Nerding Day: Malibu Comics' Firearm: The Movie (Patreon)

Malibu Comics’ Firearm was a deeply confusing book, and I feel that way even though they explicitly told me not to-

It was a reboot of the original Firearm, which was a Punisher knockoff about a Private Investigator who killed superheroes. Only this rebooted Firearm was totally different – he was actually two characters in one body working for rival agencies, who were total opposites of each other and possibly falling in love? With one other? And the other’s wives? I don’t know, the book just started introducing love triangles until it folded through 5th dimensional fuckspace and somehow became itself fucking itself. This interdimensional dickbleed spilled over backwards through time to the original Firearm when they published a prequel to that book which came with an entire actual movie! Well, 1/3rd of an entire actual movie! It’s only 35 minutes long.

Firearm: The Movie was to serve as a prequel to the prequel comic which served as a prequel of the original comic but not the reboot, although the reboot did end with a series of Firearm shorts which were actually prequels to this prequel’s prequel.

Stop being that! This is Firearm: The Movie! You know the production value’s gonna be good when you can only buy it attached to the prequel of a comic book nobody wanted. It was all done on a budget of cousin favors and minor extortions, with the finest cast that promising extra credit to a Burbank acting school could buy. It was all filmed on somebody’s phone, and this was 1993, before phones had cameras. It sounds like two scuba instructors arguing underwater while a third one dies, and- I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. One image sums it up better than I ever could…

But before we get into the movie, we have something special. Something amazing. Something that provides enough joy-per-second to round Firearm: The Movie up to “Intermittently Tolerable.”

We have a ‘90s commercial.

Not just a ‘90s commercial, the most ‘90s commercial – the most ‘90s Malibu Comics commercial. It includes only my favorite things about the 1990s, all of them, and nothing else. I promise you that having never seen this commercial, if you remember what Zack Morris’ band was called, you know every scene by heart.

Two professionally cool dudes lean in to yell “comic book store! Let’s go!” directly into one another’s mouths. They eat each other’s attitude, and are nourished by it. We cut to extreme sports:

No, more extreme sports.

I almost can’t handle this. Why, if I was on set for that kind of action, I’d sweep my hair back, look directly into camera, and say “whoa.”

It’s perfect, this is perfect advertising. I’m not even joking. This seems silly now, but it worked on us like crazy in the ‘90s – I couldn’t even take a shit unless I saw a colorful teenager kickflip his own ass onto a toilet first. I still mentally recite Radical Rick’s How to Drop In On a Bowl every other Tuesday, after coffee.

Our gnarly dudes pull up to the comic store, eyes to the horizon like they know how wide open the world is for two default white male dipshits with nothing to offer anybody – the undisputed heroes of the 1990s.

The camera spins around behind them while holy music plays sarcastically, letting us know this is a sacred place but also that we’re assholes for thinking that. That’s how everything was treated in the 1990s, the decade we invented irony but not the one when we learned how to deploy it.

The bros take a single step toward the comic book shop only to be told by some B-B-B-BUZZKILL GROWNUP that-

Man, the only way this would be better is if there was a screeching brake sound effect, which there is, so please picture this roughly three times better than you were.

Oh no, a LINE, the most hated enemy of cool dudes! You know what a line symbolizes? Cooperation, order, rules! You know who stands in lines? YOUR. DAD.

No cool dude has ever suffered a line, every cool dude knows that the only proper response to queueing is a series of increasingly zany antics.

So I hope your favorite Final Fantasy 9 character is Zidane. I hope you think the most unsung horror performance of 1995 was Demon Knight’s Billy Zane. I hope you’re ready to get zaned up you rotten motherfuckers because-

Wait. Holy shit.

No antics?

Not a single shenanigan?

Instead the Buzzkill Adult just laughs in our bros’ faces as their jaws drop, shrieking pure agony in slow motion until the commercial cuts out?

This is how you would film somebody watching their platoon get blown apart in ‘Nam.

