Nicolas Cage has been a fixture of the big screen for quite some time, but he’s probably made just as big an impression on the direct to video market. Cage has quite a few movies on his resume that didn’t receive a national theatrical release, and after going down memory lane with a rewatch of National Treasure, one fan decided he to binge all 29 of Cage’s film in that category of the past decade. Reddit user Schwano took on the herculean task and lived to tell the tale, and reviewed each film along the way. “A couple of weeks ago, I showed my son National Treasure, and the whole time I kept thinking “damn, I really miss Nic Cage”. I knew that he was pretty much in the DTV world for the past 10 years, but I didn’t realize to what level,” Schwano wrote. “Turns out that Nicolas Cage made 29 direct-to-video movies in the 2010’s, and almost immediately, I was determined to watch every one of them. So I did. In no particular order:”
The scores ranged from 1 out of 10 to 10 out of 10, and it seems like the average of all of these films was actually pretty high. Schwano started with The Trust (7/10) and Kill Chain (8/10) before getting to The Runner (5/10) and Rage (6/10), but it was Between Worlds where things really took off.
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“Between Worlds. 10/10.
I’m going to be fast and loose with the spoilers on this one. Joe is a down-on-his-luck truck driver who lost his wife and kid to a house fire some years prior. In the first 10 minutes of the movie, Joe is at a gas station pit stop where he finds Julie being choked out by some dude. Joe steps in and knocks him out, much to her dissatisfaction. Why? Because 1 hour prior, her daughter was in a motorcycle accident and is now in a coma, and because of a childhood incident, knows that if she is unconscious she can cross over to “the other side”. So her plan was to have some rando choke her in a rest stop bathroom so she could guide her daughter back to the land of the living. Joe interrupted the process, so he offers to give her a ride to the hospital. Once there, she asks Joe to choke her in the hallway so she can try again to reach her. “Something” goes wrong, and instead, Joe’s dead wife is brought back in the daughters body.
The next 30 minutes see Joe moving in with Julie and playing house while dead-wife-in-daughter (DWID from this point on) slowly creeps around trying to seduce him. It’s the halfway point when Joe is made aware what is happening, and by extension Julie and the movies 1 other character. They all accept this very easily.
It’s around this time that we get to a scene where Joe and DWID are f******, interspersed with a scene where Joe and his wife before she died are also f******. In both of these scenarios, his wife wants him to read poetry while they f***. The poetry Joe proceeds to read in both scenes is from a book titled, I s*** you not, “Memories by Nicolas Cage”.
More stuff happens, and at the end of the movie, through various circumstances, Joe is doing a classic Cage scream-cry, one arm hugging a jack-in-the-box that presumably belonged to his daughter, and in the other, he is dousing himself in gasoline. He then lights a cigarette, which of course ignites his entire body, and he smokes in a completely normal manner while his body burns. This all happens while Leader of the Pack is playing, a song that holds absolutely no significance to anything that has come prior.
Throughout, music that feels directly ripped from Twin Peaks is playing, and the whole atmosphere is begging to feel like David Lynch. Is the kind of movie you would find on Cinemax at 2am on a random Wednesday in 1995. It’s f****** glorious. At this particular moment in my life, my greatest fear is that with 24 films to go, I will never again reach these heights.”
It all couldn’t be great though, as he found out with USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage.
“USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage. 3/10.
A poorly made movie that plays like a work of complete fiction. The use of a famous quote 50 years before it was coined is particularly atrocious, as is Tom Sizemore, acting as though he were Tobias Fünke trying his best at an Academy Award. This is the first straight-up bad movie thus far. Up until this point they’ve either crossed over into so-bad-they’re-good or Cage has given a performance that keeps things entertaining and watchable. USS Indianapolis is just a lame movie across the board.”
He ended things with Cage’s latest hit, Mandy, going out on a high note.
“Mandy. 10/10.
There was no better way to end this journey. Cage is smartly restrained for a majority of the picture, but when the beast is let loose, THE BEAST IS LET LOOSE! A fever dream of a movie that delivers on all accounts, and something that will be re-watched in years to come.”
Which one of these movies is your fave? Let us know in the comments!
