The Prisoner 2009 again

Please visit the Ruin Your Eyes website for the second of my pieces on AMC’s The Prisoner. If you don’t, I’ll whine.

Meanwhile, yesterday I watched about 20 minutes of a movie that really didn’t have much promise to begin with, but I was exactly that bored: This was a Michael Madsen “vehicle” listed in OnDemand as Final Connection but in imdb.com as Dead Connection (1994), which might be what I should have hoped for from Comcast instead of what I actually watched. Lord. Bad. Madsen: hard-bitten detective owns fish bowl full of matchbooks with women’s phone number on them. Why, the ladies love the chain-smoking, hard-drinking lout. I would say “It was like looking into a mirror!” but that would only be funny to those who know me—but then, who else reads my stuff these days?

And you probably shouldn’t tell me I should have known better, given that the co-star was Lisa Bonet (born Lisa Boney, since you asked). Even in her late twenties, she still sported that teenager voice that made her hard to believe as, well, as any kind of adult. Oh, plus: the hair. Did you believe it? You must have seen it, then.

The killer is this dude with an odd accent who (a) whomps the snot out of a couple of big, ugly dorks hoping to rape the 18-year-old girls who refused to dance with them at a club, and (b) later, in his horrendously appointed motel room, whomps the life out of the girls themselves, one at a time. One of these was Parker Posey, who’s about a year younger than Bonet; had their roles been reversed, their respective characters actually might have been more believable, but Bonet (I assume) was supposed to be the draw, see.

Not that it’s any of my business, but it may well be no coincidence that the year after this woofer hit the screens (or, perhaps, went straight to video, but probably not), Bonet legally changed her name to Lilakoi Moon. Since Final Dead Connection the kind of movie from which one should be ashamed to make money, evading governmental taxation had to sound like an attractive option.

Oh, and the best moment involved Tim Russ (Star Trek: Voyager’s Tuvok, only with a patchy mustache, normal ears, and that unusual hairline), a rookie detective, doing some research on his computer: “Division: Homocide,” it read. I promise I’m not joking—I had to rewind to be sure.

Still, since I’ve been told all my life that if I can’t say something nice, I shouldn’t say anything at all, pay no attention to the previous five paragraphs.