I love it!

If this was an intentional decision, it’s mocking ‘90s commercial tropes that were barely established in 1993. It implies that the radical dude lifestyle is not sustainable, and these self-centered thrill-seeking children are shattered by reality the second they encounter it.

And this is from Malibu Comics!

That can’t be the case. They can’t have just arrived at competency once, in a 1993 commercial for themselves, and then never again. This must have been an accident. They must have stepped on a rollerskate and shot down the street onto a see-saw that an anvil fell on, launching them through a plate glass window into competency.

All right, let’s get to this bummer of a movie HOLD THE FUCK ON THERE ARE MORE COMMERCIALS!

Oh thank god, thank god Malibu Comics felt the need to extensively advertise themselves – no specific product, just their own existence – on this VHS tape you could only buy if you were already a super-collector of Malibu Comics.

Feet step into frame, wearing Ultraverse brand workboots (never available) and some kind of neon foam ankle armor. We don’t question the ankle armor. This was 1993, we called those some shit like Anks and you would get beat up after school if you ran the colors that meant you were gay (all of them).

Now, hold on, don’t laugh. Or rather, stop laughing.

Today we recognize this instantly as an incel, a guy banned from uploading to wikifeet for not respecting their consent rules, the photo we ask each other not to spread in the comments below a tragic news story because it’s what the bastard would want.

But in 1993 this was the coolest guy in the parking lot of your middle school, with his goatee and his slicked back hair and his dark round glasses that make him look like notorious tough guy, John Lennon. Look at him. Magnificent. With his offbrand comic book shirt tucked into slacks, pulling 8th grade tail left and right until they had to park a cop car behind the basketball courts just to stop it.

Hell yeah, the comic book just came into frame. Time to cue up some generic rock about a verb – RUN, or SMASH, or in this case JUMP - while the words COMIC BOOKS flash on screen. With no specificity, no particular brand, no edict. Don’t buy them, or love them, it doesn’t matter if they’re Malibu or DC or Tijuana, just COMIC BOOKS.

In the ‘90s, we truly didn’t need to say anything at all so long as we said it right in somebody’s face.

Then something odd happens: This nerd puts on his helmet and safety harness… to read a comic book. What the…? Can you imagine?! Maybe they’re saying like “whoa, these titles are so extreme you need safety gear!”

I’d say you’ll never believe what happens next, but if you were alive in the 1990s you already yelled the answer at your flickering CRT set atop a larger wooden TV cabinet (non functional)...

He goes bungee jumping!

…While reading a comic book!

Two extreme things, both equally cool, going together. If you ever watched a cartoon sun skateboard through a living room to throw juice at children, you know this tactic. Electric guitars are cool, lions are cool, so put Grape Nuts next to a superpredator shredding the axe – job done! Run it eight times an episode on Mighty Max and die buried under a pile of children’s disposable income, which existed in 1993.

But this scourge of the arcade women’s bathroom is so jaded that he gets no thrill out of it anymore. Bungee jumping fucking sucks, you guys! Not like Malibu Comics – he opens one and immediately screams “WOO!”

Malibu Comics: Helping jaded sex criminals fall back in love with life.

God, fine. It’s time to talk about Firearm: The Movie. The boring Punisher fanfic shot entirely in a storage locker HOLY SHIT THERE’S A THIRD COMMERCIAL.

It’s a sequel to the first commercial! Haha remember when commercials had sequels, when advertising executives thought we’d become emotionally invested in commercials and beg for closure to their arcs?

We’re back at the comic book shop to find the crowd has turned violent, perhaps realizing this entire place is stocked with nothing but Malibu Comics.

You know what comes next - I hope your favorite color is polka dots and your favorite song is the BONK sound effect, because it’s time for shenanigans!

Our badical boys would never let the man’s precious “line” get them down. They fight back! They dress up in comical outfits and show something cool to a fisheye lens!

They scale the building, busting their way into the vents, because a two-story comic book shop needs a man-sized HVAC system running throughout.

