eats boring, generic food at the diner. She’s sexy. She’s tough. She’s got a sharp tongue. She’s 2,000 miles away from where she grew up. She’s generally bad news in a sexy pair of jeans.

Trouble arises when it turns out that Mike Starr is sitting one booth over. He’s got some things to say about Harley while she is trying to place a call from the diner. Naturally, I only know that Mike Starr is bad news because I can read the IMDb page, and that he plays Tono. Anyway, there’s also a guy who has basically been hired to tail Harley. He’s someone Gin has referred to as a “professional.” She’s knocked him around a couple of times. The second time requires Harley and Ray to beat a hasty retreat.

Harley starts to flirt a bit with Ray. She even goes so far as to say Ray has a sexy profile. They arrive in Williams, Arizona. This was where Harley was headed the whole time. He drops her off, and she seems to want to make an additional request, but thinks better of it. He decides to rent a room at a motel in the town, and she returns to ramp up that sexual tension between them, agreeing to stay in the room he just booked at the motel.

Now, I ain’t gonna lie… This movie has a couple of things going for it in this first half of the movie. Is it all that great? Eh, we’ll see. The songs that have played to this point are not so good. The plot is relatively boilerplate type stuff. It’s just a movie about skeezy and scummy people, with one of them, a pretty girl freshly released from jail, having a heart of gold. As appealing as Jennifer Esposito is, and as much as I signed up to see Melissa Joan Hart dig around a guy’s guts and cuss like a sailor, neither of them is really the reason why I want to keep watching this movie.

Colm Meaney is a madman in this movie. He’s got this thing with Christmas decorations. Oddly enough, and a peak behind the curtains here at B-Movie Enema Industries, I’m watching this movie on December 22. I’m currently up to my tits in Christmas decorations everywhere I go. So I guess a new contender has entered the conversation with Gremlins and Die Hard for off-beat Christmas movies. There is no dialogue, at least to this point, explaining this fascination. Meaney is a guy who, no matter when and where he shows up, always plays a fascinating part. He’s kind of the quintessential character actor of this era. You hire him, you will get something fascinating on the screen.

But also, Robert Patrick is really good in this. Well, really good can be subjective, but he’s playing against the usual type. I got to know the guy from Terminator 2 as this creepy, bad guy robot. More recently, he’s Christopher Smith’s dad on Peacemaker. He’s creepy in that show too. Even in season 2, when he’s not as obvious a white supremacist, you are always on pins and needles waiting for him to explode. So to see him as this kinda milquetoast and dorky video store owner with much softer expressions on his face is really charming. You kinda can’t help but really like this character… Maybe because I was the video store guy once upon a time too.

It’s too bad that it doesn’t hold up for the entire runtime.

At the motel, Harley explains what she went to jail for. She worked for Gin. She bartended for him, but, most importantly, she ran money for him. Gin ran the money running business for the mysterious Tono, whom only Gin had ever seen. Most everyone else talked about him like a boogeyman. She was supposed to run money to this guy named Lenny. It was Lenny who came up with an idea to skim money off the top from Gin. He had been planning it for some time, but needed someone inside Gin’s organization to do it. She agreed because, what the fuck, right? Gin was a turd, and she doesn’t like turds. Well, they skimmed a lot of money… enough for Tono to notice. After Lenny got ratted out for some other shit to the Feds, he got killed, and she got busted. In the meantime, Gin, to answer for the missing money, got both his legs broken by Tono.

So that’s why Gin is after Harley. He can’t really kill her because he needs to recoup the money. She kind of needs Ray to help her recover the money she and Lenny stashed away in a safe deposit box at a bank. She’s willing to share the money with Ray too, and even suggests they can go off to Costa Rica together.

They go to the bank where the safe deposit box is. At the bank, Ray starts getting a little nervous. He nervously peers over to the security guard, Don (Michael J. Pollard), who knows the couple who call themselves the “Friendlys” because, well, I don’t blame him for not forgetting Jennifer Esposito’s face, even after a few years. They get past the teller despite Ray and Harley’s old partner, Lenny, not really looking too much alike, but Don… Don is real observant. Thankfully, Harley’s pretty good at changing the subject. On their way out, though, they get flagged down because Ray forgot the fake ID.

Unfortunately, the bank manager recognizes that Ray is NOT Mr. Friendly. What’s more, Harley has doublecrossed Ray. She then goes into a flashback that takes her back to the side of the road right after she got out of prison. Lenny wasn’t dead. He’s been in hiding. He sets a plan into motion to find a new Mr. Friendly. He’s the one who took her to see C.J. to figure out what’s going on with Gin, before she then met Ray with the idea in mind that she and Lenny need to find a patsy.

However, after deciding that Ray is not someone she wants to betray like that, Lenny smacks her around to force her to force Ray to go through with that. So this brings us back to the start of the movie. Ray wakes up on the floor of the motel room after being knocked out by Lenny smashing a champagne bottle over his head. Before leaving him behind, Harley told Lenny to get the car while she fired their gun, making it seem like she executed Ray before leaving.

And after all this, and Ray comes to and cleans up his head from the smashed bottle, Skull now sneaks into his room to look for Harley. Ray knocks Skull out and leaves him to be found by the cops after the gunshot from Harley got reported by the hotel manager. He calls Gin and explains that Harley’s with Lenny at some cabin, getting ready to fly to Costa Rica. Gin sends his main henchman, Red, to Lenny’s cabin to kill ’em all.

At that cabin, Lenny is packing up to leave. He tells her it was good seeing her again, but he’s gotta go. Basically, he’s double-crossing Harley. With a shit-eating grin and all the smarm of a guy who needs his face punched, he tells Harley not to cry because it will mess up her pretty lil’ face.

