Writer’s Note: This first appeared in the no longer extant Colorado Daily on January 29, 2020, but the Corporate Trash that own that paper shut it down with no fanfare. I’m reposting here, so all this work doesn’t suddenly disappear when they take the website down to avoid paying the $12.95 monthly hosting fee.
This is a loose remake of “Encino Man,” but without the lame Sean Astin character, Dave, who acts like a jerk the entire movie and somehow gets the hot blonde at the denouement. Since it’s related in spirit to the original, however, you can bank on it that the Pauly Shore character, Stoney, appears in this movie, buddy. If we can find him.
I wanted to call the movie “Encino Hitman,” but I was shot down in committee, which consists of whoever is forced to listen to me ramble on at any given moment in my apartment.
The movie begins with two lonely nerds living in a southern California suburb and pining for the day they get the girl. At least the Sean Astin character does. Stoney, in my movie, is a fully realized queer character.
Dave lives next door to a fearsome Estonian gangster named Kaspar, a call back to the original film. Kaspar waves to the two boys whenever he is on his riding lawnmower. They wave back, but they are deathly afraid of Kaspar.
Our two high school nerds are digging a hole in which they wish to build a swimming pool, so that Astin can score with a hot blonde way out of his league on prom night. They strike a block of ice which, as we all know from our bad 80s cinema, contains the frozen corpse of a neanderthal.
They drag the frozen cave man into the house, and through the miracle of pouring hot water on him, reanimate him. They name him Link and decided to make him the cool kid at their high school and …
“Not so fast,” says Kaspar, who has been watching the entire incident unfold. “He is coming with me.”
“You can’t have him,” says Dave. “He’s ours. He’s going to make us cool.”
Kaspar slaps Dave, and three of his velour track suit-wearing henchmen come and take away Link. Stoney waves goodbye to Link, who is in a dissociative rage.
“I have a much better use for our frozen friend here,” Kaspar says before he lets loose a truly terrifying laugh.
Cut to a montage of Link being trained as an assassin in a warehouse somewhere in the greater Los Angeles area, shopping for velour track suits with Kaspar and coming to grips with who he is. A long take inside Link’s cage shows he is a talented cave painter.
Link is an adept assassin and scores dozens of kills. But what he really wants to be is an artist. He is taken to an art gallery to kill the owner, a hot blonde, Jane, who owes Kaspar money and has rebuffed his creepy advances. Link flies into a rage at the sight of a copy of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch hanging in the gallery. He kills his captors and runs off with the Jane who admired his art earlier in the movie, and becomes his manager.
Dave, back at his house, doesn’t get his own hot blonde in this movie either. He needs to learn that women have their own agency and aren’t just there for you to paw, jerk.
John Bear With Me 