#nut-brown

The Beer.

Oh, I should probably mention that Messiah is the beer and Hellbound is the b-movie, in case that wasn't clear.

Alright, so Messiah is a nut-brown ale by He'Brew, makers of Lenny's R.I.P.A, so again, this is a brewing company I've had a bit of experience with.

For a nut-brown, the beer pours very dark.  It's almost opaque.

The nose is pretty subtle, I got a bit of hops, but not much else.  Unlike a lot of other beers I've had, the scent here doesn't hang around, and it's kind of an effort to pick out any specific flavors to the smell. 

Once the beer hits your lips, it's kind of an electrifying feeling.  What's nice, though, is that this beer doesn't cheat by making that feeling come from an over-carbonated mouthfeel or anything.  The beer just kind of hits you up front with this nice dark chocolate taste, and a pretty expertly balanced blend of malts and hops.

The malts hit you up front, giving the beer a bunch of smoothness, and then, at the end, you get the hops, which makes for a nice, subtly bitter aftertaste.  It's a really pleasant beer- good on a cold winter night.

What's cool to me about this beer is that right there on the label, they show off all of the malts and hops they've used in making the beer, and the list is pretty long!

Verdict: Recommended.

The B-Movie.

The Netflix description for this movie read something like "Two Chicago cops battle a demon as a murder leads them to the holy land.  Stars Chuck Norris." 

I was cautiously optimistic.  I know from Chuck Norris, and I know that yeah, he's got some experience both in acting and in roundhouse kicking, so seeing Norris kick ass in Hell has to be entertaining on at least the most basic, banal level.

The movie starts kind of where it has to, given the story.  The deal is that there's this guy who's the devil's emissary or something, trying to summon Satan.  This is explained with the text crawl from Star Wars, before they show the whole thing play out in Medieval Times.

I mean that literally, by the way.  The whole introduction scene was pretty obviously shot in the dungeon area of a Medieval Times restaurant. 

A bunch of stock knights show up and defeat the baddie, saving the day and sealing him in a tomb until the 1950s, when a couple of thieves release him into the world.  We cut to the present day immediately, because presumably this dude is cool just chilling for the better part of fifty years, waiting for Chuck Norris to show up to kick his ass.

Satan-man is in a grungy apartment building in Chicago with the most annoying woman in the world.  Seriously.  She gets thrown out a window within five minutes of showing up, but she really risked ruining the movie.  You know that giggle thing that was introduced alongside the ditzy valley girl trope?  She does that at the end of every line she says.

Now we're introduced to Norris and his buddy cop partner.  This is their beat, and they're roughing up some criminals on a streetcorner as the most annoying woman in the world is flung through a window and crashes on top of their car.  What they didn't see is that right before that happened, Satan-man ripped a man's still-beating heart out of his chest, Mortal Kombat-style.  Aw yeah.  They send the perps running, and proceed up the stairs to see what the commotion is. 

As soon as we get inside, it becomes crystal clear exactly why this movie is going to be underwhelming.  We get a decent fight between Satan-man and Norris, and some classic clue-searching after Satan-man makes his escape, but the real flaw is that you can't see anything, really.  This is one of those movies where the director decided that it'd be a really cool idea to light every scene that takes place indoors with a single lightbulb with a blue piece of cellophane taped to it.

Now what that means for you and me is that although all the fight scenes in this movie are decent, because they all take place indoors, you miss out on all the impact of the hits on account of everything's shrouded in shadow.  You don't get to see any faces contort with the force of an uppercut, and even Norris's legendary roundhouse kick loses its oomph when you don't actually see it connect.  It's kind of like watching cardboard cutouts fight, or a really intense shadow puppet performance.

Now that that's out of the way, I can start talking about the rest of the movie.  The dude that Satan-man killed was a rabbi, and now Norris and his partner have to miss watching the Bulls play game 2 of the NBA championship to go to Israel.  That wasn't a joke, by the way.  Norris and his partner got tickets, but couldn't go.  Anyway.

We cut to Satan-man, who throws a priest out of a train.

We cut back to Norris and his partner,who have just landed in Israel.  Now is when it becomes blatantly clear that this movie is trying way too hard to be Lethal Weapon.  Norris and his partner start doing their best Murtaugh and Riggs impressions here, and they don't stop until the movie ends.  It's really a shame that the impressions suck.

A lot of the buddy cop set pieces get put into place here, there's a car scene with a shitty driver, an annoying kid who's supposed to be cute, and the love interest who is going to be held hostage at the end.  It's all kind of there, at least in some half-assed, phoned in sort of way. 

This is where the movie really starts to lag, though.  Pretty much all that happens between now and the time Norris and his partner confront Satan-man for the final time is one fight scene in a hotel.  The rest of this hour of the movie is spent watching Chuck Norris walk around Israel, talking to people. 

This is not what I fucking signed on for.

It gets real boring really fast, and I felt myself almost falling asleep more than a couple of times, but here's what basically happens.  Satan-man is going around killing all these religious leaders to put together a staff that's supposed to open the gates to hell.  He got the last one by murdering a monk right outside Jerusalem.  Now all he has to do to summon Satan and bring about the End of Days is to sacrifice somebody with royal blood.

Oh, and hey, would you look at that, apparently the Love Interest is the daughter of the Duke of Plothole-shire.  So she's kidnapped, and it's time for Norris and his partner (But really just Norris, his partner really is entirely useless.  He complains about needing food for the entire movie.) to track down Satan-man and save the world.

You know what's weird?  They've obviously been shooting the second and third acts in Israel.  You see Ben Gurion airport, and a lot of other iconic locations in and around Jerusalem, but for some unknown reason, for the final battle, they flew back to the good ol' USA to shoot the final scene in Medieval Times again.  Maybe it's a continuity thing.

Norris proceeds to fight Satan-man, who's a bit of a wimp for a high-ranking demon.  He gets roundhouse kicked, well, to hell.

but Norris can't put him away.  Satan-man starts using his powers now, flinging both Norris and his partner around the room, until Love Interest conveniently remembers how Satan-man can be killed.  It's apparently the scepter thing that opens the gate to hell.  Aw, come on, that's obvious. 

Norris, who has conveniently been flung right next to the scepter, picks it up and hurls it through Satan-man's chest, killing him.  Oh, and we get a one-liner.  Norris says "Eat this".

So there's that.

Watching this movie made me realize how forced all those Chuck Norris jokes were, and by extension, how forced those new World of Warcraft commercials are.  He's just some white martial arts dude.  His acting is one-note and awful, which is to be expected, but the fight scenes were all shockingly unimpressive.  Not once did I see a fist emerge from Norris's beard, and not once did I see his tears cure cancer.  Having watched these types of movies for a while now, I can say without a doubt, that he's the worst action star I've seen so far. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go lock my doors on the off-chance Chuck Norris ever reads this.