The video quality was bad, but the audio quality was worse. I could barely hear the dialogue over the ambient silence even with the volume cranked.

And what I could hear, I instantly regretted, because the writing was bad. Beauty Queen Butcher was like a terrible Carrie with flat actors, fat jokes, and a runtime well over 2 hours long.

I’m not embarrassed to say that I was done with the movie well before the movie was done with its runtime.

Alien Warrior opens in space, and that’s the alien part out of the way. Our as-yet-unnamed protagonist (played by Brett Baxter Clark) learns from his father that his brother has been killed on a distant planet. Which, of course, is Earth. The father tells as-yet-unnamed that he must travel to this planet and defeat a Great Evil. You can hear in the dialogue that they capitalize it. Only then will as-yet-unnamed be worthy of being king (of what? irrelevant). As-yet-unnamed is warned that although they speak the same language on this planet, the people have very different thought processes.

As-yet-unnamed is transported to Earth. He arrives naked, but luckily a drunk homeless guy has some spare clothes to loan as-yet-unnamed. “My first friend,” says as-yet-unnamed. As-yet-unnamed stands in the street trying to ask questions of people in cars. Someone yells at him to get out of the street, buddy, and he adopts Buddy as his name.

One of the people who passes by is a crime lord (you can tell because we see him watch a drug deal go down). Buddy asks if the crime lord is a Great Evil, and the crime lord says “The Greatest,” as he drives off. This is about the extent of this movie’s Clever Foreshadowing ability.

Buddy watches martial arts practice through a window, and then uses his newfound martial arts knowledge to save a woman from being raped by a gang. And that’s the warrior part out of the way. The woman (Lora) runs an inner-city reading program, and provides a spot for Buddy to stay.

Buddy isn’t exactly telepathic, but he can tell when people are being truthful. He uses these powers to teach inner-city kids how to read, and give them confidence when adults insult them. He also punches a stop sign and builds a car from scrap metal. This convinces some of the local gangs to join up with him against the Great Evil. They go out and spray-paint graffiti like “Be Temperate” and “Do Unto Others As You Would Like To Be Treated.”

The Great Evil takes offense to these harsh “Sunday School” words. He sends some corrupt cops to arrest Buddy. With the help of a neighborhood kid that Buddy befriended, Buddy defeats the cops and drags them to their police chief, only to discover that the police chief is corrupt. Buddy is thrown into jail with a very large cash bond required. Lora is sad because she and Buddy have been falling in love.

The newly-temperate gang members decide to go and steal the cash bond from the Great Evil as he is in the middle of a drug deal and has a lot of cash on hand. They are successful at this, albeit with a lot of collateral damage, but further draw the Great Evil’s ire.

The Great Evil kidnaps Lora, and tells Buddy to meet him at the smelter (?!). Buddy shows up, and so do some of the surviving gang members. In the middle of the climactic fight, Buddy starts to phase out. He is being transported back to his home planet!

Lora will just have to save herself from the Great Evil with the help of the gang members. Back on his home planet, Buddy opines that time and death are an illusion; he and Lora will be together forever.

My notes refer to our main character, Rick, as “the early-70s version of the man-child.” He has impulse-control problems. He’s well-known in his small Saskatchewan town, and doesn’t want to move to a bigger town because nobody would know him there. He envisions himself as the Marshall of his little town, even dressing the part. Rick doesn’t get along great with local law enforcement. He punches people, he sleeps with a lot of women, and he is the star player on his municipal hockey team.

Best thing I can say about this 1973 movie is that the on-ice camerawork is solid.

Rick’s buddy is married. His buddy’s wife wants the buddy to move to another town to get better vocational training so they can have a better life, but the buddy is resistant because that other town doesn’t have a hockey team.

Did I mention that Rick sleeps around? Loretta is his steady girlfriend, but he sleeps with his boss’s daughter on the regular. He also sleeps with a woman a few towns over who called the cops on him when he twisted her arm.

The buddy reminds Rick that in a courtroom, that’s called assault. But lest you think this movie is progressive for its time, he then offers this advice: “One way to handle a woman … first you gotta strip her down … you take her and you lay her across your knees and you give her a real hard whack … you see, what that does, it gets her blood rushing to her ass, and it gets her hotter than hell. And you just screw the beejeezees out of her and she’s 100% again.”

Loretta asks why Rick doesn’t propose to her. He says that if they get married, one day some woman would be wavin’ her tits in his face, and he would sleep with her. And he couldn’t do that to Loretta, he loves her too much. That’s not a word-for-word quote, but it’s pretty darn close. They have this conversation in the showers after some skating and puck work.

My favorite moment in the movie is toward the end, where there is a tense standoff between Rick and some local policemen. Loretta is trying to talk Rick into acting sensibly. A man on a tractor slowly drives across the street in the middle of the standoff. “Rick, Loretta,” he says, nodding to them. They nod back. After he passes, the movie resumes.

The plot of the movie is the consequences of Rick’s actions slowly catching up to him, and his (poor) reaction to that. The movie is called Paperback Hero, and I believe it’s named for a piece of the only notable song on the soundtrack, Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.” I’m going to quote the relevant stanza, which will also tell you how the movie ends:


If I could read your mind, love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind the drugstore sells
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won’t read that book again
Because the ending’s just too hard to take

The CMP 7 Remote-only show will be on Saturday, July 18, at 7 PM EDT (and again at 9 PM EDT) on Zoom.

It will feature six categories that we didn’t have room to cram into the larger April 18 show, plus one from that show chosen via Facebook poll.

It begins with seven previews, two of which are for the movie I’m about to watch. Thirteen minutes later, the movie actually starts.

Our main character is named James Kirk, but takes care to explain that he isn’t that James Kirk, rather his parents were big fans.

Five minutes of James popping into a scene, running into something, telling his computer, “No — still coming in too hot. Let’s try again,” and vanishing.

Five.

Minutes.

At one point, his suit starts to smoke. The computer reminds him that it’s an outdated model of time suit. That is the only consequence.

“Getting better. Try again.” Various years flash across the scene, as James “time jumps” between indistinguishable eras. At the end, he asks the computer how many time jumps it took to calibrate. “106,” the computer says. “Only felt like about ten,” James says, but I beg to differ. I felt those 106 time jumps in my soul.

There was a virus and it made people violent and stupid. And also somehow James’ wife was killed. And there is a bit with an alternate reality version of him replacing his boss. But just one more time jump, and he can fix it!

Wildly incoherent.

The effects are inconsistent. Some of them are very nice, and others made me wince because they’re so rudimentary.

Solar radiation — from the sun — made the virus harmless. Or did it? The President weighs in. And the head of NASA. There are a lot of random authority figures popping in and out of this movie. Police officers. A psychiatrist.

Did I mention “Wildly incoherent”?

James is good at changing the past, but bad at changing it in ways that he wants. He finds himself showing up just a little bit too late to save his wife’s life. Why does that keep happening? The computer is the one who controls the time jumps, and it has its own ideas of how to fix the time stream. It also scolds James for taking time to eat a piece of discarded pizza from a box sitting on a random hotel room bed. James’ opinion: “there’s always time for pizza.”

Finally, a sentiment I agree with.

At the end of the movie, James has everything fixed. And it only took 186 time jumps! Well … there is one little thing that he could correct….

Which is why the movie is called 187 Times.

Amy didn’t watch the movie, but her comment was “You know how shooting a sitting duck is unsporting? Well in this case, the duck is falling-down-drunk, wing draped over a bottle of Wild Turkey.”