The ‘90s told us that all the really important stories didn’t happen in a place, they happened above the place in the vents, or below the place in the sewers. Every high tide, whole generations of children died in drainage tunnels looking for the Ninja Turtles, don’t ask me to prove it: This was 1993. You just had to live with that unquestioned in your heart until they invented the internet.

Our bros keep getting stuck in the vents because they went in side-by-side, which I think does count as a joke! It’s primitive stuff, it’s maybe the fourth thing the Three Stooges tried after face slaps, eye pokes, and wife-swapping. But it’s a recognizable attempt at comedy!

The boys make it through the ventilation system and are about to crash the comic book store, but first pause for a thumbs up.

Again, this was vital. In the ‘90s, we legitimately did not know if something was okay until some dipshit’s thumb went up. It’s why Terminator 2 ended like that, it’s why every Mentos commercial ended like that, it’s why the war in Iraq ended like this:

And then ended like this:

And then-

Let’s get back to the boys. There was also what we called the Thumb of Hubris, the thumb before the fall – sometimes if two bros gave each other a thumbs up in a vent it meant they were about to face total devastation.

And sure enough…

I have to give Malibu props here: They set up tragedy after tragedy, promised wacky antics and then delivered only cold injustice. It’s like they were trying to teach radical idiot children like me that just because you bought a wrist-rocket it didn’t necessarily mean you were equipped to solve gang violence.

Fuck! In a span of seconds the twin avatars of the 1990s are bombarded with harsh reality, violate the unspoken law of commercials, call out the unspoken law of commercials, and are rewarded for breaking the meta-fiction with an inexplicable happy ending. This is brilliant. I bet I have an argument here for how this laid the groundwork for The Matrix.

Let’s end with the complete set of ‘90s commercial tropes: cool bros in wacky outfits filmed in zany fast motion, dancing with comic books and mugging into a fisheye lens while the Looney Tunes circle closes around them.

This is fucking anthropology I’m doing here, they should teach me in colleges.

These commercials were actually fun! They executed on their own limited tropes with enthusiasm, always tweaked the formula just enough to keep you guessing, and then ended without an apology. God, what a pure and focused tragedy: Malibu missed their calling as an advertising agency in favor of publishing two-thirds of a comic book story eight hundred times.

It’s such a shame we have to get to this abysmal film, but finally, here’s Firearm: The Movie.

It’s half an hour of a beefhead trying and failing every kind of British accent, constantly shooting an immortal demon when the real solution was actually just stabbing, and the whole thing looked like this:

I have no idea what I just watched. Not in the “what the fuck” sense, I mean literally I can’t tell what that was. As near as I can guess this was two Men’s Wearhouse salesmen falling in love, filmed in an exploded basement on a camera obscura.

From the audio alone I think it was about Alec Swan fighting a man possessed by a demon in such a way that only requires 14 dollars in Halloween makeup for two or three scenes. It's like a filler episode of Supernatural – one of those blank monster Mad Libs you forgive because the episode before it was about Dean fighting a living hamburger.

But hey Darren Doane directed it! He went on to make Saving Christmas, which you could see all of and we are much worse for it. He was doing us a favor. And holy shit, the lead in this played Michael Myers in the new Halloween movies! I highly recommend watching Firearm:The Movie first so every time The Shape is on screen you can mentally insert one of these eight terrible Cockney accents.

Firearm: The Movie ends on the strangest Special Thanks screen I’ve ever seen. Normally movies use this space to thank folks who helped get the thing made out of pure love, or somebody who went the extra mile but might not have made the credits. Obviously none of those people existed. So instead Firearm: The Movie lists all the people who would hate it the most if they ever saw it.

Thank you, Jane’s Addiction and The Beatles, for not contributing anything to our soundtrack. Extra special thanks to David Fincher and Martin Scorscese for never making anything like this! Sorry we spelled your name wrong, Martin Scorsese!

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