On his way out the door, Ray is waiting for them. He knocks Lenny to the floor and holds a gun to both Lenny and Harley. Lenny explains that Harley never had any kind of feelings for him. He was always going to just be a patsy. Lenny offers Ray half the money to shoot Harley. Instead, he shoots Lenny. That’s not entirely confirmation, though, that Harley’s in the clear. He keeps the gun on her and even puts the gun under her chin, but only uses that to pull her in for a kiss.

It’s a little icky, if I’m being honest. Part of the problem with this doublecross is that Harley doesn’t want this goofball guy to get hurt or killed, but she really was using him. There’s no other way to view that in this movie. Ray is, by all accounts, a dork and not really into this crime shit. Now, he’s coming into this cabin double-fisting guns and kills Lenny. Then uses the other gun to push Harley into a kiss. That’s not great. Look, I don’t mind him getting a little off-kilter over the doublecross that Harley did to him. I get it. We’ve all been burned over a million bucks by a stone cold fox. However, she gets slapped by Lenny when she doesn’t want to implicate Ray. Now Ray is using a gun, and a legitimate threat to her, to kiss him. It’s… icky.

In fact, this whole second half of the movie has really slid down a hill.

Anyway, Gin’s guys have arrived to shoot the place up. Ray sets a trap by ripping out the gas line from the stove while he and Harley escape out back. Now, we all know what’s about to happen. He’s going to make it so that his goons will explode in the cabin. But in order for this plan to happen, it relies on two things needing to unfold. They first have to stumble upon the corpse of Lenny. Then, because they need to see what it is that they nearly stumbled over, they will need a light, yes? Well, it’s not just a light. It can’t be a flashlight. No! They will need to use a lighter. So it requires one of the goons to pull out his Zippo to light it up, thus lighting up the entire place in a ball of fiery death.

This is all contrivance that, in a much, much better movie that didn’t start sliding down the quality scale over the last 30 or so minutes, you can overlook, but not here.

Tono visits Gin. Tono says he made a mistake putting him in charge of his money running business. So he reduces Gin to a doorman who needs to work out in the desert heat in a heavy doorman uniform and working for shitty tips. Meanwhile, Ray calls the video store and sells the store for nothing to his employee. He tells him to get out of town for a few days while he finishes up some business, and if anyone asks for him, tell them he moved to Canada. Harley reveals that she knows the money got switched out. He reveals that he still has it. But they are then approached by Tono. Ray gives the money to Tono. It’s then revealed that Ray used to work for Tono. Back at the diner, Tono suggested Ray come back to work for him to take over the money running business. And… I guess… He doublecrossed her too? He whispers something in her ear and gets in the car with Tono and heads off to do the criminal shit.

I guess. I don’t know. The end is pretty murky. In fact, again, the last 30-40 minutes really make this movie murky. In one way, I’m glad Harley and Ray didn’t end up together. She kinda sucked because, like I said, she might not have wanted Ray to be hurt, but she was always going to doublecross him for that cash. But this movie wants to be a Tarantino flick, but it doesn’t hate enough on Matthew Lillard or Paul Dano to be that quirky and good. It wants to be smart and trick the viewers with doublecross after doublecross after doublecross, but that’s not a recipe for a really good movie. Then, you have Ray turning out to be a real hard ass, but is it really a good idea to lie to your audience by presenting a character who was far, far more interesting as a goof kind of stumbling his way through this? He’s not likable once the turn takes place. In the end, you have a guy who is good and kind of righteous turned into a criminal and someone who has and will kill. It doesn’t sit right with me.

Not only is this movie coming from the vein of a Tarantino movie, but I am now thinking about the movie The Usual Suspects. But while there are doublecrosses in that movie, it’s all revealed in such a way that makes the movie a very special thing. It also turns what we thought we knew about a character on its head. However, the movie was already exceptional before the final moments when it was revealed to be only a version of the real story, and the main bad guy was right in front of us the whole time. Yes, Ray is someone different than presented, but it is way too much of a turn to make this satisfying at all. There are things to like about Ray that are completely washed away by the end. It’s not a movie about a guy who is falling apart and makes decisions that lead him down a very dark path. It’s a movie that just wants to set things one way, only to shift it on a dime to try to trick us. At least I never bought Harley being into the dorky version of Ray. I expected her to betray him, and she did.

But there was one character who was never different from the start to the finish of this movie. Let’s talk about Melissa Joan Hart as C.J. She really only has three scenes in this movie. Her first scene with Jennifer Esposito is a good expository scene. She explains what’s going on with Gin since Harley’s been in prison. She basically sets Harley on the path that she needs to get to that safe deposit box as soon as possible. She cusses. She talks about turning tricks. She’s sucking on a Dum-Dum. I’m in love. But she returns when Gin’s goon Red tries to ask her about what she talked to Harley about, and then we see her one last time close to the end of the movie when she gets Red’s corpse on her slab – much to her glee. Not a whole lot of time in this movie is dedicated to her, but between her and Colm Meaney, two people whom I have a great deal of appreciation for, I’m pleased with what they did in the movie.

Alright, so Melissa Joan Hart Month is off and running. Maybe we stumbled a little bit out of the blocks, but I knew she would have a smaller part in this movie, so it had to go first. Next time, we’ll talk about one of her 90s TV movies. That’s where she was slightly different than her usual image. Next week, we’ll see her in a dramatized true crime story called Twisted Desire.

So, uh… Come on back for that business, won’t ya? In the meantime, I think I’m gonna make an appointment for C.J.’s slab. Get me stuffed with some cash. Stuff it all the way up there.

Wait…

Eh, yeah, get that cash as deep as you can, babe.

Shit… I’m still typing this blog.

Fuck.

Uh… See ya next week and shit.