Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

Gods, Guns, and Gamgee
By
Michael C. Riedlinger

            Okay, so here’s the premise of Borderland: A trio of college dudes travel to Mexico to party their asses off, get laid, and generally disrespect the locals by using the country as a giant fucking frat house. From the get go we know this CANNOT end well. For one, Rider Strong from Boy Meets World is in it and that’s as sure a sign as any that he’s going to get fucked up in ways we can only cheer about. Note to Mr. Strong: Someone at After Dark Films fucking hates you. The second key hint is that one of the Goonies, a one Sean Astin, is in the flick. Actually, Astin made this film sort of bearable, but I’ll get to that in a second.

            Before we even meet these jackasses, we get a great torture-porn sequence of cops being mangled by some crazy drug-dealing cult. Imagine if Guillermo Del Toro had directed Man on Fire… It’s actually pretty cool. The way the rest of the film plays out is Hostel-esque. Dudes show up, party, and do shrooms with the locals before one of them is kidnapped by the crazy drug dealer cult. This would be Strong in a whiney tour-de-force that would have made Luke Skywalker proud. Fuck you and the Toshi station power converters you rode in on kid, take it like a man! When he comes to he is chained up in a shack in the desert and Samwise Gamgee is staring at him. It turns out Astin’s character has joined this cult because they let him hurt people and no one complains when he kills Mexicans. He makes for great comic relief, and all we’re getting is dark humor out of him. Like when audiences laugh at Patrick Bateman chasing a hooker with a chainsaw, that kind of funny! He even complains that he gets all, “the shit jobs because I’m illegal”! Damn, Samwise is great.

            So Strong gets tortured for a bit, his buddies (played by Brian Presley and Jake Muxworthy) begin asking too many questions, and the cop who survived the opening of the film comes along to help out. He’s been looking to get his revenge anyway (and what film cop wouldn’t) and offers his services. Muxworthy gets the crap beaten out of him in a great sequence of American stupidity (don’t go up against the drug-cult baddies armed only with a tire iron!) and wants to go home, but Presley has a hard on for Strong, I guess, and wants to bring him home. This leaves Presley alone with Mexican eye candy, I mean actress, Martha Higareda for way too long with no nakey-time. While they spin their boring lament about having no direction in life, (who talks about that shit while their friends are getting offed by a drug-cult!?) her friend finds a goat head in her bed and bites it and Muxworthy (consider a stage name bro) has to confront the rest of the cult he pissed off with the tire iron.

            Borderland is a film about lessons. One of those lessons seems to be that you can only expect a machete-beatdown if you smash out a Mexican drug cult guy’s headlight. When Presley and Higareda show up, her gal-pal has a goat head and his buddy is hamburger (taco meat?) and so it’s off to the final showdown with the grizzled, revenge driven cop at their side. Meanwhile, back at the compound, God has arrived. God turns out to be Santillan (played by Beto Cuevas), a tattooed, stereotypically cool mofo of a drug dealer. Sure, he’s the conduit for the dark gods of his cult, but he needs a soft sacrifice to make his posse invisible, and Rider Strong fits the bill. I tell you, when Santillan calls in Sean Astin with the bolt cutters and Strong is sitting there in nothing but his undies (boxer briefs for those curious pervs out there), I swore they were going to snip off his johnson. They don’t, but that was a very Bobbit filled fear I had there. It was about this point that my friend Amy pointed out that dead boys were easier to rape because they get hard when rigor sets in. That comment was probably more disturbing than the rest of the film.

            Come to think of it, much of this film seemed to be made to fulfill some young woman’s homosexual rape fantasy. Santillan gets naked, rolls around the temple floor with Strong, and cuts him up bad. See our review of Tooth and Nail if you want to know how that compares to the other way Strong bites it in the After Dark films. When our “heroes” arrive, the festivities are over. Presley finds Strong’s head in the kitchen, the cop finds God/Santillan in the tub, and all hell breaks loose. Another lesson I learned here was that Gods are NOT immune to a double-tap to the chest from a rifle. Go figure. A major shoot-out ensues with the cop and most of the cult going out in Robert Rodriguez fashion, and let me tell you, this film really needed it. Still, all the action in the last 15 minutes of any film couldn’t have saved this slow fucker from itself. Of course, the actual fight comes down to the American sociopath and the beautiful people. Astin finally gets whacked in the noggin with a machete and hilariously exclaims, “Ow! That fuckin hurt!” before crumbling to the ground. The credits try to remind us that this is based on a true story, but let’s be honest, shall we? If a crazy Mexican drug cult were really operating just two miles over the border by sacrificing people in order to make their drug mules invisible, Nancy Grace would have been all over that shit. The real situation in Nogales, Mexico, as bad as it has been for all involved, is only cheapened by a film like this. It tries desperately to exploit a dramatic story for one that might fit the horror genre. Tell you what folks. Rent this garbage with friends, bust out some cheap tequila and turn it into a drinking game. The rules don’t matter, but I’m sure that the booze will only make Borderland better because there’s no way to make it worse.